Yes, that's it exactly, Judith. I'll admit that this accidental discovery was momentarily disconcerting, but the silent editing only occurred in a handful of early articles that evidently had received merely cursory reviews before being approved, and the changes made genuine sense. I went over those articles line by line to winkle out the differences, and aside from one or two stylistic differences over I might have quibbled, the changes clarified and strengthened my original wording.
Since those very few articles met with the invisible but kindly Hand of Correction™, I've seen no follow-up editing of my approved work. Of course, it's early days yet with my extremely limited portfolio at Constant Content, but it is to be hoped that my style of writing has settled by now into the groove that evidently sells the best. My style admittedly had before then wobbled between off-puttingly erudite and Hemingwayish, the latter of which is best exemplified by the results of acceding to the demands of the notorious Hemingway App website.
In any case, I've been carefully studying the factors that appear to make the difference between pieces languishing in the catalog for years or leaping into customers' hands as they feast their eyes on the glory. In general, it seems that the strongest success rates greet authors who allow 100-percent summaries of their articles; who exhibit a clear, straightforward style of writing or perhaps even a lively style that caresses your senses; who ask no more than $0.10 a word and preferably around $0.08 a word; who employ click-bait titles such as "Five Ways to Make Your Cat Love You" or "Ten Top Hazards of Taunting Zoo Animals;" who focus on popular topics such as travel, real estate, and home improvement; who break up their text into easily digestible chunks under catchy subheaders; and who write absolutely tons of articles. I imagine that none of these characteristics will prove surprising to longtime authors here.
Mind you, there are obvious exceptions. I see at least one author who makes a killing with higher prices for technically oriented articles written with a strong, clear style, and I see several authors who overcome their more pedestrian styles with sheer volume and experience. If pressed to offer useful conclusions from my tentative analysis, I'd say first that leaving the long summary at its default setting of 33 percent is a sure-fire sales killer with perhaps 80 percent being a better choice for those who shy away from the potential risks of setting it to 100 percent. Second, a pedestrian writing style of writing doesn't hurt as much as you might think as long as the information is useful, but an annoyingly wordy style does indeed seriously hurt sales. Brevity and clarity are golden. Third, weak to soft prices also seem to jolt sales upward, but one wonders whether steep discounting works better or worse than putting a serious effort into learning to write with a superior style that makes readers sit up and pay attention. Fourth, buyers appear to exhibit a distinct preference for medium-length articles that fall into the sweet zone of pricing, which I think ranges from $40 to $50.
Finally, good titles are helpful although I'm not yet certain
how helpful. I do suspect that clickbait titles are considerably more likely to catch the eye of a potential buyer, which eventuality then exposes that buyer to the actual text that determines a buying decision. Needless to say, my seat-of-the-pants observations require confirmation and should be taken with a large grain of salt.
P.S. I just added to my research notes an active author with a limited but growing article count who apparently has been highly successful with weak to soft prices for full rights and what appears to be the default 33-percent setting for long summaries. The writing style is what I'll politely call "pedestrian," but it's a
lively pedestrian style. I dislike the word "engaging" for good reasons, but this style likely would be called just that word by many writers and readers. I vaguely recall at least one other author in my research notes who has evidently employed that same quality to largely overcome what would normally be the handicaps of severely limited long summaries and an otherwise fairly ordinary writing style, but I'm too lazy to track down that bit.
Judith wrote:Hi Bumpy... Am I understanding you correctly? Are you saying that after articles you wrote were approved and placed in the catalog, an editor went through each article and made changes without notifying you? I can't even imagine that happening.
