Capturing Chaos

I planned to post the edited version of the free writing excerpt today, but another topic started nagging at me, so get ready for a bit of a rant.

I’ve been coming across a lot of blogs set up to offer information to writers and would-be writers. Some concentrate on creativity and the mechanics of writing; other tend to stick with recommendations about where to write if you want to make money. What’s beginning to get my goat is recommendations that are rushed and uninformative, and even suspicious. Too often, the posts don’t indicate whether the writer actually has any experience with the site, or just ran across it in browsing the web.

Sometimes, the post is mostly excerpts from the site, usually the bits that tell you how wonderful it is to write there, but say nothing about the details that you’d want to know before signing up. When the link to the site is also a referral, that really gets the old BS meter working overtime. That kind of recommendation reads as “I want you to sign up with my referral code so that I can make money from you, but I’m not going to tell you anything about the site because then you might not want to join.”

Why am I so suspicious? Because I run into this kind of huckstering all over the web. Some of these people are just suffering from newbie enthusiasm, thinking that they’ve hit a gold mine, and they want to let everyone else in on their find of the century. But there are plenty of others who’ve discovered once they signed on, that the site doesn’t pay much at all — unless you have plenty of referrals. In other words, you’re not being paid for your work, whatever that may be, but for the number of people you manage to drag in.

So when I see recommendations that include the author’s referral code but no useful information, that’s a warning sign that says stay away — away from the writing site and, if it’s a regular pattern, away from that blog.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS