The Sun is Shining... Quick, Everyone Outside!

Photo: Chas

Because you never know how long it will last.

THE CONTENT MILL – EVIL GENIUS OF THE WRITING INDUSTRY?

I recently signed up on a content site, Copify. 

I was at a low point, where I had not been pitching or marketing and *surprise* the work wasn’t just appearing like magic. I was broke. I railed at my own carelessness and carried out an emergency marketing program to get back in business. 

Signing up on Copify didn’t take long, and I soon got a notification: "Congratulations! You are now approved as a standard level writer!" I assume this is because they didn’t have any criteria for ‘phenomenal genius’ writers. But with time and excellent feedback, I might be eligible for promotion to ‘professional’ level, so there was that. 

Content mills are a brilliant idea, but they have come under fire from many professional writers and writing industry unions. They say that being paid little more than a penny per word is an insult, undermines the profession of writing, and encourages bad grammar and the proliferation of misplaced apostrophes. I have to say, I agree. 

For the fifteen minutes I spend researching and writing a two hundred word article for Copify on the glorious benefits of rust-free garden furniture, I could send an email to two magazines suggesting a fabulous feature on how best to encourage teenagers to spend more time outdoors, or how to keep young children safe on the internet. A Copify job will pay a fairly instant £2 or so. The magazine features may eventually, if I’m lucky, pay a hundred times more. Paid blogging that I’ve sourced myself will pay better than a content mill piece, and the job itself is more flexible as what I may write. If the piece links back to my own site, I have a good reason to provide better quality posts. 

Writing is a business, and any successful writer must also be a manager. But not all writers are good managers. Not all writers are even decent writers. And sadly, the market is okay with this. If a company wants to place words on a website, they generally couldn't care less if those words are creative, inspiring or even completely factual. What they want is traffic to their website, so that when someone googles ‘my garden furniture is rusty’, they will land right on the company’s page selling rustproof chairs and tables. 

I suppose eventually someone will invent a robot that can scan the web and write a passable SEO-optimized article with apostrophes in all the right places. Google is constantly changing search algorithms to discourage this type of activity anyway. But for now, the market is open for writers who are willing to bang out uninspired paragraphs at 1p per word. I can understand why writers might be happy to work for so little: before I became a professional writer, I wrote thousands, millions of words, for free. I wrote on my own blog, I wrote for charity, I wrote for parenting websites, just for the experience and the pleasure of writing. 

If there had been a decent content mill or two available in those days, would I have stayed up all night writing about garden furniture? Maybe. I can research and write two hundred words in ten minutes. The math looks good. But I would have missed out on writing for the sake of writing, exploring my thoughts on paper. I would not have spent hours researching the business of writing. I wouldn't have taken the courses, shared inspiration with other writers, asked question after question, had comment discussions, sketched, made up stories, written them down, and pitched and pitched and been rejected and pitched again. More importantly, my own website wouldn't have grown so successful. When writing for a content site, your article is generally published without a byline. No credit, and no link back to your own site. 

The day I set up my Copify account, decent work started pouring in from my marketing efforts, so I haven’t had to resort to content mill writing. Hopefully I never will. But I’ll keep the account open, as a reminder that if I don’t keep pitching, that’s where I’ll end up.

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Wonderful Things in Pockets

It's been so long since we had the sober journalistic experience of what's been found in pockets, around here. But I just HAD to say, I found a pair of earrings in a pocket this week! I thought I'd lost them forever.

Things I've Found in Pockets:

• Tiny gold earrings, a pair!
• Sand
• Rocks
• Washed lists, hopefully not important
• Washed school notes, also hopefully not important
• £10, but it was claimed by the owner of the trousers it was in.

Go on, tell us what you've found in pockets lately!

Mother's Day: NOT for burning the house down or trips to A+E

I was browning sugar to create a delicious feast for my perfect children, when there was a thump and a screech of pain. Of course, I dropped everything and ran towards the sound of my wounded child. Five minutes later, Max was explaining just how much he could bend his fingers and that the pain was excruciating, and how it was ALL SAM'S FAULT, and smoke was billowing out of the kitchen in caustic black asphyxiating clouds. Sounds like a Mother's Day that sums it all up!

I am pleased to say that every smoke alarm in the house is in excellent, earsplittingly clamorous working order. My pot may never be the same though, or the spoon, and there is a lingering sooty smell.

How we survive from day to day around here, I just don't know.

I had quite a nice mother's day morning, previous to the aforementioned traumas. The kids slept in like good adolescents, except for Chas, who was out hiking across Dartmoor with a group of special needs kids. It was peaceful. I got into a writing groove, where my right brain stuck its tongue out at my left brain and danced naked across the keys. I should have known it was too good to last!

I hope you had a lovely mother's day. I hope you got flowers, sat on the toilet all by yourself, ate with two hands, and got hugged and 'I love you'-ed by sweet, sticky little people. They grow up so fast! When they do grow up, they are useful for rushing into smoke filled rooms, opening windows, turning on fans, turning off alarms, and alerting the neighbours that we are ok and don't need the fire brigade despite the smoke billowing from our home. And then bringing ice and comfort to their little brother. Motherhood: It's not boring, that's for sure.

Boring Update!

Photo: Kelly Warren Fitzjames, Brasso Seco

Greetings, denizens of the internet! I haven't posted anything in weeks, which is so bad. BAD BLOGGER! Apparently my marketing strategy is "Disappear." I have excuses though. My son Max has returned from a month in Trinidad, so we have been catching up. Max prowled the rainforest with cousins and friends, climbed waterfalls and jumped off into pools, found a snake skin, was hooted at by an owl that flew in when he and his friend Khalil were up in the wee hours of the morning, saw baby hummingbirds, put his hand on a gru gru tree (some bits of thorns can still be seen embedded in the palm of his hand), and generally had an amazing time.

My Mum returned with Max, so Mum and I have been catching up as well. SO good to have her here. And the weather has been sunny, so every day we've been out appreciating it.

Max has been pushing all the limits. A month with few rules, no school, and being adored and spoiled by all is very cool. Coming back to the routine, two pesky big brothers, early bedtimes and SATs exams next week has been trying, as I am sure you can appreciate.

While I was busy disappearing, my post 'Third World Stupidity' became very popular and got 4,000 views last weekend. There were lots of comments about how sad it is. People don't seem to realise that none of the things I spoke about are just sad accidents. Fires are lit. Rubbish is dumped. Animals are killed. I tried to reply to as many as I could. I also got a few emails and comments about how if I were really a Trini, I would understand... Or, I should really visit Trinidad and Tobago some day. Haha. Am I a real Trini? Am I 'English'? Do I even belong on this planet?

I'm working on some great projects these days. I have four exciting things to work on - not counting the part time day job, which continues to pay several bills and prevents me from wearing yoga pants every day, which is probably a good thing. I like to have a few projects going. My creative process sometimes grinds to a halt, and I find I can just walk away from the job for a few hours and work on the next thing. When I look at it again with fresh eyes I can see what needs to be done and carry on from there.

Gratuitous Cat Pic

And on that note, I will make another cup of tea and get back to work on two of the said projects... One due 'yesterday' and one due on Wednesday. 'Yesterday' always worries me slightly. I'm one of those people who uses excel to make a spreadsheet of when things are due and I'm generally always on time. 'Yesterday', I don't have a column for. So It gets left out until 'Whenever'. Which is probably not what the person requesting the job intended!


"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams