I’ve been on Medium.com for just a few weeks. It’s too soon to say whether it will be a significant source of income, though I’ve already gotten one payment. Here are a few observations, based on limited data.
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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’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”.
While I make my money writing about tech, I have a fiction project going as well. It’s called The Magic Battery. The starting point was some questions about how magic worked in a friend’s story. Magic always has to be limited in some way, or anything becomes possible with a wave of the wand. But if there are limitations, there will be ways of overcoming them. My comment was “Whoever invents the magic battery will make a fortune!” That was my starting point.
The story is set in 16th century Saxony, and I’m striving to make it as realistic as possible except for the existence of magic. Sorcerers are tradesmen with special skills. They make a nice living because they can do things no one else can, but they aren’t super-powerful. As one of the characters puts it, “Magic isn’t magic.” It has serious limits, one of the most important being the sorcerer’s capacity to draw on the “World Behind.” But what if they could draw on this power and save it for later use? What if they could sell their stored spells to people with no magical talent? That would change the world.
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If you’ve ever tried to research a difficult topic on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or any of the other major search engines, you know what a battle it is. You don’t just get irrelevant results, you get the feeling the search engine is working against you. Instead of matching your keywords, it returns matches for vaguely similar spellings. Instead of matching all your search terms, it gives you popular pages that match just one. You may start to think the search engines are conspiring against you, and in a sense you’re right.
Here’s the secret: Search engines think you’re stupid. They think you can’t construct a proper search and they have to “help” you by guessing your real intent. Statistically, this isn’t so unreasonable. Most people have no idea how to construct a search string. They can’t spell. Search engines have dumbed themselves down to the level of these people. This is great if you can’t remember the spelling of a name and you’re looking for popular articles, but it’s murder when you’re trying to get an answer to a difficult query.
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Politicians hate the “gig economy.” The simple reason is that it’s harder to collect taxes from freelancers than from employees. The California Assembly has passed a bill that would put many freelancers out of work, including writers. It would force clients to take them on as employees. That’s very unlikely to happen for the typical writer, who would simply lose the work.
As of this writing, the bill still has to be passed by the Senate. The text of California AB-5 is on the state website.
I’m not a lawyer and (fortunately) don’t live in California, but this kind of legislation could spread to other states. If it does, it will force a lot of writing work overseas, hurting people in every state.
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Note to companies that purchase content: This is a satire, not a model to follow! 😊
These are from the experience of other writers as they’ve described them on forums, just a bit exaggerated in some cases. I can only speculate on what the reviewer was actually thinking, but the writer can easily imagine a professional sadist at the other end of the transaction.
If you want to cultivate a team of writers who will give you a steady stream of material, please don’t follow these examples. Most reviewers try their best, but hastily-written comments can leave writers bewildered and discourage them from fixing easily-corrected problems.
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An article on Freelance Writing Jobs claims that dealing with copyright is easy. If only it were! The Internet and copyright laws make it difficult both to enforce your copyrights and to tell if you’re violating someone else’s.
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Do you create topic descriptions for writers to make proposals or submissions on? There’s an art to creating a useful description. Some common omissions regularly evoke complaints from writers. A description that doesn’t work well will result in submissions you can’t use or none at all. When you have to reject them, that sours writers who might have provided you with good material. Here are some tips, based on my experience:
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