Hello everyone,
I apreciate how helpful everyone is in the forums. I recently sold an article (yay). I've tried to read a lot in the forums to keep from asking the same things again. Someone mentioned about a purchaser not giving them credit on a site when they had not purchased full rights. I also thought I read about using a sold article as writing clip. Are we usually aware of who bought the article and where they plan to use it, or did these people do some detective work and find the site where the article was posted? The article I sold was for unique rights. Thanks.
Detective work it is! I mean, you can see the buyer's nickname in your Sales list but, other than that, there's not much to go on with. The easiest way to check where your article has been published is to google phrases from the text within quotation marks. The results may not be what you'd expect; you may only have had one usage sale but find the same piece on multiple sites, which means that you've been ripped off. Worse yet, it's often hard to identify which one is the original buyer so that you can take action against content thieves.
Oh well... I guess it goes with the territory. I stopped checking my articles long ago because they are just too many. Most customers check articles for plagiarism after purchasing them, so I suppose I'll find out one way or another.
You might consider just not offering the unique price. I think it's more trouble than it's worth, and although it's crappy that a customer doesn't follow the rules, I think it's a bit nit-picky and a turnoff to hunt them down about it. You have to ask yourself if it's worth losing a potential returning customer over something so small, because you know if you track down the article and give the customer crap over not putting your name on the article, there's a good change they ain't buying from you again.
Thanks.