You guessed it — no contract. It’s an uneven relationship from the get-go.

You’ve landed on the real problem though, Paula. All that self-promotion, or promotion of a single magazine, is annoying. It rarely hits paydirt. Better to build an actual marketing strategy that’s not the “spray and pray” variety.

If the contract doesn’t mention social media posting, then don’t do it. Or share a link to your work once. If they can’t afford to have someone do their own social media marketing, they probably can’t afford to have someone monitoring your social media accounts, so they might never know. If they tell you it’s required, point to the contract. The worst they can do is stop assigning…..which at this point sounds like a decent option.

That said, I have a friend whose contract states that payments (bonuses, I guess) are based on how many views each of her pieces generates. So she has a financial incentive to flood her social media accounts with links to her work. (Honestly, it gets annoying to see so many self-promotional posts, but I get why she does it.)