Latina Freelancers Receive $43,000 to Cover Unpaid Invoices

We were building a mass grievance at Latina and Latina Kitchen. We had organized a group of 14 writers and photographers who were owed more than $45,000 by the publications’ owner Solera Capital, LLC, a private equity firm in NYC. Latina’s website was down, and my emails to their officers bounced back. Still, we moved forward, planning to add a few more folks […]

David Hill Tells How to Pitch a Freelance Story

NWU First VP David Hill gave writers a powerful tutorial on working as a freelance journalist last night at the UAW conference rooms in NYC. He laid out in clear, concise language how he goes about pitching articles, how he builds long-term relationships with editors, many of whom move from publication to publication, and how […]

Checks Are in the Mail for May Day!

As of today, International Workers’ Day, checks for approximately $9.5 million are in the mail to almost 2,500 freelance writers whose works were copied and distributed in electronic form by publishers of print periodicals who had neither paid for nor acquired digital rights to these articles. These payments today of millions of dollars to thousands […]

NWU Reaches Final Settlement Agreement with Ebony

CHICAGO, IL – The National Writers Union has reached a final settlement agreement with the Ebony Media Organization and CVG Group LLC (which acquired Ebony magazine in 2016), over the magazine’s failure to pay freelance writers, editors and designers for contracted and published work. This settlement covers 45 freelancers who are collectively owed $80,000 by […]

NWU Boston Celebrates Its Authors

Sunday afternoon, January 28th, the Dance Complex in Central Square, Cambridge, was the place to be for writers and friends of writers. That’s where NWU Boston held our annual Book Party to celebrate members who’ve published books in the previous year. This year Amy Hoffman (The Off Season); Patrick Kennedy (Bricklayer Bill: The Untold Story of […]

New Addendum To Book Contracts Guide

Over the past few years, we’ve had increasing numbers of inquiries about the treatment of electronic books (e-books) within book contracts. While they were traditionally considered subsidiary rights that compensated authors at 50 percent of net sales, many publishers have begun to see them as a windfall, and have tried to get members to accept […]

President’s Column – Feb. Newsletter

Happy New Year and I hope you were all able to participate in the recent Women’s Marches. In NYC, the numbers were much larger than the stated 200,000, and thousands of people never got to actually join the march because the crowds were so big and due to NYPD crowd control. I was one, who […]

RIP Sister Ursula K. Le Guin

It is with great sorrow and the deepest respect that we bid farewell to Sister Ursula K. Le Guin, a  ground-breaking author, radical, feminist and revolutionary as well as a literary giant. What’s more, she was one of us, a member of NWU.  She was the author of more than 20 novels, a dozen books […]