Working for Yahoo, Part I

So, after spending some time getting the other half of this blog up and ready to go, I got to work trying to find work.

To be precise, I wrote my first article for Yahoo Associated Content, and I made a pitch to The Escapist.

The latter really wasn't all that much, comprising as it did only a short email discussing what I wanted to write and what issue it was for.  I'm hopeful that it will work out, but its my first pitch, so we'll see.  Regardless, just perusing their Writer's Guidelines and making sure my email to them fit those guidelines was a pretty useful experience.  Here's hoping they like my idea.

The more complicated process was submitting an article to the YAC.  First, I had to decide on exclusive vs non-exclusive.  The former supposedly makes it more likely I'll get an up-front bonus, while the latter let's me publish it elsewhere.  Since this is a test run to see how their system works, I went with exclusive.

The second step involved choosing whether "Yahoo Partners" could also publish my article.  Well, it would have been  a choice if I hadn't picked exclusive in the first choice.  As I had, that was already picked for me.

Next, I had to decide if I wanted to try for the Up-Front bonus.  As far as I could tell, the only reason not to at least try was that it would take longer to go through the approval process.  One to two weeks for Up-Front as opposed to one week for simple Performance Based.  Since this is still a test run, it seemed best to give the Up-Front a shot.  There's slightly more money available that way, since if they accept it for Up-Front, you get paid first and still get the Performance money afterwards.

Finally, after inputting some descriptive text, we get to the text editor.  And frankly, its a bit of a pain in the ass.  For one thing, it doesn't allow the auto-correct from my browser's spell check to function.  I can see that there's a problem, but I have to fumble around trying to spell the word out myself or go look it up.  Its not a big thing, but it slows me down, and I don't see a good reason to disable that functionality.  Also, they demand proper sourcing for things, but the superscript and subscript functions in the editor are broken, if the Pre-Publication Preview is to be believed.  Finally, the image adding is both cumbersome and inaccurate, especially since they don't tell you what pixel size they accept.  They'll just let you put in whatever size picture you like, then crop it so it looks ridiculous.  I tried to add a picture I'd taken that relates to the article four times and every time it looked stupid, so eventually I just went without it. 

Mind you, I suppose the latter two problems could be with the Preview rather than the text editor, but since I can only assume that the Preview is how things are actually going to look, I had to make corrections based on what I saw.

Overall, though, the text editor didn't fill me with joy, but it was functional enough that I managed to get what I needed to done. 

So now I've got an article submitted and another proposed.  Tomorrow, I'll do more YAC work, and see what else catches my attention.