The Sanity Project

A brief update on ContentGather

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I just came across a complaint about ContentGather on Reddit. The claim is that ContentGather suspended the poster’s account without warning or explanation. I can’t verify the authenticity of the post, but it fits with my impression of them.

According to other reports I’ve seen, ContentGather is adamant about submitting only original material that has never been submitted anywhere else. Normally they shouldn’t be able to spot recycling, but there are customers who reject articles and then use them without paying. If this happens to you and CG’s plagiarism checker catches it, you should expect your account to be suspended or terminated. You get punished again for being cheated.

It’s their choice how to do business, but CG just doesn’t pay enough for me to send them anything but articles that have failed to find another home. I removed all but one of my articles from their queue. They required payment to remove the last one, so I left it there.

Note on Medium

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My income from my articles on Medium.com in November is down from October, even though I have more articles up.

This is what I was afraid would happen. The removal of “claps” as a determiner of income means that whatever gets opened the most gets the biggest share of the income. Writers with a small but enthusiastic following lose with the new scheme. The pages that get opened the most are the ones that appear on the homepage. The ones on politics, society, and culture that get listed there are mostly fanatically statist. (Edit: I should have added that some titles are clear cases of race-baiting. Edit 2: And outright racism at times. I just spotted an article, prominently featured on Medium’s home page, with the title “Lindsey Graham’s Hypocrisy is a Product of Whiteness.” I don’t know if the editors selected that article, or if it popped to the top because so many readers clapped it. Either thought makes me want to throw up.)

There’s a section on the homepage for writers I follow. It lists only four items at any given time, while the list of articles the editors are pushing is huge. Evidently Medium doesn’t want to encourage writers to build their own following.

I don’t know if I’ll bother posting any more articles there.

In more encouraging news, I’ve finished the first draft of The Magic Battery!

New Jersey bill attacks freelancers

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing as business and tagged freelancing New Jersey regulation on by

A bill in the New Jersey legislature could mean trouble for freelance writers. It bans freelance contract work that doesn’t meet all of the following requirements:

a. The individual has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the service, both under the individual’s contract of service and in fact; and

b. The individual’s service is either outside the usual course of the business for which that service is performed; and

c. The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, profession or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

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How writers should deal with Internet bullying

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There’s an old Internet saying: “Don’t feed the trolls.” It’s still excellent advice. When people communicate with you only to get you upset, the best answer is usually no answer.

Some authors have been subjected to online harassment by cultural segregationists. Their crime is to write something which is not permitted to their race or ethnic group. A bunch of racists piled on Amélie Wen Zhao for the offense of depicting a fantasy world in which slavery isn’t limited to people with dark skins. (There’s a real-world counterpart: China, which is where Zhao comes from.) Some of these bigots said that people with yellow skins shouldn’t write about slavery at all. They temporarily intimidated her into withdrawing her book from publication.
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Beware of fake statistics 1

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Some research I recently did for an article turned up a statistic that would have made a nice centerpiece: 60% of small businesses that experience cyberattacks go out of business within six months! If I were a hack writer, I could just have run with it; it’s “confirmed” on plenty of websites. But it smelled phony.

First, what exactly is it counting? It doesn’t even say “successful” cyberattacks. Let’s assume it means that, though. Almost every business falls victim to some malware. The consequences can be small or huge. It might contact a server that no longer exists and do nothing. It might attempt to encrypt files for ransomware but fail. It might mine for cryptocurrency, send spam, or try to enlarge a botnet. Those are all bad but won’t usually destroy the business.

Second, how much of the correlation is causation? Small businesses have high mortality rates in general. It just isn’t plausible that cyberattacks are wiping out huge numbers of small companies.
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Medium’s new payment model

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Just as I thought I was starting to figure Medium out, they’ve completely changed the payment model. This is what they’ll be doing, starting October 28:

1. We will calculate earnings based on the reading time of Medium members.

2. We will include reading time from non-members too, once they become members.

3. Your earnings will be updated daily, not weekly.

4. Your story stats will show new metrics to explain your earnings.

For more information, please read our blog post here. [no link]

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This entry was posted in Writer ethics Writing Writing as business and tagged business clients on by | Open »

A while back, I got a solicitation from a Dan Marzullo saying, “I run a small copywriting firm and I’m looking for another writer to add to the team.” I didn’t respond, since it felt like mass marketing. Since then I’ve learned that he’s contacted other writers I know and may not have represented his conflicts of interest accurately. I recommend not dealing with him. Inadvertently violating your existing agreements can really mess up your business.

Constant Content spam

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Lately I’ve been getting unwanted promotional email from Constant Content, even though I haven’t written for them or logged in there in at least two years. When I tried to “unsubscribe” (which would imply that I had ever subscribed), their website told me I wasn’t on their list.

I’ve seen indications from other writers that they’re getting spammed too. If Constant Content has started spamming its inactive writers, that suggests desperation.

I’m on Medium.com

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I’ve started posting articles on Medium.com. Please follow and clap if you’re so inclined.

Here’s the link for the RSS feed. It works in the Leaf reader, but the WordPress sidebar widget doesn’t recognize it, so I can’t add the feed on this site. You can try bookmarking it in your favorite feed reader; let me know if it works or doesn’t.

My latest article, as of this post, is “Remembering the Salem Witch Executions”.