Constant Content

Indulging in a little displacement activity, I searched for one of my recently sold articles. When I found it I was a little surprised to see that it included by real name as opposed to the name I use for submitting articles to CC (JD). Does a customer, in buying the full rights to an article, also get to know - and use - the author's real name even though it wasn't actually included in the article? (It's an unfortunate coincidence, that with this article, it looks as though in posting it to his (or her) website, the customer deleted a couple of words so that there's a line in the intro that doesn't make sense! )

I don't want to sound too precious about this, but would be interested to know.

Thanks.

(Real name) Jane

They should be using your penname, or nothing at all, unless you included something else in your article.

Ed

I never include my real name in my articles (I think I've only ever included it once and that was at the request of the customer who stated in the public request that they wanted to include the author's name - and then I used a variation on my real name!).

Perhaps there's some part of the buying process that automatically gives the customer the author's real name (as well as any pen name an author's included in the actual article)?

Jane

I don't know. Maybe this is a question for support?

One of my customers suddenly started calling me by my "real" first name without my ever telling him what it is. I suspect he found it by looking at the document's properties.

In MS Word, you can see who created a document by going into the document's properties (unless you specifically wipe out this data). Word places the name of whoever that copy of Word is registered to.

It does seem odd that someone would go out of their way to replace your byline with the name listed in the document though. Unless they were concerned with just posting your initials. Maybe they thought they were doing you a favor by giving you proper credit?

Celeste

Thanks for the info. I don't think the customer got my name from the MS Word properties, as the program I type in isn't registered to me - it's part of the package on my partner's laptop. (I think I've understood you correctly on that one....!)

I think I might ping an email off to Support.

Yes, maybe the customer thought that he was giving me my deserved credit in using my real name, although having read more of the article I can see that he's edited it and not done that great a job! Still, he paid for it, so he can do with it what he wants. However, it does make me want to put some sort of disclaimer on the page saying, "No, no, no - I didn't write it like that, the original version's much better - it's at least comprehensible"!

Jane

edited

When selling articles elsewhere, like to magazines and newspapers, oftentimes the editors do their editing thing yet still include your byline. Sometimes they may chop an article to make it fit their space; othertimes they'll use their own preferences punctuation wise; othertimes they'll add whole paragraphs of their own. It's usually their perogative to do so and not really worth fretting over. Sure, it's a bit frustrating when they get it wrong. Most of the time, you're the only one who will notice the nuances because you're so intimately involved.

An individual article isn't going to make or break your career. What's more important is your whole body of work in general.

thanks

That must've sucked to have your name associated with a porno-like site though! Part of why I use a pen name is because you can't be sure where your work will appear. But then again, now my Celeste persona has a reputation to uphold too. Sigh....

Audrabianca

I also found a dating article of mine on a site that had porn ads running across the top of it! Fortunately, my name was nowhere to be seen!

I agree that it's not worth fretting about. I was just a little but put out when I saw the article with my name, especially as it looked so good (the site was an attractive site and they'd posted a really nice photo to accompany my article); yet when I read the first para I noticed this glaring error - it's just the deletion of a period and one word but the para doesn't make sense without them (and you know how hard we work at these things .

I can understand why a customer would prefer to put my real name on the article as opposed to the pen name I use at CC, as JD doesn't read too "real," if you see what I mean. Anyway, on some of my articles now I'm including a variation of my pen name which sounds more like a "proper" name. I've also asked Support if changing my pen name will mean that it's changed on all the articles I've submitted to CC and are in my portfolio (I don't want to have two separate lots of articles under two different pen names).

Anyway, let's hope we continue to find names on lots more articles!

Jane