Creating previews with the important stuff missing?

[MicheleH]

I noticed an article that someone posted without the so-called 'meat' of the article. The article had a few bullet lists and they removed the bullets from the preview. The paragraphs before and after the bullets appeared to be complete. Seemed like a great way to thwart the content thieves that appear to have found CC recently.

My question for the editors...How much will you allow to be removed from internal sections of an article? Would removing specific facts or figures also be acceptable, i.e. "The study found xx percent of respondents preferred chocolate ice cream to all other flavors." Does it matter as long as the preview is still at least 60% of the article?

For other writers and buyers...Do you think doing something like that would seriously limit the saleability of the article?

[Judith]

I don't like thieves, whether they are stealing my writing or my photography. That said, I will not allow a few thieves to control how I offer my work. With the exception of a very few articles, written when I first started here, I post the entire article. I believe the buyer needs to see the full article to determine its appropriateness to meet their need. That's just my opinion and I am sure others have reasons to do the opposite. I had three articles approved yesterday and two were sold by this morning and I credit the buyer being able to see the whole article as a reason for fast sales. That's my 2 cents worth!!!

[JStone]

When I first started writing for CC I used to post only half of the article in the summary/preview, then a few months ago I started posting the whole thing. I can honestly say that it made no difference to the amount of sales I made...people bought my articles whether I posted the full article in the preview or not. I would prefer customers to be able to see the full article before buying so that they know what they are getting, but after the recent spate of article thefts I'm having a rethink.

[Courtney]

I'm a relative newbie here myself. I have been posting only about 1/3 to 1/2 of the article in the preview and I've sold three articles using this method. I can't imagine how posting the whole thing would make that much of a difference in sales. Customers should realize the reasons why a writer would not want to post the whole article and have it ripped off. The short summary should give the customer an idea of exactly what sort of information is in the article so they can decide whether it includes what they would like. The longer preview will give them an idea of your writing style and whether it suits their needs. Enough said for me!