If you write for ContentGather, you should be aware that you won’t get email notifications when a regular marketplace article of yours sells. You have to check the site periodically to find out if you’re owed money. There isn’t any preference setting which lets you get notified about a sale of a regular article. You can, however, get notifications about the sale of custom jobs.
This seems like a way to hang on to writers’ money longer.
Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds? It must be true, it’s all over the Internet! The oldest mention I can find of that factoid dates from 2009. At the time, the supposed source was the FBI, without any citation. Lately it’s usually Gartner, still with no citation.
Recently a customer asked me to include that “statistic” in an article. Fortunately, it wasn’t a requirement, just a suggestion. The customer also wanted all links to be no more than a year old, so citing a nine-year-old figure didn’t really seem like what they wanted. Even if the figure was once accurate, the theft rate is sure to have changed over the years.
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Here are a couple of discounts for your holiday shopping.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek is available at 60% off with the coupon code WZ63B. It’s aimed at any computer-literate readers who want to keep their data usable for many years.
You can get Yesterday’s Songs Transformed: A Historical Tour of Song Rewriting at 30% off with the coupon code LS92Y.
Please share this information with your friends. My book sales help to support this blog. The coupons expire December 26, 2018.
Update: I should have mentioned how you can give Smashwords books as gifts. Recipients do have to register with Smashwords to accept the gift, and there’s not much I can do about that. But if you want to buy a copy (very important!) and give the recipient the PDF, I won’t object to that. Just don’t share a single purchase, please. We writers gotta eat.
Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, Cato Institute, 2018.
It would be hard to believe all the outrages described in Overcharged if public information and personal experience didn’t back them up so much. We all know that medical costs are skyrocketing. This book goes into many of the details and provides a comprehensive explanation.
A number of my experiences make more sense in the light of what I’ve read there. One time a full surgical team, including an anesthesiologist, showed up for a procedure to remove a routine sebaceous cyst from my scalp. I had already said I didn’t want general anesthesia, and I continued to refuse it. I’m sure he got paid anyway. Fortunately, I had very good insurance at the time.
Another time I underwent a biopsy for prostate cancer because of elevated PSA. It turned out negative. I had recently had a bladder infection, which is a common cause of high PSA, but the doctor didn’t care that it was most likely a false positive. I won’t go into how disgusting the prep, the procedure, and the aftereffects are. Once I sued a doctor for overcharging, only to learn that in New Hampshire, you can’t sue a doctor in small claims court without an expert witness. (At least that was what he told the judge, and she didn’t contradict him.) In terms of practical economics, that means you can’t sue a doctor in small claims court. We all know that the very idea of getting a price or even an estimate in advance for a medical procedure is a joke, even though it’s expected for any other big-ticket expenditure.
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There’s an old federal law that affects publishers. It requires every book publisher to submit two copies of each work published to the Copyright Office, without getting any payment. It originated long before automatic copyright and print-on-demand existed. Originally that served the purpose of securing copyright, and it only affected large-volume publishers. The burden on such publishers was low.
Today the law still exists, but it’s rarely enforced. With automatic copyright, it no longer serves its original purpose. Collecting free books from every print-on-demand operation and every fan publisher would ruin them. But when someone in the government wants to target a business, antiquated laws are useful. The Copyright Office is trying to ruin small PoD publisher Valancourt Books by enforcing this law.
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[Withdrawn, as I no longer wish to give any positive publicity to Verblio]
A piece called “Confessions of a Fake News Writer,” by someone using the name Winston Wordsworth, recently came to my attention. You can look it up if you want; I’m not giving this scumbag any “link juice.” He says in the article that he currently accepts money to write lies, so there’s no strong reason to accept anything he says as true. But by Russell’s Paradox, if he’s lying, he’s telling us the truth when he says he lies. And there must be people like this. They deserve to be spat upon.
Winston says he’s “prostituting myself out.” That’s an insult to prostitutes, who mostly deliver honest value for money.
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Small minds are attracted to zero-sum thinking. They believe that anything that benefits someone else must hurt them. That’s where the myth that sites should never expend “link juice” comes from. The idea is that if you have any links in your articles, the site you link to will gain in search rank and you’ll lose correspondingly.
How much influence do these people think they have over search ranks? Unless they’re operating a leading site in the field, their effect is negligible. Besides, presumably they aren’t linking to their competitors, so giving another site a slight boost doesn’t do them any injury.
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Writers in every country can run into governmental censorship. The USA is among the freest, but there are some areas where businesses can get into legal trouble for publishing truthful statements that aren’t state secrets. The FDA is one of the biggest censors of truthful speech. With certain products, it isn’t enough for the manufacturer’s statements about them to be true. They have to be approved. More precisely, making certain truthful statements about smokeless cigarettes, which contain no tobacco, miraculously turns them into “modified risk tobacco products” which are subject to tobacco regulations.
I can say what I want about e-cigarettes on this blog, since I don’t produce or sell them and I’m not getting paid by anyone who does. But if a business that sold them asked me to write something for them, I’d have to be careful. I might not be able to say that they don’t contain tobacco, even though they don’t. I couldn’t point out that they’re far less dangerous than real cigarettes.
Legal writer Jonathan Adler, in the Washington Post, writes about the prohibition: “FDA regulation of e-cigarettes is not only bad for public health but also is likely unconstitutional. Insofar as the federal Tobacco Act, and the FDA’s implementing regulation, prohibit product makers and sellers from making factually true statements about their products, they likely violate the First Amendment.”
Nonetheless, A lawsuit against the FDA lost and, as far as I can tell, ran out of appeals. The ruling is long, and I can’t figure out from it how it justifies the speech prohibition. It seems to just take it for granted. The part of the ruling which claims to show that products with no tobacco are “tobacco products” is preposterous hand-waving, so I shouldn’t expect much sense from anything in the ruling.
It’s very unlikely the FDA would go after me personally for anything I wrote for a customer. (But don’t take anything here as legal advice.) The issue is that to write something which the customer could safely publish, I’d have to be careful to state only government-approved facts. Companies sometimes run articles past their legal departments to minimize the chance of regulatory trouble. This could result in nitpicking rewrites or even rejection of a perfectly good article. If you get into this situation, understand that the customers are just protecting themselves.
The tobacco industry loves it when e-cigarette makers can’t tell people all about their products. So do the nannies who think people should be prohibited from taking any risk, even if it’s a smaller risk than they’re currently taking. Tacit alliances like this happen more often in the crony system than you might think.
You have to be aware of the potential for trouble when you write on those topics. You can’t be a legal expert on what statements are allowed or not, but you can be aware that your work could face delays and rewrites.
Thanks to Tom Schwing for the forum post which called my attention to this issue.
Is a professional writer just someone who makes money writing? Then we might as well call anyone who gets paid for doing anything a pro. The word implies more than that. It means a commitment to producing the best results possible. It means not just being paid for work, but being paid for good work.
Professionals know that a career is an ongoing effort, not a leap to stardom. It’s a matter of constantly developing better skills, both at doing the work and at marketing it. Jeff Goins’ “7 Things Professional Writers Know That Amateurs Don’t” makes some excellent points on this topic. He explains that “success in any field is more about commitment to a process than it is about finding one magic trick that will make it all come together.”
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