I was recently asked by a young writer about the best advice I could give him.

Since “take up accounting” is not something I would tell — or wish on — anyone, I decided to give him some actual advice. What I told him applies to everyone else who wants to, as sportswriter Red Smith put it, “open your veins and bleed.”

Here are a few tried-and-true pieces of advice — maxims, if you will, because that sounds more important than “pieces” — I’ve picked up over the years:

Carry a Moleskine and a Pilot G-2 pen with you everywhere you go, and write like mad.

1. Write every day. That sounds easier said than done, and is almost one of those “let down” pieces of advice. (“Seriously? That’s all you got?”) In fact, I have always thought this was the stupidest piece of writing advice, and whenever I heard it, I rolled my eyes so far back into my head, I could see my third grade memories. But it really does make a difference. Just like anything else you want to get good at — woodworking, sports, music, art — you need to write every single day. In fact, as stupid as I thought this was, this has also been the most important piece of advice I have ever gotten. You’re only going to get better by writing on a constant, regular basis, not by reading books on writing, or only writing when you feel inspired. Your skills are going to develop only as long as you put energy and effort into it. Write every day, and you get better that much sooner.
2. Read A LOT. Not just your favorite genres, but other genres, even ones you don’t particularly like. Find some favorite authors and devour everything they’ve written. Identify those things they do that make them your favorites, and see if you can incorporate a few of them into your own writing. You’ll discard a few of the techniques you borrowed, you’ll change and develop others, and you’ll create a hybrid style that is all your own. (That’s how those writers did it, and it will work for you too.)
3. Avoid books on writing, except for Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
   (affiliate links). (Okay, there are actually three others I especially like, but those are for another day, after you’ve read these two.) Everything else has already been said, and it’s too easy to mire yourself in every single book on writing, but they’ll only delay you from actually writing. It’s too easy to read writing book after writing book, and say that’s part of your learning process, but eventually that becomes a crutch that keeps you from actually writing. Too many new writers hide behind their tall stack of writing books, saying they’re not ready to start because they haven’t read the 23rd writing book they just got from the library. Remember maxim #1; it’s not “read writing books every day.”

   The same holds true for writing exercises. Skip those. If you want to practice writing, write something. A real something, that will actually be read by real people. Write a blog post, write an article and submit it, write an essay and email it to people.

4. Seek out one or two good mentors. Find people who will mercilessly edit your stuff and not give a shit about your feelings. Don’t connect with someone who wants to be mean, but you also don’t want the person who will pat your head and say you did a good job. So, don’t ask your mom. She loves you and wants to protect you. But you don’t need protection, you need education. If you ask your writing friends, they’ll be professionally jealous and will rip you a new one harshly enough to be helpful. Basically, if someone reads your stuff and says, “yeah, it’s pretty good,” they’re not good mentors, because they’re not giving you anything to improve or pointing out your weaknesses.
5. Write even when you don’t think you’re doing a good job. In fact, that’s when you need to write. Never let your doubts sink your goals. Even if you don’t think you’re doing a good job, focus on your writing goals. Those feelings won’t ever go away — even the most successful writers have them — but you’ll get better every day. You just have to ignore the self-doubt and keep writing. Eventually you will outgrow the feelings, and learn to recognize the negative self-talk for what it is. You’ll learn to trust your abilities and your work, and know that your work is better than your doubts let you think it is.


This is fellow humor writer and online buddy, Bruce Cameron. He writes very funny, successful books, and is more than happy to selflessly share advice and support to other writers. I hate him.

6. Never EVER compare yourself to another writer’s success. “Never compare someone else’s highlight reel to your day-to-day stuff,” I read once. You’ll make yourself crazy. Years ago, I used to compare myself to Bruce Cameron, a fellow humorist and member of the NetWits, a humor writers group. I would see everything he was doing, and despair that I would never have that kind of success. I would get depressed every time I paid close attention to what he was doing.

   And despite what I just said, you’ll do it too. You’ll see their publications and their success and ask yourself “why can’t that happen to ME?!” It will. You just have to go back and do #1 and #5 more and more, and keep submitting your work, publishing blog posts, going to seminars, re-reading Bird By Bird and On Writing. One day, you’ll look up and realize you’ve done just as much as the people you were comparing yourself to all those years ago. You’ll also find that someone newer and younger than you is making themselves crazy, comparing themselves to your publications and successes. Just keep your head down, keep your eyes on your own work, and don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Later, you can salve your wounds with sweet, sweet schadenfreude when you spot their books in a bookstore’s bargain bin.

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• 

Cathy Day’s recent blog post, “Last Lecture: Am I a Writer?” took me back to my own days of struggling with my identity as a Writer.

I’ve been writing for 24 years, but I’ve only accepted the mantle of Writer for the last 17.

It’s an odd thing to wonder about one’s self. Either you’re a Writer, or you’re not, right?

You’re a professional, literary, word slinging, spell-it-with-a-capital-W-by-God Writer, or you’re just some wannabe hack who doesn’t deserve to even call what you do “writing.” (You even manage to speak the word with invisible quotes around it.)

Ernest Hemingway: This dude was a capital-W Writer. He also drank a lot and shot things.

Someone who does plumbing is a plumber. Someone who does accounting is an accountant. And someone who cooks food is a cook.

But ask someone who strings words together if they’re a Writer, and they’ll think about it for a minute.

“No, because I haven’t been published.”

“Yes, as soon I published my first book.”

“No, I’ve only been doing it for a couple years.”

“Yes, after I received my first check for a magazine article.”

New writers hesitate to call themselves one, as if this thing we do is sacred, and they’re not worthy. Writers don’t just string words together for people to read in an email. We tell stories to entertain people, inform and educate, persuade and rally. We can string words together that provoke, comfort, or incite. Scribblers use corporate jargon and fifty dollar words in five cent emails.

Even when I first started writing, it never occurred to me that I was a Writer, until a more experienced one said, “Don’t you write stuff?”

“Yes, every day.”

If you do this a lot, you may be a writer.

Since I didn’t have a good answer, it was easier just to mumble, “Well, I guess I am.”

That’s how most Writers are crowned, with a mumbled realization, rather than a pomp-filled ceremony, complete with gleaming pens carried proudly on red velvet pillows by pages, to be presented by the queen amidst the fanfare of trumpets. (Although wouldn’t that be awesome?)

To be sure, Writers earn their title. That capital W is not just granted to every schmuck who took a high school English class and pounds out the occasional email to coworkers. That’s not writing. That’s written communication, but it’s not writing.

There may be standards for calling one’s self a Writer — you have to write 100,000 words first; you have to submit a piece for print publication; you have to get paid — but no one has figured out what that is yet. Self-granting the title varies from person to person.

But one constant remains: you’re not a Writer until you call yourself one. The very minute you can say, “I’m a Writer,” and say it without that question mark at the end? That’s when you are one.

Otherwise, no one is stopping you. Go ahead. Take it out. Try it on, and see how it fits. You’ll grow into it over time.

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• 

After yesterday’s post on Suggested Freelance Writing Rates — Midwest Edition, I was asked why it costs so much ($75 – $125) to write a blog post.

“It’s 350 – 450 words. How hard can it be?”

Actually, that depends. It depends on what you’re writing. If you’re writing a personal blog entry about the hamburger you enjoyed at lunch with your besties, that’s not hard at all. Takes you 15 minutes tops. But I have yet to meet anyone to hire me to ghost write their personal blog entries.

Writing corporate blog posts is a different matter. The actual wordsmithing — spinning out 350 – 450 words — is pretty straightforward. Yes, you’re paying for the writer’s expertise and skills (remember, this is a trained professional who has dedicated himself or herself to the written word), but there are other factors that go into corporate blogging. Here’s the basic process that most professional bloggers follow:

• Regular research of the client’s industry. We have to know as much as we can about your industry, reading related blogs, trade journals, and news articles.
• Interview the client. For Pro Blog Service, I interview our clients about that month’s blog posts, record the interviews, and we write the posts based on that.
• The writing. This is the act of putting the words into a word processing document.
• The editing. Any writer will tell you that the editing process is just as crucial as the actual writing. As first draft writers, most of us vary from horrible to passable. There are very, very few people who can write a great first draft. So the editing is just as difficult as putting down the actual words.
• Publishing to the blog. This includes adding photos, any outbound links, using tools for SEO like WordPress SEO and Schemas. This is the other place people have problems, because they don’t have the time to dink around with finding photos, creating links, etc.
• Promoting each blog post. You can’t just throw up a blog post and let it sit. You have to promote it to your social networks. And you have to grow those networks. A full-service professional blogger will also include that in their offerings, helping you grow your network so you can reach a bigger and more target audience

Blogging is much, much more than just spinning out the actual words, although that’s certainly the most important part of it. Without the research, the editing, and the promotion, you’re just writing in a diary about whatever randomly pops into your head.

If you’re thinking about blogging, more power to you! Please do. It’s an important part of social media marketing. But just remember that it takes about 1 – 2 hours worth of work to come up with a single blog post. That’s why you either need to hire it done, or allow for that much time in your schedule.

In future posts, I’ll be talking about what makes a good writer, and why, even though we all learned how to write in school, those skills are not enough to make an effective writer.

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• 

What are some different freelance writing rates that freelancers ought to be charging? It depends on where you live. If you live in America’s Heartland, where the cost of living is lower, you’ll charge less. If you live on one of the three coasts (that includes Chicago), your rates will be much, much higher.

It always makes me laugh when clients from Out East or Out West think that we aren’t charging enough here in Indiana, because our rates are often 50 – 100% less than what they’re being charged by hometown writers. We’re able to charge so much because our cost of living is so much lower. Rent is anywhere from $600 – $1,200 here in Central Indiana, but in New York, that’s the the cost of a gallon of milk.

But things aren’t as good if they’re not as expensive, so the smart freelancer raises his or her rates to meet expense expectations when the client is from Away.

Having said that, here’s a typical freelance rate for the Midwest (excluding Chicago; see above “Out East or Out West”). Also, keep in mind that these rates may be higher or lower, depending on whether you’re a new freelancer or a seasoned professional:

• Blog post (300 – 500 words): $75 – $125
• Web copy (1 page): $75 – $100
• Press release (1 page): $100
• White paper (6 – 10 pages): $300 – $600
• Market copy (2 pages): $200
• Newspaper or magazine article (< 1,000 words): $300 – $1,000, depending on the publication.

To that, I would add:

• To fix what you already wrote: $50/hr.
• If you edit the work, and I have to go back and fix what you did: $200/hour
• You’re from the East/West Coast, and think we don’t charge enough: Double the above rates until we reach your desired expectations.

Update: I’ve received a lot of feedback on this particular post, both in the comments and messages scrawled in blood on the flaming bags of dog poo on my front porch. This is a contentious issue for some, because they make much more than this from their freelance work. For others, they can’t believe I would advocate charging so much (those are usually the people who hire freelancers).

The point of this post is to get you thinking about what freelancers should be charging, at least as a starting point. Your mileage will vary, depending on your experience, where you live, and who you’re writing for.

Writing a magazine article for a small startup magazine in small-town Indiana is going to be way different than writing a cover piece for Newsweek or US News and World Report. Giving one price for a magazine is like saying, “A car costs $18,000.”

So, if you’re thinking about hiring a freelancer, these are prices to start with when hiring freelancers here in America’s heartland. If you’re looking to launch your freelance career, this a good guideline if you live in the Midwest. But if you’re a freelancer who’s already earning more than this, ignore these numbers, keep doing good work, and charge what your clients are willing to pay.

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• 

After Monday’s post, “Writing For ‘Exposure’ Is Not Payment,” travel writer and photographer Mark Eveleiegh emailed me a great response that helped me crystallize my own thoughts. With his kind permission, I am reposting his reply here (not a differing response, but more of a ‘hell, yeah!’ reply), because he makes a very important point.

Mark Eveleigh is a professional photographer, travel writer, and journalist. I also like his tattoo.

(Note: Mark is British, so any ‘misspellings’ are actually English writing styles and spellings.)

When I was starting out I had a golden rule NEVER to write for free. The magazines that want your free work are rarely the ones that can offer the best exposure (also most pros and editors know you wrote for free, thereby lowering your professional credibility). Will the day come when Nat Geo will expect us to write for free? After all it is the best exposure we will ever get.

When times were hard I was reduced to selling ‘travellers tips’ for USD10 to a travel magazine. They only paid for the best tip…but I figured that a pro ought to be able to stand up to that sort of competition and I welcomed even this minor challenge. I remember bending the golden rule just once when a good friend was launching a new magazine and I wrote a story for him.

Times have changed though. Finally – after 16 years living from freelance travel journalism – I’m accepting the fact that we need to write for free. We market, advertise and promote ourselves online through blogs and social-networking.

I’ve just finished a tight deadline that’s had me on assignment for 10 days. I’ve been writing and polishing images for much of the last 72 hours. Pay rate for that was decent (several thousand dollars). Tonight though my task is to write a 500-word blog post on travel scams. Payrate for this is a big fat ZERO.

My old theory was that work that was not paid for was worth nothing – now I have even had to rethink that. The important thing if we are going to write for free is that the quality of the work we file should nevertheless be right up there with our best commissioned work. Why should we expect to market ourselves with sub-standard work? I want my best work ever to be on my blog. Many people publish sloppy writing with bad grammar and spelling and defend themselves by the statement “well, it’s only blogging.”

We need to stop this slide into a new era of true hack writing. Whether you are writing a magazine cover-story or a blog post you should be proud to have your name on the piece.

Finally, one of the greatest things about this new era is a revival of the pure sense of fun that comes from writing about something simply because it fascinates you, or because it’s a challenge. I’ve rarely had so much fun with writing as I’ve had in the months since Erik Deckers convinced me that I ought to set up my Parallel Worlds blog.

I’m enjoying this new era and as long as I can keep pulling in the paid magazine commissions I for one intend to keep ‘writing for free’ as much as possible.

Mark Eveleigh is the founder of THE WIDEANGLE photo agency and, as a photojournalist and author, has worked for more than 50 publications, including Geographical, CNN Traveller, Sunday Times, The Guardian, Africa Geographic, and National Geographic.

Undercover news assignments have taken him from besieged Zimbabwean farms to high-security Bolivian prisons, but charging African elephants, Spanish fighting bulls, and a randy Peruvian llama have taught him the real importance of ‘journalistic footwork.’

He is rated #27 in official Press Gazette (UK) listing of the 50 most influential travel writers.

—–

Mark’s letter made me realize an important distinction in my thoughts on “Writing For ‘Exposure’ Is Not Payment.”

Exposure is important. It’s crucial to building our personal brand. It’s how people know us. And sometimes writers, especially professional writers, sometimes have to write for free. I write this blog for free. Mark’s blog is free. We don’t get paid for writing our blogs, or writing guest post’s on other people’s blogs.

However, it’s not payment. Don’t tell us that’s the reason we should do it, because it shows a shallowness of thinking and understanding how a writer works.

What we ultimately get out of it is payment through other works. I write blog posts about social media, business owners and marketers read it, and they hire my company to write blog posts for them. Mark writes blog posts about adventure travel, marketing executives at travel-related companies read it, and they hire Mark to tote their products down the Amazon and write about it.

We don’t just do the free stuff for exposure. We do it for exposure to the right people.

And therein lies the difference. It’s not a payment. It’s a long-term benefit.

(But we still want the money.)

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• 

Yesterday’s clarification by Judge Marco A. Hernandez about treating bloggers as journalists points out the need for bloggers to follow basic ethical principles, especially as it relates to accepting money or requiring payment for our services.

Oregon blogger Crystal Cox had been sued for defamation — and lost — after writing blog posts that were critical of Obsidian Financial Group and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Cox had claimed she was a journalist and used Oregon’s Media Shield Law as her defense. But Hernandez decided she wasn’t a journalist at all.

The reason she lost, the reason she was deemed to be not “media,” was that she basically tried to get Obsidian to pay her to repair the damage she was causing. As Hernandez wrote:

“[T]he uncontroverted evidence at trial was that after receiving a demand to stop posting what plaintiffs believed to be false and defamatory materials on several websites, including allegations that Padrick had committed tax fraud, defendant offered ‘PR,’ ‘search engine management,’ and online reputation repair services to Obsidian Finance, for a price of $2,500 per month.”

(Source: Courthouse News)

Not only was Cox’s action not in standing with what a journalist would/should/could never do, we bloggers have our own set of ethics that we must never violate.

There are three ethical principles bloggers cannot and should not violate:

1. You cannot ask for money to write about a product.

You can ask for money to advertise a product on your blog, but you cannot ask to be paid for a review. If you were a radio station, and you demanded payment to play a particular song, that would be payola, and it’s illegal.

Sending a PR flak your rate sheet for reviewing a product is in poor taste and unethical. That would also make your review an advertisement, not an actual review.

Now, you may keep the product, if they offer, and you may also accept the goods or service necessary to write a review (i.e. a stay at a hotel, a meal at a restaurant, theater or movie tickets, etc.), but you have to disclose the receipt of the product/goods/service, according to FTC Guidelines:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

2. You cannot accept money or goods in exchange for a POSITIVE review.

The great thing about bloggers is that we are free to give our unbiased, unvarnished thoughts on a product. If it sucks, we get to say it sucks, even if the company itself sent us the product.

It’s one thing to be asked to write a review. It’s a completely other thing to be asked to write a positive review.

If a company offers you money or lets you keep a very expensive product in exchange for your glowing review of it, that’s a bribe. The company should let you say what you want about the product; if they don’t, they’ve got some unreasonable and unethical expectations, and you should turn the offer down completely.

Yes, we want to say the product was good, because they were so nice to us. And they’re our new friends, and they said they liked our blog. We want them to be happy and continue to be our friends, right? That’s an understandable feeling, but you have to resist the urge.

If the product wasn’t good, you have to/get to say so. If it was great, you have to/get to say so.

Now, you have the right to only write about products or services you’ll like. And it’s not required that you hate something or pan something. When I was a music reviewer for Indie-Music.com, I never panned anyone in 150 album reviews. I never hated anyone’s work, and never said anyone should pour their heart and soul into their life’s work of being a bartender. However, there were a few albums that I listened to that I never wrote about, because I didn’t want to pan it or say something was awful. Our whole editorial attitude was our moms’ old trope, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

We were able to make that choice, because the owners decided that was their right. As a blogger, you are free to define your blog’s attitude too. Want to be a hater? Be a hater. Want to only publish positive reviews? Publish them. And just ignore the items that don’t fit with your overall attitude.

You have the choice to only write blog posts about great products, but you don’t have an obligation to say only positive things. You also have the choice to only write blog posts about how things suck, but you don’t have an obligation to seek out the worst in anything and everything you see. (Besides, that gets tiresome and people won’t want to hang around you.)

3. You cannot ask for money to undo something you did.

If you wrote negative content and it’s ranking high on a search engine results page (SERP), you can’t ask to be paid to remove it or hide it with positive content. That’s extortion. You expect this kind of behavior from men in shiny suits running protection rackets.

I can’t say much more about this, it’s pretty straightforward. This is not only unethical, it’s pretty stupid. It’s akin to doctors running around, stabbing people, in order to generate more need for their ER services.

Bloggers need to adopt the same ethical standards as professional journalists. We’re still fighting for recognition as real journalists and real media, and we need to live up to the same standards in anticipation of the day that there’s no recognizable difference between the two professions. One of the only ways we are going to be taken seriously is if we follow the same level of ethics that they do.

Photo credit: Images_of_Money (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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• 

Hooray, bloggers are real journalists again! Just not one in particular.

Back in December 2011, we learned that a U.S. district court judge had ruled that bloggers in Oregon are not part of the media, and therefore, are not protected by Oregon’s media shield laws.

This may or may not have happened after Judge Hernandez's clarification

But Judge Marco A. Hernandez has clarified that he did not mean for his ruling to apply to all bloggers, or at least all Oregon bloggers, only to Crystal Cox.

Cox had been writing critical blog posts about Obsidian Financial Group and co-founder Kevin Padrick, and was sued for defamation by the firm. Cox lost her case after trying to use Oregon’s media shield law as her defense. Hernandez had also awarded Padrick $2.5 million.

Cox appealed the ruling to Hernandez’s court, when he ruled that as a blogger, Cox, could not use Oregon’s media shield law to defend herself.

This sent most of us bloggers into a tizzy. I was especially concerned, since I’ve been a champion of bloggers as citizen journalists. After all, if we’re not considered journalists, then how and why would we serve to educate and inform our communities?

It turns out that’s not what Hernandez meant at all. According to a Courthouse News article, Hernandez wrote:

“In my discussion, I did not state that a person who ‘blogs’ could never be considered ‘media.’ I also did not state that to be considered ‘media,’ one had to possess all or most of the characteristics I recited.

“[T]he uncontroverted evidence at trial was that after receiving a demand to stop posting what plaintiffs believed to be false and defamatory materials on several websites, including allegations that Padrick had committed tax fraud, defendant offered ‘PR,’ ‘search engine management,’ and online reputation repair services to Obsidian Finance, for a price of $2,500 per month.

“The suggestion was that defendant offered to repair the very damage she caused for a small but tasteful monthly fee. This feature, along with the absence of other media features, led me to conclude that defendant was not media.”

(Source: Courthouse News)

This was always something that always bothered me about Cox’s actions. It’s the same thing Yelp was accused of a couple of in 2009 and 2010 (a class-action lawsuit against Yelp was dismissed exactly one year ago):

You cannot ask for payment to undo something you did.

There are people, my company included, that do search engine optimization (SEO). They help companies get their positive news and content to the top of the search engines. But they do not do it to overcome the negative information they put there in the first place.

In other words, if you try to screw a company, you cannot ask for money to unscrew them. If you said negative things about a company, you cannot be paid to then hide those bad things. (We’ll leave the question of Cox’s defamation aside for the moment.)

And that’s what Cox did that made her “not media.”

I’ll talk about blogging ethics in a day or so, but in the meantime, I’m going to breathe a sigh of relief that Judge Hernandez has recognized that bloggers can be considered journalists, and therefore, entitled to a journalist’s defense under Oregon’s media shield laws.

Photo credit: kslavin (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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• 

I’m still surprised at the number of writers who will write for the promise of exposure by websites, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. I was offered that a lot when I was a budding writer. It was fine when I was first starting out, but after a year, I didn’t want exposure, I wanted money.

That’s what any writer wants.

Not that kind of exposure

We don’t write for fame, we don’t write for glory, we don’t write because it’s a cool thing to do. We write because it’s our job, and it’s how we feed our family.

Our families can’t eat exposure, and our mortgage holders don’t accept, “but my article was seen by 2,000 people last month.” Our grocery stores and our banks want money, not readers.

Dorm Room Logic

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, when Napster was all the rage, you had plenty of people engaging in late-night dorm room logic, thinking the only thing musicians ever really wanted was fame. By downloading and stealing their music, they were giving the musicians exactly what they had wanted all along: to be recognized and revered for making good music.

What the downloaders failed to realize was that the only reason the musicians were able to feed themselves and pay for shelter to keep themselves healthy so they could play music was because people were buying their albums, and not ripping them off.

So it goes with the editors who want writers to write for the “exposure.”

“Exposure” is publisher talk for “we want to put you in front of all of our readers who will be so impressed by your work that they will soon become your slobbering fans and put their hard-earned money into your pocket in a desperate grab for anything you produce and sell.”

Oftentimes, what it really means is “we don’t have very much money.”

I hear the “exposure” excuse now that I’ve moved most of my written content online. Sometimes it’s a money thing.

I respect when the editor says they don’t have the money. I understand the problem, and appreciate the honesty. I’m more likely to say yes when they’re honest with me, even if it’s a one-off project for them.

But when the magazine has fewer readers than I have Facebook friends, and they’re promising me exposure? I’m not interested. I can get that level of exposure in 30 minutes. In cases like that, I think the better deal is that they pay me money, and I’ll tell my social networks about them.

If you’re still at the stage in your writing career where you need more readers, use some of the social profile building techniques I’ve discussed on this blog and PersonalBrandBlog.com. Build your readership up to the point that you don’t need the exposure, but rather that you’re doing the publication a favor by telling people that your stuff is available there.

I Write for Free When I Choose

There are times I will write for free, because I know that I am getting in front of a brand new audience. And these are people I would have a hard time reaching on my own. At the same time, the editor or publisher actually knows how to help me convert those readers into my own readers and fans, and will share that with me. A lot of editors aren’t able to do that.

At the same time, guest blogging is one of those things you should be willing to do for free. It does give you traffic, and it introduces you to another, hopefully more successful, blogger’s audience. They’re not only willing to share their limelight with you, but they’re going to tell their audience all about you. If they’re a successful blogger, they’ll have a readership of least a few thousand people.

But more importantly, that person you guest wrote for will do the same for you. So while money doesn’t change hands, there is a quid pro quo agreement between you both — you’re exchanging a post for a post. If they paid you, then you need to turn around and pay them the same amount.

So while you shouldn’t have to take any and every freebie offer that comes your way, check out the publication’s target audience and market size and see if that’s a group you want to reach. If it is, see if you have the time to do a good job. If it isn’t, ask for money. If they say no, you say no.

What Harlan Ellison Has to Say About Writing for Exposure

Photo credit: kthypryn (Flickr)

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• 

Yesterday, I discussed how to find out if you’ve been plagiarized, or at least had your stuff used without permission, but with your byline intact.

When that happens, it’s not uncommon to feel both flattered and angry at the same time. Jason Offutt called the feeling “flangry.” On the one hand, you’re pissed that your stuff was stolen. On the other, you’re flattered that it was good enough to steal.

Flangry: adj. The combination of being flattered and angry, after finding some jackwagon stole your work and passed it off as their own.

Regardless of how you feel, it was wrong of the other person to take it, and you have rights. Here are the steps to take if you’ve been stolen from, especially if they removed your byline, and tried to pass it off as their own.

(Remember, plagiarism is when someone passes your work off as their own; copyright violations are when they use your work without permission, but may leave your name intact.)

1) Immediately create a PDF or screenshot of the page.

On a Mac, select Print, and then set the output to be a PDF instead of a printed page. On Windows, if this option isn’t available, download CutePDF and output the page to a PDF. Next, save an html copy of the page. And if you have it, save it to Evernote. If you’re a designer or photographer, and one of your images is being used, take a screenshot. You need to do this, because as soon as the plagiarist gets a hint of what’s going on, all stolen content will disappear, and you’ll want proof of what happened.

If they have already removed the content, do a search for the original phrase that brought you there, and then hover over the Google results. A preview window should pop up in the side bar, as well as the word Cached. Click Cached, and you’ll see the older version of what Google has in their index. Print that to a PDF or take a screenshot.

2) Start researching their other content.

The only reason I heard about the two instances where I had been ripped off this month is because the person who first found he had been ripped off that that other stuff might be stolen too. In both cases, they researched all available columns they could find and discovered the original authors. They also saved copies of every stolen piece they found, as per #1.

3) Contact other victims.

If you find that other writers have been stolen from, contact them and let them know what’s going on. You can do it as a group email, or you can do it as a one-to-one email. Explain the situation clearly and without a lot of preamble, but recognize that some writers may ignore your email. One author in this most recent case of plagiarism thought the initial email was spam, so he ignored it. It wasn’t until he got a call from a reporter for a newspaper story that he realized it was real.

4) Present a unified plan of action, and adopt the role as leader.

This may seem a bit unusual, but it’s important if you discover that several people have been stolen from. If you’re the only victim, then you need to lay out a plan of action before you do anything. If there’s more than one of you, there should be one point of contact between the publisher and/or editor, and the group whose work was stolen. If the editor is being bombarded by 5 or 10 different people, then they may be less likely to be helpful. Be patient and cooperative, and the publisher is more likely to help you.

In the Jon Flatland situation, one of the writers went off-script and contacted the plagiarist directly. As a result, Flatland realized he’d been caught, and tendered his resignation via email admitting to a single act of theft, before his publisher ever got to the office. As a result, we (and the publisher) missed out on the chance to hear the plagiarist’s excuses, get an apology, and to royally ream the guy out.

This also means you need to hold off on putting the word out on social media and your own blogs until you’ve gotten some answers from the publisher. Trust me, this is so heinous a crime that a media publisher will drop everything to deal with it, because they know they’re facing some serious problems. You shouldn’t have to wait that long. Be patient, contact the publisher, and start writing your summary of the situation for your blog. Publish it when you get a final resolution from the publisher or editor.

5) Don’t start screaming about lawyers.

Chances are, if your stuff was stolen by someone in the traditional media, they have a boss and/or peers who all know it’s wrong. Journalists are trained not to steal. It’s the number one sin they could commit, so there are mechanisms in traditional media settings to bring them to justice. Instead, rat them out to their bosses, and they’ll take care of the rest. Ask to be updated on a regular basis, and pass that information on to your fellow victims. Chances are, the publisher will recognize the legal ramifications of someone on their staff stealing their stuff, and they will be eager to make everything right, just so you won’t sue them.

Instead, be patient, and wait for nature to take its course. If cooperation from the publisher is not forthcoming, or they refuse to cooperate, that’s when you pull out the big guns. Get a lawyer to write a nasty letter for you, and see what happens.

6) Use takedown notices and invoices for one-person operations.

Occasionally you’ll see your stuff used in someone else’s one-person operation. Whether they swiped your stuff without attribution, or your find it with your name and website included, there are times you need to defend your property and your copyright.

• If they included your byline, ask them to take it down by including what it would cost to normally run your piece. Most people will comply if they think you’re going to charge them $150 just to run a single piece they copy-pasted; more if they took more than one piece.
• On the other hand, there is some benefit to having a link out there that leads back to your website. If the site is not a spammy site, or it links to a lot of unrelated garbage, leave it up. You’re getting a little SEO (search engine optimization) juice out of it.
• If they stole your stuff outright, let them know that you know. Give them 48 hours to remove it fully. If they don’t comply, get a lawyer to send a letter. Be sure to save a copy of that letter so you can use it later for future instances. (Get the lawyer’s permission to reuse it, of course!)
• Also send a note to their ISP and/or web host. Let them know that one of their customers has posted unauthorized, copyrighted material on their site. Include the name, site name, and exact URL of the material, as well as URLs or copies of your original material. While SOPA may have died, most ISPs are still concerned about hosting stolen material, and will help the content owner. If they don’t, get the lawyer to write you another letter.

7) Suing for this stuff is hard

While you may think that a lawsuit for major theft is a good idea, keep in mind that it’s expensive and very difficult. And in most cases, it’s going after the wrong person. While the publisher is often responsible for the content of the newspaper, it’s the writer who did all the stealing, and tricked the publisher. You can sue the publisher, but they’re usually on your side (at least insofar as they don’t want to get sued and will cooperate with you to avoid it). So you’ll look like a real d-bag if you sue someone who tried to help you out.

Plus, there aren’t many lawyers who are willing to take these cases on contingency, so that means you have to come up with a few thousand dollar retainer to hire them. If you’ve only had a couple pieces stolen, it’s not worth it. If you didn’t actually lose anything monetarily or opportunity-wise, it’s not worth it. But if someone ripped off an entire book that went on to become a NY Times best seller and made the author fabulously wealthy — and you can prove your entire manuscript was stolen, because you registered it with the US Copyright Office (also read Wikihow’s “How to Copyright a Book“) — then, by all means, find an attorney and pursue it.

For the most part, people are honest. If they took something without permission, it’s because they don’t have a basic understanding of copyright laws (Tip: Just because you found it on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s free.) If you address it with someone — be polite, at least the first time — they’re probably going to be willing to do as you ask.

But occasionally you’ll find someone who knows it’s wrong, like a trained journalist, and they stole from you anyway. Follow these steps once you , and the action you think you should take. Hopefully you’ll never need it.

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I’ve had my humor columns plagiarized three times in the last 10 years, the last two happening within 25 days of each other. The most recent one happened Monday, and ended with the plagiarist resigning his position as a newspaper publisher 24 hours later.

In the first case, I found out about it myself by doing some basic Google research. The last two, I was emailed because someone else did the same thing, and then did more diligent research, and identified a number of other humor writers who had been stolen from.

If you’re worried about your stuff getting stolen, here are a few things you can do to protect yourself:

1) Google unique phrases and sentences.

The way most people check for plagiarism is to do a Google search for a unique phrase. The lede sentence here, “I’ve had my humor columns plagiarized three times in the last 10 years” is unique — no one has ever used it, in fact — so I would pop something like that in the Google search box.

But, and this is important, you have to put quotes around the entire sentence. This tells Google, “I want to find only instances of these words in this order. If they’re not in this order, don’t serve me the results.” That means sentences that say cooking columns instead of humor columns won’t show up.

Check at least three sentences per piece, just in case one of them was edited. And don’t search for sentences that contain the following:

• Specific locations: One of my plagiarists changed my city names to his city names so they would be more specific to him.
• Specific names: Any semi-smart plagiarist is going to know enough to change your spouse’s name to their spouse’s name. Same with kids, pets, and friends.
• Dates: Unless it’s something historic, don’t search for dates. If you talk about being in college 15 years ago, that will get changed to suit the writer’s personal timeline.

Pick unusual sentences that seem almost innocuous. A string of words that is both unique and unnoticed at the same time. “I snapped my computer lid shut and took a drink” is a safe bet, “”But I’ve never been to Tallahasee!” Gladys shrieked.”

2) Search with Copyscape.com.

I was playing around with Copyscape for a couple of days, and quickly hit my free searches per month limit. They only charge $.05 per search on the Pro plan, so it may be a good purchase if you’re especially worried about being ripped off. It searches all content on a whole web page, rather than unique phrases, and it looks for any matching or near-matching phrases, not just ones you specify.

You can also drop in blocks of text to search for, which is useful if you work with freelance writers or teach high school and college classes.

The same company also has CopySentry.com, which will do regular searches on pages you’ve already written. It does a regularly scheduled search for any possible matches, and emails you the results.

3) Put a copyright statement with your name on every piece

Admittedly, this is like putting a sign on your window that says “please do not steal my TV,” but this may have the desired effect on one or two people. It also gives you a leg to stand on if you ever have to defend it legally. After all, the thief had to remove the copyright statement in order to publish it, so they can’t argue “It was like that when I found it.”

Two caveats about plagiarism

1) It’s not plagiarism if your name is still on it. If you find someone has lifted your stuff and left your name intact, that may be a copyright violation, but it’s not plagiarism. You’re still getting credit for your work.
2) You can’t steal an idea. Someone else may have — and probably has had — an idea on whatever it is you wrote about. If you’re talking about “five ways to rock your next presentation,” it’s been done. If you’re writing about “paintings you must see before you die,” it’s been done. In fact, any idea you had has already been done. Unless you invented something that has never been done before, you’re going to have a tough time proving that you had your idea first. If this is the case, speak to an Intellectual Property attorney.

Once you’ve found out your stuff has been lifted, your first instinct may be to go on the warpath and hammer the thief like the fist of an angry god. Hold that thought. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about what steps to take if you find you have had your stuff stolen. (Preview: It’s not to immediately confront the thief. There’s some work involved.)

Photo credit: jamesmorton (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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