Long summary/excerpt

[4rumid]

Hopefully, this is my last question before I submit my first article . . .

Are there any rules about the excerpt apart from including about 1/3 of the article? Specifically, my article consists of an introductory paragraph, a numbered list with each item discussed, and a short conclusion. A couple of the items contain important info that many people don't know -- I'd like to make that info available only after the article has been purchased. So what I'd like to do is provide the introductory paragraph and list all the items, but only provide the relevant text for some of them. So it would read like this:

Introductory paragraph
Item #1 "[available with purchase]"
Item #2 "[available with purchase]"
Item #3 with all text
Item #4 with all text
Item #5 with all text
Item #6 "[available with purchase]"

Would that be okay?
That is, I want to let the potential buyer know what material is covered in the article, without giving everything away. (The short summary is designed to get potential buyers interested in what they're missing.) It this isn't clear, I can provide specific content.

Thanks!

[Debbi]

I always include my whole article. If I were a buyer, I'd want to know how the article develops and how it wraps up, etc. I used to just put part of the article and then put "more..." but then a friend of mine was looking at one of my aricles and said "I tried to click on "more..." but nothing happened." I know some writers put just part of the article to keep it from being stolen, but for me, I'd rather just show the whole ting and let CC do the protecting.

Debbi

[Celeste Stewart]

Plus the customer won't be able to tell how brilliant and unique the ideas are if they aren't displayed

[4rumid]

Hmm. I have to think about these responses.

There's nothing CC can do once the article is available to read. Once it's out there, it's out there. Particularly given the amount of discussion on this forum about stolen material, I'd like to play it safe. But I do see the point that the best way to show potential buyers the value of what you've got is to just show them the whole article. Now I'm not really sure what to do.

I'm tempted to try it first with just the excerpt, using the short summary to lure buyers in, and see if I get any bites. If that doesn't work, can I change my long summary once the article has been accepted?

Thanks very much for your input. Can CC weigh in on relative success of sales with and without the whole article available to read before buying?

[Amy W]

You can change the long summary after your article has been accepted, as long as you are not making changes to the article itself. So if you want to paste the whole article in the long summary, you can do that.

I post the whole article. I know that when I'm shopping, I want to see what I'm buying. I don't think CC buyers are any different. And customers will never know how brilliant your article is if you hide the best parts from them. I wouldn't worry too much about stolen content. Whether a thief rips off a part of your article or the whole article, it amounts to the same thing - they ripped off your article. In the past I've posted only excerpts of my articles, but I had the entire article stolen. Content thieves will always find a way to steal articles, no matter what you do. So if I were you, I'd focus more on what will ensure a sale and less on what will foil thieves.

[4rumid]

Thanks, Amy, you're making some good points. But can you explain how your whole article was stolen when you had only posted excerpts? Do you mean it was stolen from the place it was posted after it was sold?

I'm really on the fence now about posting the whole article. I'm completely new to selling written content online but well aware of how easy it is to copy text. I agree that a buyer wants to see what he's getting, but why would a less than scrupulous person buy the article at all if he's got access to the whole thing?

I'm considering doing something in between what I suggested above and posting the whole article. I would give all the important points, but not go into detail. For example, this article is about what to look for in a glucometer, and one feature is accuracy. So part of that section would read:

"Taking too much insulin based on an inaccurate reading can be extremely dangerous, so it's important to know your meter is accurate. Here's how to find out . . . "

The ellipsis would be included, so the reader knows the article explains how to find out, but the exact method isn't out in the open until the article is paid for.

I guess my point is, focusing more on what would ensure a sale sounds good, but how will providing the info for free ensure a sale? Or is your point that there are enough honest people are out there to make theft an unnecessary concern?

[Debbi]

4rumid,

Don't let this worry over the long summary keep you from submitting your article. If the article itself is good to go, submit it so you can see if it gets accepted. You can put a third of it in the long summary for now and then change it later. Every field but the uploaded document itself and the title is editable after your submissino is made.

C'mon, c'mon! We're all rooting for you

[Celeste Stewart]

"Or is your point that there are enough honest people are out there to make theft an unnecessary concern?"

I can't speak for Amy, but I believe that yes, there are enough honest people out there. It's not the customers that are stealing content. I believe I heard that content theft here affects less than one percent of all content posted on the site. Content theft happens here, there, and everywhere but CC is aggressive and helpful when it does occur. It's a risk that we all take in order to reap the rewards of selling our writing.

I think it's a much harder to sell an article with excerpts and teasers. Customers want to know that the writing is solid, that it progresses naturally from one point to the next, and that it contains unique and useful information for their readers. If you have new information and a fresh angle, all the better! But they won't know it unless they see it. It's a little off-putting to read an article for sale that teases the customer to purchase the article in order to fully evaluate it. It's like sending a manuscript to a potential publisher and asking the publisher to sign a confidentiality clause before they can read it. Chances are good that they aren't going to nibble. By posting just a portion, we are asking the customer to take a risk on us. Remember, customers are not reading our articles for entertainment or to be enticed to read more; they are reading them to see if the articles are worth spending their hard-earned dollars on.

Anyhow, there are two schools of thought on this and you can do the excerpt thing or the full text thing (or both) and see for yourself which approach works best for you. As for me, I've found success with the full excerpt choice and have had relatively minor theft issues as a result. A couple instances here and there but in the grand scheme of Web writing, nothing to lose sleep over. Plus, CC has handled each case quickly and efficiently and the net loss to me has been minimal if anything at all.

[4rumid]

Thank you, Debbi and Celeste, for your responses. I actually did submit the article a little while ago, having learned in this thread that I can change the excerpt later. I ended up posting 2/3 of the article. CC is very clear in its guidelines to both writers and buyers that the 1/3 excerpt is the way to go, but having listened to the feedback here, I tried to balance the security issue with buyers' reasonable desire to see what they're paying for. I suppose I'm not used to selling something that I'm basically giving away first, that buyers can pay for if they're honest or not pay for if they're not. I was burned not too long ago by a client who decided not to pay what he owed after I sent him his article, so I've become cautious. If only selling articles were like selling photographs -- we could insert a watermark so the buyer could see the whole product but not be able to use it until it's paid for.

Thanks for the input and the encouragement! We'll see what happens . . .

[Celeste Stewart]

Good luck! Sounds like a good compromise that you can tweak if needed.

I don't really see posting an article here as giving it away. Sure, everything here is "on spec" but no one is giving their articles away and many of us are happily earning a nice sum for our efforts. In construction, builders commonly build houses on spec, but they aren't going to allow squatters or vagrants to come live in the house for free. Okay, bad example with the housing slump but the concept is similar. Okay, how about putting a piece of jewelry on consignment at the local consignment shop? You aren't giving it away but rather allowing potential customers to see it firsthand. If a thief breaks in and steals it, then yeah, that sucks but it's not like you're allowing customers to do with it what they please.

Again, let me reiterate that it's not the buyers who are dishonest here. It's the random content troll. Plenty of mechanisms are in place to prevent content theft but it's a cat and mouse game - and it's not unique to CC. In fact, CC is one of the best sites you'll find as far as protecting content and responding to theft go (plus CC rocks in other ways, too).

Keep us posted.

[Amy W]

Wish I could explain how my whole article was stolen, but I never found out. The articles never sold, I had only posted around 80 to 90 percent of the article, but I found that a content thief had somehow stolen the entire article. So now I just post the entire article in the long summary.

I think you should post whatever you feel comfortable posting. But I also think you shouldn't worry too much about content thieves. Celeste is right - most people who visit the site would never steal an article, no matter how much of it was posted in the long summary. I know it doesn't feel like it most of the time, but most people on the internet are honest, good people!

But just one more argument in favour of posting the entire article in the long summary -

I used to use the same reasoning as you for posting only a portion of my article - if someone steals it, at least they don't have the entire article. But content thieves are often a stupid bunch, and they copy the long summary as it appears, "cont'd" and ...'s and "available with purchase" and all. So no matter what you put in the long summary, at the end of the day, the result is the same - your article was stolen. And the final result is the same - Support goes after the content thieves and has them take down the stolen articles. So all in all, the content thieves can be controlled.

I was more worried about disappointed customers than content thieves. I was always nervous that a customer would buy my article thinking a certain fact or argument was made in the 25% I didn't include in the long summary, only to find out after purchasing it that the article never mentioned the fact or argument at all. By including the entire article, the buyer knows exactly what he/she is getting. Hopefully, that results in more sales, but I'm not sure one way or another. It would be interesting to see if CC had any statistics on sales for entire articles posted in the long summary versus sales for portions of articles posted.

Good luck with your article! And don't forget to start writing your second article the second your first is submitted - sometimes writing the second is harder than writing the first!

[Celeste Stewart]

Ever notice in these "long summary" discussions that you rarely see anyone writing about how successful they are selling articles with just a short 1/3 excerpt? Just an observation. . . Anyone out there regularly selling content with short excerpts in the long summary only?

[nichewriter]

I'm one of those who post 1/3 (or more) of the article in the long summary. Since I came back from my long CC hiatus and sold my 9th article in May 2008, I've sold 244 articles by the strength of my samples. My sales are mostly from repeat customers. I'm comfortable with posting just a portion of my articles and quite content with the results I get from CC. On average, my CC earning accounts for 5% of my total income from writing, and when something works for me (e.g., posting 1/3 of my article and making sales), I stick with it. I would be interested in seeing statistics on sales with the full article posted versus sales with 1/3 to 2/3 of the articles (excluding private requests), though.

[Celeste Stewart]

I looked at each of the top ten best-selling authors and it looks like it's about half and half. Some do, some don't.

One thing that I would recommend to anyone doing the 1/3rd thing: make it obvious that it's just a sample. If the article just ends mid-way through without an "article continues" or some other cue, it could look like a weak piece of writing that doesn't come to a nice conclusion.

[nichewriter]

Also, it helps to describe in the short summary what you're tackling in the article. I usually craft my summaries along the lines of, "This XXX-word article discusses XX [tips/methods/ways, etc.] of [topic], such as [tip #1], [tip #2], [tip #3], and [tip #4]."

Example summary of one of my business-related articles that sold:

"Do you want to put up your home-based business? This 775-word article lists 5
sources of home business ideas: your knowledge; your passion, interests or hobby;
your talents and skills; what you already have at home; and what makes you unique.
You can use these to brainstorm and narrow down your list of potential home
business that you can start."

That way, buyers know what the rest of my article contains even if they only see text up to the second source (passion, interests or hobby). And then at the end, I include the line, "For the full text, please purchase rights."


~S