What can you do when you’re offered a kill fee?

Cash, in hand - almost always better than nothing

Image © Mike Holderness

SO YOU have understood the commission, agreed terms, and filed the article, to length and on time. Then: nothing.

You don't want to seem a fusspot... but you contact the publication. It offers you a "kill fee" - say, two-thirds of what they originally agreed to pay.

What do you do?

In principle: as the NUJ advises in its Freelance Fees Guide, the publication ought to pay in full.

After all, you have a contract, and you fulfil your side of it when you deliver the work on time and meeting the agreed specification. The NUJ recommends that any work that fulfils your contract should be paid for in full, whatever happens to it after that.

Extensive discussion among members of the NUJ's Freelance Industrial Council threw up only one proper exception to this. If your agreement with your client specified that you would grant it an exclusive licence to publish your work, and if your client releases you from that agreement, and if you have the chance to license the piece to some other client - then there may be an argument for paying you less.

Of course, not all stories are re-sellable. One extreme is a contemporaneous report of court proceedings, to which special rules apply in avoiding issues with contempt of court. Such reports would likely have to be entirely rewritten for it to be legal to publish them later. They definitely should be paid for in full whether used or not.

But... from the editor...

Editors may not see it this way. Editors who have over-commissioned, changed their minds, or (especially) taken over a previous commissioning editor's job often offer a "kill fee", typically two-thirds or half of the agreed fee, instead of the full amount. Especially if they're hazy about what a licence to reproduce your work means, this may seem "fair" to them - or to the business managers pressing them to undershoot their budget.

All we can really recommend is that you negotiate. As always: to negotiate calmly and reasonably is a sign of professionalism. Any editor who finds personal animosity in this simple contractual matter is, it seems to us, being unprofessional. But you may be concerned about their willingness to commission you in the future...

Most definitely, though, if you agreed an exclusive, push the point that you should be released from exclusivity if you are paid any less than 100 per cent of the agreed amount.

Worse things happen: payment on publication

Far worse than the practice of offering kill fees is that of offering nothing at all. That's one consequence of the "payment on publication" policies that some publishers try to impose. Another consequence is of course that payment may be massively delayed - in an attempt to circumvent late payment legislation.

In discussing this, Freelance Industrial Council recognised that a kill fee is better than nothing.

We have not recently heard of photographers being offered kill fees. It would seem obvious that if you are commissioned to do a day's shoot you should be paid in full.

Catch-and-kill?

If your client refuses to release you from an exclusivity agreement, it's possible that something fishy is going on. In recent years light has been thrown on the practice of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer of commissioning stories - especially tell-all interviews - and then sitting on them. An example of this "catch-and-kill" manoeuvre was the payment of $150,000 to Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of an affair with Donald Trump, who National Enquirer proprietor David Pecker wanted to protect.

In most cases in the UK it's probably worth thinking about that as a possibility only very, very briefly.

Please do let us know about your experiences at killfee@londonfreelance.org

© Mike Holderness

Kill fees for commissioned articles Freelance Fees Guide

Commissions and contracts Freelance Fees Guide