Dear Geist,

Is it cricket to sell a freelance article, then make a few revisions and sell it to a different periodical? And another and another? At a social for writers I heard two guys bragging about how many times they sold the same article to five or six different publishers with just a few tweaks. I was shocked! But maybe it happens all the time?

—Babe in the Woods, Toronto

Dear Babe,

Yes, it does happen all the time, and it's usually perfectly legal. An editor accepts a piece of writing and pays the writer a fee and expenses as agreed. There may also be an agreement that the writer won’t publish the piece anywhere else for a specified time—usually the period during which the published article is on the market: three months for a quarterly periodical, for example.

If those agreements are being honoured, the writer is free to sell the work to other publications. We know writers who often revise pieces to appeal to different audiences—a longer piece, for example, emphasizing some other aspect, for a publication that has a different readership. Professional writers know their editors and audiences, and some of them find ingenious ways to make the most of a piece of writing by rewriting for diverse audiences. But the publishing community is a small one, and it's not in a writer's interest to do anything that would compromise good working relationships. We're guessing the “few tweaks” flung out by those writers at the social were actually some hours of hard work.

—The Editors