Two more weeks without a post. Yikes. Blogging may not be my thing.
Despite my still serious complaints about Yahoo and the economics thereof, I saw a relatively easy assignment and snapped it up. Write 350 words about your favorite novel, they asked, so here it is: My thoughts on American Gods.
In truth that was more about getting back into the habit of writing than any great expectations about its success. A glance at my stats shows that my review of the new Randhurst AMC is still my most popular article, despite the cross-linking I did with the Western Battlefield Summery article.
On the other hand, my stab at "current" content in the form of my First Impressions: Age of Empires Online Beta only scored two measly hits, and no one at all has read my review of Murder for Two.
I mean, I know musical theater ain't exactly front page news unless it's Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, but Murder for Two really was a funny little show. No one? Really?
Very depressing.
In other news, there are job openings at The Escapist and Rock, Paper, Shotgun that I'm trying to fill. I don't have high hopes, since the jobs were posted on the front pages of popular websites and will likely be flooded with entries, but I'm doing my bit regardless.
Wish me (lots and lots of) luck.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part XIII
Yep, still a bad blogger. Sorry about that.
I did manage to put together a guide page to my Western Civil War series. It seems that the Yahoo pay scale is by length, because the guide is the longest thing I've written for them, and they paid me $3 up front, rather than the usual $2. So that's something.
But not enough.
At this point, I've made around $26 writing for Yahoo, which has all been from upfront bonuses. I've achieved 850 or so clicks, so I may eventually make it to my first 1,000, at which point Yahoo will generously give me...another $1.50.
So yeah, the Yahoo thing isn't working out. But hey, I did complete the Western Civil War series, so that's something at least.
The big question is, of course, what next?
It might be time to start getting serious about writing a novel. Let's see if we can make that happen.
(Yeah, I know, doomed. But what do I have to lose at this point? And when will I have a better chance?)
I did manage to put together a guide page to my Western Civil War series. It seems that the Yahoo pay scale is by length, because the guide is the longest thing I've written for them, and they paid me $3 up front, rather than the usual $2. So that's something.
But not enough.
At this point, I've made around $26 writing for Yahoo, which has all been from upfront bonuses. I've achieved 850 or so clicks, so I may eventually make it to my first 1,000, at which point Yahoo will generously give me...another $1.50.
So yeah, the Yahoo thing isn't working out. But hey, I did complete the Western Civil War series, so that's something at least.
The big question is, of course, what next?
It might be time to start getting serious about writing a novel. Let's see if we can make that happen.
(Yeah, I know, doomed. But what do I have to lose at this point? And when will I have a better chance?)
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part XII
Wow, two weeks since I've blogged about my writing and a month since I've said anything over at After Hours. I'm a bad blogger.
To be fair, I've been busy, but over all, it's not been a great couple of weeks in the writing realm. I spent a week working on a project only to have the hard drive on my desktop die the final death and take a week's work with it. I've spent the last week and a half trying to recover from that, but it's slow and painful going.
Today's lesson? Backups!
In other news, the next two articles in my Civil War series are up, Chikamauga and Shiloh. You may recall that I had two articles rejected for re-editing. These were the ones. Back when I talked about it a couple of weeks ago, I said that I'd be a good little writer and do what I was told.
Yeah, well, screw that.
The complaint that got them kicked back to me was that they "needed sourcing." Even though those had been the fifth and sixth articles I'd submitted in the series and the first four had sailed through without a source to be seen....and that five more had been published after that hadn't needed it either, I resolved to "give the client what he wants." So I spent a bunch of time to add links to everything that could possibly be a source to the Chikamauga article and re-submitted it.
A week later it was rejected. You want to know why? "Too many long links."
I swallowed my curses, deleted all the sourcing I had done and then resubmitted it exactly as it had been the first time, along with the Shiloh article, which I'd never gotten around to fixing in the first place. And guess what happened?
(Well, since links to the published articles are in this very post, I suppose you don't really need to guess, do you?)
In short, the Yahoo editing process is terrible. The comments they make when they review your stuff are so ambiguous as to be worse than worthless, and when you try to follow them anyway, a different editor bashes you for the changes. There are apparently so many editors out there who don't communicate with one another that there's no fixed standard for submissions at all. Ergo, the only sane strategy is to write what you like and then keep submitting it until you get accepted. It's a cynical procedure, I grant you, but no less cynical than Yahoo itself setting up a no-win scenario for writers trying to do as they're asked to do, is it?
To be fair, I've been busy, but over all, it's not been a great couple of weeks in the writing realm. I spent a week working on a project only to have the hard drive on my desktop die the final death and take a week's work with it. I've spent the last week and a half trying to recover from that, but it's slow and painful going.
Today's lesson? Backups!
In other news, the next two articles in my Civil War series are up, Chikamauga and Shiloh. You may recall that I had two articles rejected for re-editing. These were the ones. Back when I talked about it a couple of weeks ago, I said that I'd be a good little writer and do what I was told.
Yeah, well, screw that.
The complaint that got them kicked back to me was that they "needed sourcing." Even though those had been the fifth and sixth articles I'd submitted in the series and the first four had sailed through without a source to be seen....and that five more had been published after that hadn't needed it either, I resolved to "give the client what he wants." So I spent a bunch of time to add links to everything that could possibly be a source to the Chikamauga article and re-submitted it.
A week later it was rejected. You want to know why? "Too many long links."
I swallowed my curses, deleted all the sourcing I had done and then resubmitted it exactly as it had been the first time, along with the Shiloh article, which I'd never gotten around to fixing in the first place. And guess what happened?
(Well, since links to the published articles are in this very post, I suppose you don't really need to guess, do you?)
In short, the Yahoo editing process is terrible. The comments they make when they review your stuff are so ambiguous as to be worse than worthless, and when you try to follow them anyway, a different editor bashes you for the changes. There are apparently so many editors out there who don't communicate with one another that there's no fixed standard for submissions at all. Ergo, the only sane strategy is to write what you like and then keep submitting it until you get accepted. It's a cynical procedure, I grant you, but no less cynical than Yahoo itself setting up a no-win scenario for writers trying to do as they're asked to do, is it?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part XI
So, I got my first couple of rejections from Yahoo. To be precise, they turned down two of my Civil War articles saying that I need to cite my sources. Which is odd, because they didn't ask for that on the first four articles in the series...and they didn't ask for that in four more they published in the same series that had been submitted after the two that got refused!
Puzzling, to say the least.
I can only hypothesize that Yahoo has a ton of different editors, and that the two articles that I submitted on the 20th that got rejected went to one who's more of a stickler for the rules than the one who got the four I submitted on the 23rd.
Nevertheless, one of the rules for being a good writer is "Give the client what they want." So, tempting as it might be to revise one and re-submit the other unamended to see what happens, I shall swallow both pride and curiosity both and do as I am bid. That's the job.
In other news, as I mentioned, I have a bunch of new articles up. Starting off with four new Civil War articles here:
Tupelo
Stones River
Kennesaw Mountain
Brice's Crossroads
What's interesting about these is that they're the first battlefields in the series, well except for Fort Donelson which was the last stop on my trip last March, that I haven't actually visited. I'm basically just summarizing what I know about the battles, backed up by Shelby Foote and Wikipedia, and pulling relevant travel details from National Parks sites.
Why yes, I do feel like a contributing member of society, why do you ask?
The thing of it is, most people interested in going to these battlefields are almost certainly ending up somewhere else other than Yahoo for that information. But if Yahoo is willing to pay me to mold that content into a few hundred words on their site, who am I to argue? I'm not copy and pasting, and you'd have to go to two separate sites to get both the history of the battle and the travel information, so the pages I'm writing are more efficient, if nothing else.
Finally, I also have a review up of Murder for Two, a cute hour and a half long musical about a murder with fifteen characters and only two cast members.
Yes, I actually went and saw it, just over a week ago, in fact.
You can give it a glance here.
Puzzling, to say the least.
I can only hypothesize that Yahoo has a ton of different editors, and that the two articles that I submitted on the 20th that got rejected went to one who's more of a stickler for the rules than the one who got the four I submitted on the 23rd.
Nevertheless, one of the rules for being a good writer is "Give the client what they want." So, tempting as it might be to revise one and re-submit the other unamended to see what happens, I shall swallow both pride and curiosity both and do as I am bid. That's the job.
In other news, as I mentioned, I have a bunch of new articles up. Starting off with four new Civil War articles here:
Tupelo
Stones River
Kennesaw Mountain
Brice's Crossroads
What's interesting about these is that they're the first battlefields in the series, well except for Fort Donelson which was the last stop on my trip last March, that I haven't actually visited. I'm basically just summarizing what I know about the battles, backed up by Shelby Foote and Wikipedia, and pulling relevant travel details from National Parks sites.
Why yes, I do feel like a contributing member of society, why do you ask?
The thing of it is, most people interested in going to these battlefields are almost certainly ending up somewhere else other than Yahoo for that information. But if Yahoo is willing to pay me to mold that content into a few hundred words on their site, who am I to argue? I'm not copy and pasting, and you'd have to go to two separate sites to get both the history of the battle and the travel information, so the pages I'm writing are more efficient, if nothing else.
Finally, I also have a review up of Murder for Two, a cute hour and a half long musical about a murder with fifteen characters and only two cast members.
Yes, I actually went and saw it, just over a week ago, in fact.
You can give it a glance here.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part X
So a couple of days ago, I had two more articles posted by Yahoo. They were more of my Civil War series, talking about the Battle of Pea Ridge, and the Siege of Vicksburg. The thing of it is, they actually got posted on Saturday the 21st, while I didn't Tweet or Facebook about them until Monday the 23rd. In the interim, I let them both go unannounced over the weekend to see what happens. Also, I figured I'd get a bigger bump by mentioning them on a Monday, instead of a Saturday.
And a funny thing happened. The Pea Ridge article did nothing at all. Indeed, it only got 6 hits in total on Monday when it got a little publicity from me, and nothing since. The Vicksburg piece, on the other hand, has been averaging 9 hits a day, with or without my pumping it up. Vicksburg, of course, was a crucial battle in the Civil War, and is much more likely to be known by people than the relatively small battle that was Pea Ridge, so those numbers make a certain amount of sense.
So, once I saw how those numbers were going, I did the obvious. I wrote up a similar article on Gettysburg, as a start to be "Travelleing the EASTERN Battlefields" series. If a moderately well known battle can draw in much better hits/day than anything else I've done, how about the most famous battle of the war?
I also finished off the Western Battlefields set, so I've got nine Civil War articles in the queue awaiting approval. A couple of those, like Chikamauga and Shiloh are of big and reasonably well known battles. Others, like Stones River and Brice's Crossroads, not so much. But I am very interested to know how well they'll all do, and whether the success of Vicksburg is an aberration, or if the bigger battles lead to more hits.
And, just to keep things fresh, I've also got a review of a little play I saw on Friday and some commentary about last night's Bulls game. This last one could go either way. Its a time sensetive piece, in that it won't make any sense if it goes up after the Bulls play Game 5 on Thursday. But if they do accept it quickly, it may be able to get me a ton of hits quickly.
We'll see.
And a funny thing happened. The Pea Ridge article did nothing at all. Indeed, it only got 6 hits in total on Monday when it got a little publicity from me, and nothing since. The Vicksburg piece, on the other hand, has been averaging 9 hits a day, with or without my pumping it up. Vicksburg, of course, was a crucial battle in the Civil War, and is much more likely to be known by people than the relatively small battle that was Pea Ridge, so those numbers make a certain amount of sense.
So, once I saw how those numbers were going, I did the obvious. I wrote up a similar article on Gettysburg, as a start to be "Travelleing the EASTERN Battlefields" series. If a moderately well known battle can draw in much better hits/day than anything else I've done, how about the most famous battle of the war?
I also finished off the Western Battlefields set, so I've got nine Civil War articles in the queue awaiting approval. A couple of those, like Chikamauga and Shiloh are of big and reasonably well known battles. Others, like Stones River and Brice's Crossroads, not so much. But I am very interested to know how well they'll all do, and whether the success of Vicksburg is an aberration, or if the bigger battles lead to more hits.
And, just to keep things fresh, I've also got a review of a little play I saw on Friday and some commentary about last night's Bulls game. This last one could go either way. Its a time sensetive piece, in that it won't make any sense if it goes up after the Bulls play Game 5 on Thursday. But if they do accept it quickly, it may be able to get me a ton of hits quickly.
We'll see.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part IX
So, after three weeks in the system, here are some numbers.
Here's Louie 22 days, 37 views
Visting Civil War Battlefields: Wilson's Creek 21 days, 70 views
Kings, Queens, and Generals: A Summer 2011 Reading List 21 days, 34 views
AMC Randhurst 12: A Theater in the Digital Age 16 days, 98 views
Lord of Ultima: A Copy of a Copy 10 days, 37 views
As we can see, certain trends are at work here. For one thing, the two assignment pieces I did, "Here's Louie" and "Kings, Queens, and Generals," are the least efficient ones I've done. I'd expected that assignments would get some play somewhere on the Yahoo network, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Apparently assignments are only good if you can't think of something else to write. What's worse, both of these, especially Here's Louie, have almost all their views in the first couple of days, that is through views generated by my mentioning them here, on Facebook, and on Twitter. There's virtually no hits after that first bump, so these are pretty much entirely self-promoted.
Ergo, assignments are a bad deal.
I'll admit, I expected the Lord of Ultima piece to do better. I know I search for reviews before playing random internet games, but traffic on this one is pretty much flat too. Technically, the reading list is getting more play. So Yahoo is right...video game reviews, even of a game for which I couldn't find any other reviews, don't do well.
Where they're wrong, though, is in the popularity of the movie theater review. As you can see, its outpacing everything else in both a per day hits and in overall. Yahoo wouldn't give me the upfront payment on this one, but it's still doing pretty well.
Despite the theater review's comparative success, I've spent all week pumping out six more Battlefield articles like my Wilson's Creek one. Why? Well, the thing of it is that the $2.00 I get for each one is equivalent to 1,333 views straight up. So regardless of the fact that the Randhurst piece is nominally more efficient, if I can keep scoring the upfronts, that's probably better overall.
Of course, it's still not much money, but it's a start.
Here's Louie 22 days, 37 views
Visting Civil War Battlefields: Wilson's Creek 21 days, 70 views
Kings, Queens, and Generals: A Summer 2011 Reading List 21 days, 34 views
AMC Randhurst 12: A Theater in the Digital Age 16 days, 98 views
Lord of Ultima: A Copy of a Copy 10 days, 37 views
As we can see, certain trends are at work here. For one thing, the two assignment pieces I did, "Here's Louie" and "Kings, Queens, and Generals," are the least efficient ones I've done. I'd expected that assignments would get some play somewhere on the Yahoo network, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Apparently assignments are only good if you can't think of something else to write. What's worse, both of these, especially Here's Louie, have almost all their views in the first couple of days, that is through views generated by my mentioning them here, on Facebook, and on Twitter. There's virtually no hits after that first bump, so these are pretty much entirely self-promoted.
Ergo, assignments are a bad deal.
I'll admit, I expected the Lord of Ultima piece to do better. I know I search for reviews before playing random internet games, but traffic on this one is pretty much flat too. Technically, the reading list is getting more play. So Yahoo is right...video game reviews, even of a game for which I couldn't find any other reviews, don't do well.
Where they're wrong, though, is in the popularity of the movie theater review. As you can see, its outpacing everything else in both a per day hits and in overall. Yahoo wouldn't give me the upfront payment on this one, but it's still doing pretty well.
Despite the theater review's comparative success, I've spent all week pumping out six more Battlefield articles like my Wilson's Creek one. Why? Well, the thing of it is that the $2.00 I get for each one is equivalent to 1,333 views straight up. So regardless of the fact that the Randhurst piece is nominally more efficient, if I can keep scoring the upfronts, that's probably better overall.
Of course, it's still not much money, but it's a start.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Working for Yahoo, Part VIII
So doing a short story for Yahoo was a terrible idea. With the deadline looming, I slapped together what I had and put it up. I'm not the slightest bit happy with it, and don't plan to link to it even though the damn thing got published immediately. Fortunately, since it was an assignment, it ended up being in the "Display Only" category, which means I can take it down or edit it whenever I like. I'll likely try and fix it through editing, but since I blew a whole week working on what turned out to be drek, that'll have to wait until I get more paying articles up.
As the deadline neared, I tried to cancel out of the assignment only to be warned that doing so near the deadline (which I most certainly was) would endanger my ability to receive other assignments. So I swallowed my pride and dumped it up. It does suggest, however, that Yahoo definitely has a Quantity over Quality point of view towards what it publishes. It doesn't matter if it sucks...just get it up there. I did cancel out of a similar Science Fiction short story assignment that had 15 days left on it. I'm not getting shoved up against a wall like that again.
However, since I have no intention of linking to the story here or anywhere else, it will make a good test case to see how many clicks something that has no author advertisement at all can garner. Right now, it has 0 clicks. I wonder if it'll get any at all?
In more positive news, the article I wrote about the slow speed RTS Lord of Ultima finally got published. Have a look at it here. I do wonder what took them so long, since I wrote it almost two weeks ago.
I also got my second article about Civil War battlefields submitted. It should be published late this week or early next week if Yahoo works as fast as it did on my first article in the series.
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