Slammed and spammed

I've been ridiculously busy lately, as you might have noticed from my lack of posting (again). However, one thing I noticed is that I have roughly the same amount of work as last month, but I'm taking more time to do it. My productivity has been gradually decreasing for a while now, so I've taken some action to remedy that — which I'll write about in another post.

I've also started getting a ton of spam. The thing is, I don't know from where. I've never had a major problem with spam, and sudden, wham — I'm getting a dozen spam emails a day. What the heck happened?

Anyway, I have several posts in the works, so check back periodically over the next few days!

FreelanceHomeWriters and Freelance Work Exchange are BFFs

Several years after I wrote my first post on Freelance Work Exchange, this is still one of the most searched-for topics on my blog. It amazes me that I still get emails and comments, at least one or two a month, thanking me for the warning — or, more often, complaining that they, too, have fallen victim to this scam.

Toward the end of last year, another site popped up on my radar that seemed similar: FreelanceHomeWriters.com. They have practically the same trial membership deal, and they too are spamming Craigslist with fake freelance job ads. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I responded to what I thought was a job ad, only to receive an email directing me to their stupid website.

Then on Wednesday of this week, WritersWeekly.com posted with a long list of complaints about FreelanceHomeWriters.com. It turns out I was right, and it's exactly the same scam as Freelance Work Exchange and GoFreelance: poor unsuspecting wannabe writer signs up for the trial membership, then attempts to cancel and can't, while FreelanceHomeWriters happily sucks $49.95 out of their bank accounts every month.

Although the owner of FreelanceHomeWriters.com is supposedly Charles Wellmore (sound made-up to you?) instead of Rob Palmer, I think this is rather too similar to be unrelated. I mean, the prices are exactly the same, right down to the $2.95 week-long trial membership, and of course the complaints are exactly the same too! I wouldn't be surprised at all if we were to discover that Rob Palmer and Charles Wellmore are actually the same person, trying the same scam under a different name now that so many people have wised up to Freelance Work Exchange.

You get what you pay for...

Apparently, with the current economy freelance writers are not the only ones pointing out that you get what you pay for. NPR ran a story today on a new book called Cheap, in which the author, Ellen Ruppel Shell, talks about the hidden ways we pay for it when we buy things at discount prices. It's not about the dramatic reduction in quality — it's also about the risk of deflation.

This reminded me so much of the ongoing talk of writers rates' and that clients get what they pay for. The other issue is, of course, that writers' rates trending downward also downgrades the industry, and makes it more difficult to earn a living as a writer. If we aren't careful, and writers' rates fall too much, will writers from India, who speak English as a second language, be the only way to find a writer — kind of like how discount superstores like Wal-Mart and Target dominate the shopping scene now?

Plan D ... for "Dumbass" and "Desperate"

I've been hearing from many of my fellow freelancers that they are experiencing a shortage of writing work. That's not the case with me, but nontheless I thought of you guys when I saw this headline.

See, even if work is getting harder to find, you have something to be grateful for: that you're not as desperate as those people!

Trends in teen fiction

Any good writer knows that it's important to keep an eye on trends in the publishing industry. Whether you want to write articles, books, or anything else, it's important to know what is selling and what is not.

Here's a tip for anyone who is interested in writing young adult fiction, as I am: According to an article in yesterday's Denver Post, darker plotlines are becoming more common — and more popular — in teen fiction.

If you look at the most popular young adult fantasy, you can see this is the case: The Harry Potter series got increasingly dark as it went along, and then of course there was the seductive vampire world of the Twilight Saga. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials was pretty dark, too.

As one commenter on the article pointed out, dark subjects aren't exactly new to teen fiction — authors such as Robert Cormier and books like Go Ask Alice tackled tough topics long ago. But I guess the point of the article is that these books are becoming more common in young adult literature than they used to be.

The implication is that teens these days are more interested than they used to be in darker, more adult subject matter. Thinking back on my own teen years, I think they always have been, actually, but when I was in high school we just moved on to adult fiction earlier. Perhaps young adult authors are simply finally catching on, and giving teens what they really want. After all, young adult is still a fairly new genre, so it makes sense that YA authors are still learning how to get it right!

Well-written headlines: An all-American goal

Happy Fourth of July! Rather than celebrating in the usual manner, I spent the evening at the barn, making sure the horses were safe from fire and fright. Since I've also been working this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about how the important pieces of our lives influence how we celebrate — or don't celebrate — holidays.

An interesting subject for reflection, made all the more interesting because it seems our country's journalists took a break this weekend. Or maybe were just too hung over this morning to recognize the problem with this headline:

Fireworks explosion kills 3 in N.C., 1 in Pa.

Wow, that's a low death count for such a massive explosion.

I saw the headline late last night, when the article was just about the North Carolina explosion. Apparently when they revised the article, they forgot to make one small but significant change to the title: "Fireworks explosions kills 3 in N.C., 1 in Pa."

Whoops.

BookGlutton.com: Interactive online ebook reader

I spotted an interesting story on NPR today: an introduction to BookGlutton.com, an interactive online ebook reader that allows readers to leave comments/annotations and chat with other readers. You can set your profile to show others what you read last, follow other readers, and manage responses to your comments on your profile.

Basically, it's Facebook but with books. Social reading instead of social networking. You get the idea.

Of course, because of copyright concerns, they can only offer books that are either part of the public domain, or have been approved for use on the site by the author and/or publisher. However, this also makes for a really awesome promotional tool for authors. For instance, the current featured article is offering the first four chapters of her newest book via BookGlutton. The obvious goal is to get people reading and discussing the chapters, get the word out about the book, and get people hooked so that they buy it.

The only downfall that I see is that it doesn't work with all browsers. In other words, it doesn't work with my browser. I'm apparently a dinosaur because I still prefer IE 6. I did try to upgrade once, but IE 7 crashed my computer so many times just in the first day that I restored my system's previous settings and never looked back. Heck if I'll make the same mistake with IE 8. And I'm not really a fan of cluttering up my hard drive with downloads, so I'm reluctant to download Firefox just for this one application. (I'm not a fan of that browser either, I'm afraid, so I wouldn't use it for anything else.)

However, I thought many of you — as writers and, it follows, also as readers — would appreciate a social bookreading site. If you try it out, either for reading or for marketing your books, please let me know what you think — since I can't try it out for myself!