Constant Content

After having had 12 articles in all accepted at Constant Content and after subsequently selling three of them, I'm now plotting and scheming to write a fair number of additional articles. As part of this effort and after having seen that Lysis and others allow 100 per cent of their articles to be viewed by prospective customers, I've changed my own default percentage to 100 percent. It is to be hoped this isn't a mistake. How common is it for shady clients to simply rip off articles with OCR programs?

In any case, I'm also now manually changing the long summaries for the nine unsold articles. It's been a terrific struggle thus far. For some reason, the system insists on making me fight and kick and struggle to make anything stick. One oddity stands out. The count for my single Halloween-themed article should be 812 words. Indeed, this was the official word count before I started mucking around with changes to the asking price for full rights, the short summary and the long summary. I've repeatedly verified the correct word count with outside programs for counting words.

Yet after expanding the long summary, slightly editing the short summary and discounting the asking price, the official word count now shows as 758 words. Repeatedly saving the updated entry changes nothing. Constant Content's system bitterly insists on dropping 54 words from the total. I've looked at the invariant official text and the manually entered long summary again and again. They look virtually identical. The official count nonetheless remains at 758 words instead of the correct total of 812 words. Has anyone else noticed this sort of weirdness?

The opening thread post took a few days to slide past moderation, probably because it was my first post here of any kind since opening the forum account a couple of years ago. I did lurk extensively after opening the account and then again after deciding recently to make a real go of writing for Constant Content. Simply following back older threads that held comments from Lysis yielded a treasure trove of useful insights on succeeding at Constant Content! In the meantime, I added one more article that has since been approved without comment. I've also more or less successfully finished with updating the original nine remaining unsold articles to show 100 percent of the primary text in their long summaries. From all appearances, it may take a few months to see any difference in sale rates for them from this action.

The unexplained quirk with mismatched word counts appears restricted to that one Halloween article, too. I'll keep an eye on it, but it's not a high priority. Of more interest is the subsequent discovery that an unknown editor had in the preceding months followed up on a few otherwise approved articles by extensively and silently editing them. The official word counts for the affected articles didn't change until I updated them with 100-percent long summaries and discounted prices, though. Truth to tell, I hadn't even noticed the editorial changes until the mysteriously altered word counts prompted me to probe for the reason behind them.

I'll admit to being momentarily discombobulated by said discovery, but upon meticulously winkling out the changes and documenting them in my own records, I was surprised and pleased to find that with few exceptions, I wholeheartedly approved of the changes. They were in any case thoughtful, and more importantly, they almost invariably tightened up the text in ways that I wish I'd thought to do myself. I did disagree with two or three changes, but the disagreements were essentially stylistic in nature and minor.

It's both exhilarating and embarrassing. I do love great editorial feedback, but it is to be hoped that I'll not in the future write sloppy text that cries out for a quick bullet to the head. Happily, my most recent three articles were left unchanged, most likely because I had by then finally, grudgingly accepted the agonizingly succinct principles behind the notorious Hemingway App website.

"I'm happy about my new puppy. He barks and plays with me. He slobbers on my face! My Mom is happy, too. She said my Dad is back for good. He got a job at the cotton factory. My friends don't know this yet. They still think my Dad is a worthless drunk."

Okay, I'm kidding about that last bit. The Hemingway App doesn't quite demand that level of simplicity.

As a final thought, I did notice that this mysterious editor seemed to dislike the word "though," preferring instead the word "however." I wonder if I missed this somewhere in the official guidelines. Perhaps it's just a personal preference on the part of that editor. It's not important, though! I haven't the least problem with trying hard to remember to eschew "though" in favor of "however" for articles meant for Constant Content. Textbroker, where I've been writing for years, has its own basket of stylistic quirks.

I had to do that too when it went live. Frustrating.

Erm ... please forgive me for being obtuse, Ms. Lysis, but you had to do what when what went live?

Maybe I'm just tired. I missed an important deadline today at another content broker after goofing up the complex order requirements out of sheer fatigue. Woe is me!

Lysis wrote:I had to do that too when it went live. Frustrating.

You had to copy/paste the words when you switched to 100%? Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood. lol

Oh! Yes, manually copying and pasting the text was a bit tedious. Of course, I only had to do that for a few articles. One shudders to think of having to do that for ... hundreds of articles?

Lysis wrote:You had to copy/paste the words when you switched to 100%? Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood. lol

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.

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.