The Stupidity of Lashing Out

You feel an editor treated you roughly. A review of your novel angered you. A "competitor" gets some notice by a market that seems indifferent to your work. What do you do? If you're like novelist Alice Hoffman, you lash out publicly, in this case on Twitter. And if you do, unless you have a sizeable and unreasonably loyal following, you're burying yourself.

In Hoffman's case, she took particular offense at a Boston Globe reviewer's view of her latest book:

In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

There was only a story in the New York Times because the subject was high enough profile. But it doesn't take such a strong media lens to inadvertently damage yourself. I've seen writers go on at length about idiot editors, unappreciative clients, uncooperative sources, and all manners of other things on various forums.

Guess what? Also on those forums are editors and people in a position to recommend you, or not, for work. This is about the worst type of PR you can create for yourself, so why do it? If something is bugging you, complain to a close colleague or two. But even then, remember that conversations can be repeated, often inaccurately, and emails can be passed on. Better to forge ahead on a new project, close a sail, send an invoice, or do something else productive.

Developing a Nose for Honesty

Warning, there be moralizing here.

Earlier today, I wrote for BNET Media an article titled, Why Is the Press So Freakin' Credulous and Dumb? In it I mention a story about the magazine Paris Match being thoroughly hoaxed by two students who staged a photo essay on student poverty just to show how unquestioning the mainstream press is.

“We pushed the clichés to the limit. We thought the whole thing was so hackneyed that it could never win … We wanted to call into question the inner-workings of the attitude of the kind of media which portrays human distress with complacency and voyeurism,” they said.

I also relate a story debunking that I did last year. (Some regular readers may remember it - an article claiming that Thomas Edison had a rival murdered.)

My point was and is that too many writers and editors are so hungry for a "good" story that they're willing to buy into anything. And that is true. Those wanting to avoid being hoaxed might like to review my 16 tips on verifying information. But there is something even more serious at stake. No technique can help if you are essentially determined to get ahead no matter what the cost. Even when you know better, you will make the wrong choice. Look at Bernie Madoff. A friend said to me earlier today, "He could have invested in savings bonds and still done better." And he knew it, only he was too driven by his desire and by his fear of consequences.

Sometimes writers considering some course of action wonder if they are crossing an ethical bound. The most important rule of thumb, far above the 16 aforementioned tips, is that if you find yourself asking whether you're doing something questionable, chances are that the answer is yes. It could be slightly changing someone's sentence to claim as your own, making up something in a story, poaching another writer's ideas or sources, or even giving a glowing review to a book you've never read. Such actions eat away at the soul and are often eventually uncovered, much to the embarrassment of the perpetrator. The ethical path may sometimes not be as financially rewarding, but you do get the benefit of being able to sleep at night and confront your visage in the mirror the next morning. And, similarly, you have to begin trusting your own nose. When someone has the aroma of the ethically challenged, trust your own reaction. At worse you're unnecessarily on guard. At best, you avoid stepping into a mud bath.

"Free" Author Using Wikipedia Without Attribution [UPDATE]

In a story that restores your post Postmodernist faith in irony, Wired editor Chris Anderson, one of the supporters of giving away chunks of content free and then making money selling a small group of people something else, extensively used Wikimedia as a source in his book "Free" without attribution.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Anyway, what's the big deal? After all, information wants to be free, right? Oh, and you can buy Anderson's book in many places. The list price is $26.99. Can we get a discount for the stuff he, uh, appropriated?

[UPDATE: Ah, but wait, there's more. Much more. Plus a side case of someone accusing The View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck of plagiarizing.]

New Journalism Models and Spot.Us Public Funding

There's a recording of an interesting discussion, including my BNET colleague David Weir, about new business models for journalism. Another participant was someone from Spot.Us, a site at which the public can suggest stories and journlaists can seek community funding for reporting projects. It's an intriguing approach. A reporter can pitch a story and see whether people will pay money to see it. If you, the writer, get the funding and do the story to eventually place it somewhere, you pay back the money you were fronted and the contributors get a refund. If you can't sell the story, it becomes something available under a Creative Commons license, making it open for distribution. Looking at the site, I noticed one story about sustainable school lunches for which the site had raised $120 out of a target $380. Another story had raised $920 out of $1000. This is a site that is definitely worth checking.

Contract Review: Cyberhomes

Someone sent a copy of a Cyberhomes.com contract to me for review. As always, remember that I'm not a lawyer and that this isn't legal advice. Also, please remember that contracts change, so if you're looking back at this from some future date, it might not completely apply. Also, I'm only mentioning the clauses that I think either raise questions or might need explanation.

• 1. Engagement of Services - This is a contract for ongoing work over a one year period, so if you sign, don't think that you'll be negotiating better terms on a second piece.


• 2. Compensation - It's payment on acceptance, which later in the contract appears to need to come in writing, either email or mail. So you'd need to be sure you get an editor to explicitly say this. Only then can you invoice. Payment is 45 days after invoice.


• Grant of Rights - Clause 3.1 states that they get "the worldwide, non-transferable, perpetual right and license to publish, display and distribute any Works (in full or any portion thereof) submitted by Contractor under this Agreement in all forms of media (including, but not limited to, all electronic media, whether now known or hereafter created and whether owned and operated by Client or not)." But notice that it does not say exclusive rights. I read this as saying that it's implicitly non-exclusive. Also, you see that they include the ability to let others "display on third party websites and third party printed publications." So they can either resell your work or even let others use it without pay, whether on the web or in print. That means you can't offer any sort of exclusive rights licensing to any other client of the same material. They can also use the material as promotion for the site, using your name, bio, and image "provided such promotional materials present Contractor in a fair and professional manner." I'm wondering if they could portray you as a "site writer," creating more of a sense of affiliation than there may be.
  
  They have the right to edit your work - a pretty normal thing, except that it opens a back door to paying even later. "In such cases, payment will not be processed until such revisions have been submitted by Contractor and approved by Client." So, even though it says pay 45 days after you invoice and you can invoice after you have something that's approved, it's essentially not approved if there are edits, and who knows how long those could take to get to you?
  
  Finally, for this clause at least, they acknowledge that you own all other rights - of course, because you didn't sign them away - but they want you to credit Cyberhomes.com any time someone else reuses the work. This has become an often-seen practice that is ridiculous. What if the other publication doesn't want to do it. If you can't get this struck, which is by far the better thing to do, because you shouldn't have such conditions on your own intellectual property, then add that you will use "best efforts" to include it. That way, if another client says no, you haven't lost the sale.


• 4. Representations and Warranties; Indemnification - The warranties section is actually one of the most reasonably constructed that I've seen, and I don't think you'd need to change a word. There is a problem in the indemnification: "arising in whole or in part from any breach of Contractor’s representations or warranties hereunder." If a problem comes only in part from a breach of the warranties, why should the writer take on all of the financial burden? So strike "or in part".


• 5. Independent Contractor Relationship - It's fine to say that you are responsible for your own taxes, but not to make the time table on which you file taxes part of this contractual arrangement. What if there was some form you forgot to file? (It takes federal, state, and local into account.) So scratch that part.


• 6. Confidential Information - I'd want the following language stricken: "Breach of any of such obligations under this section will result in irreparable and continuing damage to Client for which there will be no adequate remedy at law; and, in the event of such breach, Client will be entitled to injunctive relief and/or a decree for specific performance, and such other and further relief as may be proper (including monetary damages if appropriate)." You don't want someone to have the automatic ability to get an injunction, as this is a pretty extraordinary type of remedy. Let them convince a judge.


• 10. Governing Law - For a long time I've advised against wording that allows automatic recovery of legal fees for the prevailing party of a legal dispute. Some recent experience on my part and discussion with a lawyer now has me thinking quite the opposite. It's far more likely that you'll be the one suing, and so you want to make sure that you get your costs covered. However, there is the danger that if you brought an action and lost, you'd then be liable for their costs.


• Exhibit A - Under the "Deadlines and Submissions" section is a requirement to provide source contact info with an article. That would be fine, except they say they'll keep it in a database of source contact info and make it available to anyone they have writing for them. So, if you value your source relationships and arne't interested in making them available for potentially multiple contacts from the publication that might get annoying, you might think twice about doing anything for this site.

Author Reveals Kindle Book Sales

People have been wondering about actual sales of e-books on the Kindle. JA Konrath was kind enough to do this in significant detail. A few things jump out:

• His publisher released a couple of novels. One was at $1.99 each and sold over 10,000 copies in a month. But publishers get 35% of the sale, which would be around $7000. So you can figure that the author's take would be between roughly $700 and $1000. Another title was listed for free. As Konrath is releasing some out-of-print books at very low prices to encourage more readers and is focusing on copies moved, not profit, it sounds as though the publisher did the same.


• The publisher actually promoted the books on Amazon, which means that the net for it is likely next to nothing, reinforcing the "get audience members" view.


• As previously mentioned, Konrath is selling some of his out-of-print titles, earning $2781.35 in just over two months.


• From the little price testing that he's done, at least on the low end there doesn't seem to be a lot of sensitivity, and I get the sense that charing a few dollars per title might work.


• With the way things work, for self-sold work, authors set the price and Amazon pays 35% of that, and then might further discount. So raising the price increases your take per copy, and even then Amazon might sell at a lower price to move more units. Effectively, you end up getting a bigger chunk of what the company actually takes in.


• Genre seems to trump the strength of the work's listed description, which to me makes sense. To specify genre is to effectively describe the size of the potential audience. Even a killer description of a book of poetry is going to be limited to attracting people who would buy poetry.


• Some authors who have never traditionally published are doing as well or better than Konrath, who has had seven book in print.


• Publisher releases "vastly" outsell author releases, because the publisher can get better placement from Amazon.


• Being active in the Kindle and Amazon social network features and in newsletters seems to be important to success.

If you're a book author, don't depend on this summary and do read his blog entry, becuase there are other things to learn from it.

Round-Up of Google Book Settlement Criticism

The Department of Justice is showing increasing interest in the settlement between Google, book publishers, and the Authors Guild. And the way debate is shaping up in the publishing community, what had seemed a PR stroke of genius for Google — make use of copyrighted material, wait to get sued, settle, and seem like a hero — seems more likely to turn into an expensive and messy public black eye.

At BNET Media, I have a short summary of the issues.

Brant Pubs Under Fire For "Not Paying Anybody"

Brant Publications, which produces such titles as Interview and Art in America, has been the brunt of some major criticism by people who’ve claimed that they weren’t getting paid. Now there is corroboration from Glenn O’Brien, who, up until recently, was the company’s editorial director.

Here's the link.

Questions to Ask Helium to Avoid Hot Air

Michelle Rafter's blog had a couple of guest posts about content aggregator Helium. Tim Beyers warned writers off writing for Helium and Helium new member outreach manager Barbara Whitlock said that writers should.

Being the sometimes practical and often cranky man that I am, I just want to know about the money. Helium announced that it had paid writers more than $1 million since its inception, and half of that in the last six months. That may sound attractive, but the real question is something I like to remember by the clumsy acronym HMWEM, or How Much Will Erik Make?

You see, when it comes to connecting writing and making money, I'm not interested in a good story. I want to see numbers on the page. Looking a bit further into Helium's press release on its million dollar mark, we see the following:

• Since 2006, writers have posted 1.25 million articles on 125,000 topics.


• Over 1,000 writers have earned more than $100 from their work for Helium.


• "Top earners" have made more then $5,000 "in a matter of months."

Let's do the math:

1. The average story will make 80 cents.


2. There's no indication I can find about how many "top earners" they have. But according to one mention on helium, there was one person who made $5,000 in six months. He averaged an hour a day, according to the release. That's 30 hours a month for six months, or 180 hours. So, he managed $27.78 an hour in revenue. But apparently there is no other big earner mentioned. Could he be the only one? Also, how many articles did he have to write?
   
3. On a "bulk sale" of content, some writers got $5. When you read this in context, it makes it sound like $5 was the high end.


4. According to the site's press page, there are more than 100,000 writers on the site. So, at the tops mathematically, it's an average of $10 per person.

I understand that Ms. Whitlock wrote, "Helium isn’t a substitute for a full-time job, but it can be combined with other freelance gigs to provide additional revenue. Plus, the freedom to also write what you want is appealing for many." But when put to the HMWEM test, the answer still sounds like nowhere near enough to justify the effort.

Aftermarket Journalism

I posted something on BNET that I thought readers of this blog might find interesting:

I’ve heard many people insist that the future of traditional news media is to work with aggregators like Google, because they represent a new model of delivering the news. Recently, I noticed a blog post by Jeff Jarvis, which was about the auto industry. Although it may seem off-topic on first thought, it actually isn’t, and the flaws in his argument about cars explain the underlying problem with the “embrace Google” argument.

Rest of the article

NPR's Totenberg Drops Quasi Q-Bomb

I was surprised when I heard this over the weekend, so ended up writing about it on BNET Media:

There was great linguistic irony on the most recent NPR Weekend Edition Saturday. In an interview with host Scott Simon, legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg said that racism charges leveled at Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor over a remark about white male judges would not “queer” the nomination. In discussing a question of whether attitudes are biased, Totenberg used one of the more emotionally loaded words in the English language.

Here's the link to the piece.

Testing a Free Web Plagiarism Finder

I'm guessing that the combination of "plagiarism finder" and "free" will light up the eyes of many who read this blog. I just learned of a new service called Plagium. Using Yahoo search, it can take a string of text longer than will work in usual search engine front ends and look to see where on the web it might appear. I tested it with one paragraph from an article I had written for a magazine. Plagium turned up copies not only at the company's web site, but at Entrepreneur.com and Allbusiness.com. (Apparently the magazine sold the piece to Gale Group - yes, folks, the problem with magazines selling without permission to the database companies has not gone away, even if that long-standing class action effectively appears to have. Make sure you're registering your copyrights.)

I ran part of the paragraph through Google, which found only the Entrepreneur.com appearnance, and not the one at Allbusiness.com, so even in that one short experiement, Plagium appears to be the better choice.

At first I didn't enter the entire article, but just the one paragraph, thinking that looking for too great a section might identify potential copyright theft more easily than a long block of material, as someone might not have used the entire piece. But then, what if someone dropped the one graph I searched for? So I had Plagium search on all the text, which turned up the same instances.

So I tried something a bit trickier. When a piece I did on Wi-Fi hacking for the New York Times Magazine first came out, a good number of people posted it on various discussion sites, though I didn't know where it might appear any more. So I tried entering the submitted draft, and not the final copy-edited version. The only hits were - at the New York Times. So, Plagium will pick up examples that are close, but not exact.

Then I entered the exact text that the NYTM ran. Suddenly I had more hits, though the added ones were generally a few paragraphs with a link. If you prefer, you can choose to provide a URL for your article's location, rather than copying over the text. I think the latter makes most sense, because you reduce the number of false positives from other things that might be on the page.

Your search generates a graph in which potential infringements are bubbles on a timeline; the larger the bubble, the more likely that it is a copy. If you register with the site, you can have it look for new instances of the article over time, which suggests a smart set of steps:

1. Write and submit the article.


2. Finish edits.


3. Register the copyright.


4. Put the article into Plagium.


5. Find the uses of the article as they happen.

Clearly this can't be your only tool, but it seems like a good one and, at least for now, is free. (Though there is a Donate button, which might be wise to actually use.)

If you're interested, here's a comparison that the site PlagiarismToday (I can't get over that name) ran between Plagium, a paid infringement service called Copyscape, and Google itself. In this case, Google seemed to do far and away better, but the author says that there seemed to be a lot of duplication.