Author Archives: Maria Langer

Could it be? Piracy site shut down?

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To early to be sure, but not too early to hope.

Last night, before shutting down for the night, I decided to check a pirate Web site I’ve been monitoring to see if any new ebooks had arrived. I’ve been finding my books — and the books of author friends — on a number of pirate Web sites, but one of them was especially blatant and offensive. It listed literally hundreds of ebooks and complete training DVDs by dozens of publishers and scores of authors. If you can’t figure out why this bothers me, read this.

After a long wait, an error message appeared in place of the site’s home page:

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://[omitted]/
The following error was encountered:
* Connection to [omitted] Failed
The system returned:
(111) Connection refused
The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

I tried a few more times and got the same result.

Then my normal state of paranoia set in and I thought that the site’s owner may have blocked my IP address. I’d been checking the site with an alias user ID that pointed to a domain name I never use for personal stuff. But I didn’t mask my IP address. So I asked Jonathan at Plagiarism Today to try. He got the same result (and taught me a trick for checking for IP blocking another way).

About the Site

The site was hosted somewhere in Asia or the Pacific, although the guy who ran it wrote in perfect English. So there wasn’t much to be done as far as DMCA notices to the guy’s site hosting ISP.

Most of the pirated files were being hosted on a Germany-based free file hosting site. That site’s gimmick is that people can download one file at a time unless they pay for a “premium account.” So I think one could make a good argument that the hosting company was selling access to our files.

To the hosting company’s credit, they made it pretty easy to get the files taken down. All I had to do is get the complete URL to the file and send it to them via an online form. Within 24 hours, the link simply stopped working. So even though the pirate site still listed my ebooks, none of the download links would work. To me, that was almost as good as taking the whole site down.

Take Down!

Join us in our fight to stop ebook piracy! Authors Against Piracy is a private Yahoo Group dedicated to educating authors on how they can find illegal copies of their books online and get them off. We can make a difference!

But I do have reason to hope that the site may have been taken down. When I saw the extend of the copyright infringement there, I was outraged. I spent almost two full days contacting authors and publishers to tell them about what I’d seen. Among the publishers I contacted were Pearson, McGraw-Hill, O’Reilly, Symantec, Lynda.com, and Total Training. I thought that if I got some big guns out against this guy, he’d get taken down.

And maybe it did work. Maybe one of them threw a big enough legal staff at either the site owner, his ISP, or the file hosting sites to get the whole thing taken offline. Or maybe just having all those publishers and authors going at him with e-mail and other communications made him realize that his efforts to earn a few dollars by setting up illegal downloads just wasn’t worth the hassle of fighting all these people.

Whacking Moles

I don’t care what the reason might be. I just rejoice in the possibility that we may have succeeded in “whacking this mole.”

Because as one of my publishers pointed out: “Trying to stop these guys is a game of whack-a-mole. You hit one and another one pops up.”

I agree. But there are more people and resources on our team than on theirs. If we work together, we can keep those moles in their holes.

Declaring RSS Feed Bankruptcy

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When there are just too many posts to read.

When I started subscribing to feeds about a year or so ago, I only subscribed to a handful and quickly read through the new posts each day. In fact, I recall asking other readers for suggestions on feeds I should subscribe to.

Things change. I began accumulating feeds. I use endo, an offline feed aggregator, and I’m very pleased with it. It sucks down my feeds each morning when the computer starts up and presents them to me as I’ve organized them, so I can read them at my leisure.

Unfortunately, I started subscribing to a number of feeds that put out 5 to 10 new posts a day. And there were more than a few days that I didn’t read any new posts. And then days when I felt rushed and put aside certain feeds for another day. And another day.

The problem got serious. At one point, I had over 2,000 unread posts in endo. Not acceptable. I killed off a bunch of feeds that were just too heavy with a low percentage of content that actually interested me.

But today I decided to take drastic steps. I went into endo and deleted any unread post that hit the Web before August 1. That brought 1300 unread posts down to 124. A much more reasonable number.

Did I miss great content? Possibly. But one of the things I’ve noticed — especially in blogs about blogging — is that the same basic topics come up over and over again. If you missed the “5 Ways to Energize Feeds” this week, you’ll catch the “7 Ways to Make Your Feed Pop!” next month. You get the idea. Same old, same old. You can read this stuff for two months before it starts to recycle with very little content that’s really new.

Hmmm…I feel a new topic coming on. I’ll have to put this on my list of things to write about here.

After I’ve gone through those 124 posts waiting for me in endo.

Blog Post Length

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Is there a “right” length?

RulerI’ve recently been involved in a discussion with another blogger — we’ll call him Tom — about blog post length. Tom has instituted an “aside” feature in WordPress that applies different formatting to very short posts that he’s identified as “asides.” But the length of his “short” posts is still longer than the length of other bloggers’ average posts.

And while the different formatting of asides comes through on Tom’s site, there’s no differentiation on his blog’s RSS feed, which is how I normally read his blog. So to me, Tom’s blog just suddenly started getting posts that were short, along with the other ones that were relatively lengthy.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that my blog posts range from a single bullet items for a “This Just In…” link (which, by the way, is created automatically by del.icio.us) to 2,000+ word ramblings. That’s why I didn’t think it mattered how long a post was. It doesn’t really matter to me.

But Tom had made a distinction between his shorter posts — perhaps 150-200 words in length — and his longer ones — which probably approached 1,000 words. And that got me thinking (which is always a dangerous thing): what’s the “right” length for a blog post?

The Argument for Long Blog Posts

A long blog post, one can argue, shows that a lot of thought and effort has gone into the topic. The blogger started with an idea, perhaps jotted down some notes about points he wanted to cover, did some research that resulted in useful links, and wrote up the post.

This is [supposedly] what we browse the Web for. Anyone can grab a few links and call it a blog post. But how many people can actually write something original based on an idea and references on other sites and blogs? Surely fresh content backed up with links to references has good value. And that’s what serious bloggers should be striving to create.

The Argument for Short Posts

Short posts can have a certain wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am quality to them. You get a thought, you share it, and you move on to the next thing, leaving the reader to think the rest out for himself. If what you’re sharing is compelling enough, the reader might follow whatever links are included to learn more or do some other research or thinking on their own.

While that might be good for readers who like to think for themselves, I’m not convinced that all of them do. They want the blogger to do the brainwork and report the results. After all, if they wanted to do their own serious thinking and research about a topic, they’d likely become bloggers themselves.

Again, this all depends on the blogger. Some bloggers can, in a short post, put a new spin on a topic that’s been explored by others. Those blog posts are a real pleasure to read.

Other bloggers seem to simply rehash the thoughts of others. You know. Soandso says this and whosewhatsit said that. Here are the links.

Oddly enough, a blogger’s success does not appear to be tied into how well he can come up with original content. Many popular bloggers fill their blogs primarily with links or brief commentaries about other bloggers’ conclusions, without adding much food for thought. Yet they continue to gain a following, for reasons I can’t quite comprehend.

My Argument

My argument is that it doesn’t really matter how long a post is, as long as it provides something of real value to the reader. Does it make him think? Does it give him fresh information? A new way to look a topic?

If the answer is yes to any or all of those things, what difference does it make how long the post is?

My Problem (or one of them, anyway)

But Tom got me thinking hard about post length. And although he’s worried that his asides are too short to be considered posts, I’m worried that my posts might be too long.

My problem is that my blog posts are often a bit too original, based on my own personal experiences. Although they tend to be peppered with appropriate links — when I find them — if you’re looking for a blog post based on someone else’s post or one that’s heavily cross-referenced to others, you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. I’m on another planet sometimes — planet Maria, perhaps — and I draw from the well of useless (or sometimes useful) information that’s in the atmosphere there.

To further complicate matters, my blog posts tend to be very long at times, almost to the point of becoming pointless ramblings. (Yes, I do know this. Sorry. I can’t help it.) If I get an audience for the title, how many members last through the whole post? Even I don’t have the patience to read blog posts as long as some of the ones I write. So clearly, there’s a limit on length.

My Solution (to this problem, anyway)

My solution to the problem is to break up long posts into shorter, multi-part series posts. I’ve already done this with my post about Copyright for Writers and Bloggers. And the other day, I actually went back and broke up my post about Copy Editing, which was insanely long and rambling.

There are two benefits to this:

  • My long posts get broken up into more easily digestible pieces. Now I don’t have to worry about keeping my audience’s attention for 2,000+ words.
  • I can schedule parts to appear in the future. This is a great WordPress feature. Although I usually write multi-part posts in one sitting, they don’t have to appear all at once. That means I might even get a day off from blogging.
  • On the off-chance that I’ve interested a new visitor in the topic of a multi-part post, he may just come back to read the remaining parts. Or, better yet, subscribe to my feed to have them delivered to his reader.

Did I say two benefits? I obviously meant three.

That’s Enough!

And on that note, I think I’ll draw this post to a close. After all, if I keep typing, I’ll just have to chop it into multiple parts.

Why I Use a Test Mule

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One good reason not to load beta operating system software on a computer with real data on it.

Today, while working with a certain beta operating system, I managed to lock myself out of my user account.

Well, I didn’t do the locking. The computer did. An error occurred as I was logging in, right after disabling its heavy-duty file security feature. It decided it didn’t like my password, and although it liked the master password I entered for the computer, it didn’t like the idea of me changing mine to one that would work.

Result: I couldn’t log in as an administrator, so I couldn’t do much of anything with the operating system — including accessing my files.

This brought my entire workday grinding to a halt. Thank heaven I pulled those screenshots off before I clicked that button. They’d be goners.

Now if this were my main production machine, I’d be going bonkers right about now. I’d be freaking out. I’d be so glad I’ve been faithfully backing up all my important files all over the place. But I’d be really POed that I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

But it isn’t so bad when you’re dealing with a test mule. That’s a computer that exists solely to run software in a test environment.

Like beta operating system software.

The computer has hardly anything on it, so losing the hard disk contents isn’t a big deal. Just reformat and reinstall. I’ve already installed betas three times for this book and I’m sure I’ll be doing it again before the software is finalized. Not a big deal.

As I write this, the installation DVD is starting up the computer. I had to fool it into booting from that disc, since I’d normally need to enter my password to restart with the boot disk inserted. (I got to use that Option key trick I wrote about earlier today in an emergency situation.) I figure that just before bedtime, the installation will be complete.

Tomorrow, I’ll pick up where I left off.

Copy Editing – Part II: My Experience with Copy Editors

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My experiences with copy editors.

This is the second installment of my series about copy editing. As I discuss in Part I, part of this series is a rant based on 15 years of accumulated frustration. This Part is where I blow steam.

Stet!Copy Editors and My Work

I have to start out by saying that my work is usually not very heavily edited. I take that to mean that one or more of the following are true (or is that is true? I never said my grammar was perfect.):

  • I know how to write. Seems funny to even make that statement. It’s pretty obvious that I know how to write when I’ve been doing it for a living for so long.
  • My publishers have a limited budget for copy editing. This might be true with my “packaged” books — those are the ones I write, lay out, and submit as InDesign files, TIFFs, and PDFs. But I don’t think that’s the case with my more traditionally produced books.
  • The copy editors I get don’t know what they’re doing. For the most part, I don’t believe this is true. How can they be copy editors when they don’t know what they’re doing?

So I tend to believe it’s the first reason more than the others.

But the reason doesn’t really matter. Any writer can tell you that they’d rather see their work lightly copy edited than heavily copy edited. The reason: the percentage of original words, sentences, and paragraphs that “survive” the editing process. Light editing means more of the author’s original work remains intact. Heavy editing means that less of the author’s original work remains intact. It’s as simple as that.

[I need to make a disclosure here. I am guilty of being a heavy-handed editor. I’ve worked with co-authors on three occasions. On two of them, I had final say over the text that would become the content. In both cases, I tried to change the co-author’s “voice” to match mine. Voice is a sort of writing style that comes across in sentence construction, etc. In one case, the co-author didn’t give a hoot; he was just glad that someone was going through the text and making the style consistent. In the other case, the co-author was rather upset and offended. In both cases, I did what I did to make the book better. Or at least better in my opinion. Whether I made it better or worse is something we’ll never know. In any case, I’ve decided that it’s probably best if I stay away from the co-author role.]

Ten Editions, Ten Experiences

I just completed the tenth edition of one of my books. Each revision begins with the previous edition’s text and edits it so it covers the current software product. Some years, less than 5% of the book’s content changes. Yet for the first few years, the book was sprinkled with copy edits — I could see them because we use Microsoft Word to prepare the manuscript and the revision feature is turned on throughout.

Every year’s editor — because there have been 8 of them over 10 editions — had a different “pet change.” For example, one editor didn’t like where I put words like “only” and would invariably move them to another part of the sentence. I’d read the sentence both ways and either way worked for me — although it obviously sounded more natural to me the way I’d originally written it. Another editor liked to add commas. That didn’t matter much, because the next year’s editor liked to remove commas. One year’s editor decided that all the names of menu commands, dialogs, and options within the software should be in title case, no matter how it was presented in the software. So the Show color for Background image check box would become the Show Color For Background Image check box. One editor rolled up her sleeves and rewrote a bunch sentences that the previous editions’ editors had either fiddled with themselves or left as is. The most recent editor decided to introduce italics to some text that had never had it before.

How I Felt about It

Each year — the book is revised annually, every summer — my attitude toward the copy edits changed.

At first I didn’t mind so much, although I got seriously peeved when the production editor for the first edition started making changes to content that we’d all already agreed on. (That’s another story and not a happy one, although I did get the last laugh.)

Then, as I saw the current year editor change things that the previous year’s editor had changed so it was what I’d originally written (or pretty close to it), I started complaining. I could do that since the book’s very first edition had become a bestseller and the publisher wanted to keep me happy. (Don’t try this for your first book, kids.) The copy editor on that edition tuned things down a notch.

But the following year it was back to what I consider “changes for the sake of making changes.” I got fed up, blew a gasket, and decided that I didn’t care about the changes. I’d just rubber-stamp everything. And I did for two or three years.

But then I started caring again, right around the time I got a good editor two years in a row. (Where is she now? Come back!)

Last year’s editor wasn’t bad, although he did ask a lot of questions that seemed designed to point out errors in my text rather than just fix them. For example, “The art shows that the dialog is called Colors, not Color as you have indicated here. You also called it Colors in five other places. Should I make the change here?” Uh, yeah. Isn’t that what you’re here for? Of course, I didn’t say that. I just thought it. Loudly, in my head. If he would have just made the change, I would have seen it with the revision marks and would have checked it and would have realized his edit was correct.

This Year

This year’s copy editor absolutely wigged me out. Her orders were supposed to be to edit the text that has changed. Remember, the majority of the book is exactly the same as it was the previous year. This year, about 20% of the text changed. That means she only had to look at 20% of the manuscript — the part with all the colored revision marks. Yet she insisted on copy editing the whole thing. She inserted a bunch of commas, which I really don’t care about. (Next year’s editor will pull them back out and I won’t care about that, either.)

But she also decided that all occurrences of Web should be web and that some terms, menu commands, feature names, and dialog options should be italicized. The problem with this is consistency — there wasn’t any. A command name on one page would be in normal type and the same command name on the next page might be in italics.

I freaked and I complained to the project editor. The formatting was wrong and inconsistent, I’d have to undo every wrong change she’d made while reviewing the edits. It was annoying and time-consuming and I had another (dare I say it?) more important book lined up after this one to write.

The PE clarified the instructions to the CE. The CE continued to make the same changes. I freaked again. I couldn’t get the PE on the phone, so I wrote a nasty e-mail to the CE. (I’d thrown my back out the day before and was in incredible pain, but still had to work on the book to meet the deadline, so I was pretty cranky. I wrote the e-mail just before heading out to the chiropractor.) I got scolded by the PE. I defended my complaints. The PE talked to the CE again. And then the CE stopped reviewing anything except the edits (as she should have been from the start). And guess what? In three of the remaining 12 chapters, she had absolutely no changes.

Now tell me, what does that say to you?

More to Come…

In Part III of this series, I’ll tell you what that said to me. Until then, if you want to share copy editor horror stories, the Comments link or form is a good place to do it.