How to Get Paid

FREELANCE WRITING

MICHAEL BOURNE is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

FOUR years ago Jennifer Percy decided she wanted to report on the lives of women in war-torn Afghanistan and get paid to do it. A graduate of both the fiction and nonfiction MFA programs at the University of Iowa, Percy was about to publish her first book, Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism (Scribner, 2014), but she had written only one previous magazine feature and knew that few editors would be eager to send a new writer halfway around the world to report from a war zone.

So Percy launched a GoFundMe campaign to help finance her travel, lodging, and personal protection while in Afghanistan and contacted an editor at Harper’s who had handled an excerpt from her book that had appeared in the magazine’s Readings section.

“I wanted to take a leap and not build up pieces that were maybe easier to get but rather jump right into things and do international reporting right away with a big project,” Percy says. “I think I raised three or four thousand dollars on GoFundMe, and the rest I took out in student loans, which I’m still paying off.”

Percy’s bold move produced results. In January 2015, published her ten-thousand-word article, “Love Crimes,” which examined what liberation looked like for Afghan women after the U.S. occupation, and while she was in Afghanistan, Percy traveled to meet the country’s lone female warlord and pitched the story to an, which ran it later that year.