I need to make a few things clear(er).
Although I discuss my comment policy briefly on the Contact Me page of this site, allow me to expand on what’s there in this post.
This site allows comments on blog posts (often referred to as “articles” here). To enter a comment, fill in the comment form at the bottom of the post. If the form doesn’t appear, click the Comment link at the bottom of the post to display it. Registration is not required.
The name, e-mail, and comment fields of the form are required. If any are left blank or if the e-mail field is an obvious fake, the comment will be deleted.
First names only or handles are fine for the Name field, as long as they don’t use words that are in poor taste.
If you enter a company name or Web site name in the Name field, there’s a pretty good chance your comment will be deleted as spam.
Speaking of spam, if your comment was posted solely to advertise a product, service, or Web site, it’s likely to be deleted as spam. I have zero tolerance for spam or spam-like postings.
Because of the problem with comment spam on frequently-visited blogs, this site uses two types of comment moderation:
Please don’t expect your comment, no matter how appropriate, to appear immediately or even within a day or two. I’m a busy person and try to moderate comments daily, but that doesn’t always happen. Don’t post the same comment repeatedly; I’ll just have to delete the extras.
I’m always interested in reading the opinions of others, as long as they’re presented in a reasonable and friendly way. Rudely bashing me or other commenters is a good way to get your comment deleted — or, worse yet, marked as spam so I never see one of your comments again. I’ll allow comments with differences of opinion if those differences are presented in the spirit of friendly debate.
I also reserve the right to edit comments. I don’t modify content, but I might delete something I think is offensive or overly commercial if the rest of the comment is something other readers might benefit from.
I do want to remind all visitors that I am responsible for this site’s content — including comments. I simply won’t let the site be used for anything other than a place to share information and ideas. The site maintains a PG-13 rating in both content and language.
If you believe I’ve deleted your comment because I didn’t think it was appropriate, you will be wasting your time if you attempt to repost it or e-mail me about it. Your comment will not appear and I will ignore your e-mail. It takes only seconds to delete either one, so you’re not wasting my time at all. There are a lot of small minded, nasty people out there and I’m not about to waste my time dealing with any of them.
While I realize that this policy might be harsher than the policies in place on other sites, this isn’t one of those sites. It’s my site. You’re my guest, and I don’t expect my guests to abuse my hospitality. If you have a problem with this policy, then you have a problem with me and my site and I don’t expect you to waste your time here.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Your comments are appreciated — really! You know where to put them.
Reports of cancelled accounts while sploggers earn money by scraping honest bloggers’ content is troubling.
Jim Mitchell lost his AdSense account and Google won’t tell him why. He’s bitter about it. But what makes him more bitter is that he’s discovered that sploggers with AdSense accounts have been using his content to earn revenue.
From Is Google AdSense Really Fair? on JimMitchell.org:
Today, I found four different sites that have scraped my content to use as their own with AdSense ads on the page. This, according to the Google AdSense Terms of Service, is a huge violation. I promptly reported the abuse with hopes the sploggers who lifted my content get their income generating plug pulled pronto.
One of the commenters to Jim’s post claims his AdSense account was also cancelled for no reason.
Now I’ve had no trouble with Google or AdSense and hope I never do. My earnings are meager, but they do cover the cost of hosting, which is my primary goal for including AdSense ads on this site. (That’s one of the reasons I don’t plaster the site with advertising like so many other bloggers do.)
But I do have a serious problem with sploggers, especially if they’re using AdSense or other advertising programs to earn money by illegally using the content written by other bloggers.
I know my content is scraped. Every once in a while, I’ll get a pingback from a sloppy splogger that directs me to his site. The site is full of scraped content and not much else. Most of the ones I’ve seen seem to be link farms for some other purpose. I don’t know enough about this stuff to understand why my content is being scraped when there doesn’t appear to be ads on the site my content is appearing on. (Perhaps someone reading this can explain or include a link to a good explanation.) But if these sloppy sploggers are stealing content in a way that can be easily traced, how many other sploggers are stealing content in a way that can’t be easily traced?
And do they all have Google AdSense accounts?
Which brings up a good question: how does Google determine who qualifies for an AdSense account? Is there a human who actually looks at the sites? I seriously doubt that. So that makes me wonder how effective their software is at determining whether a site is legitimate — full of fresh, legally obtained content — or a ripoff of other bloggers’ hard work.
And that also brings up the question of the effectiveness of an Adwords account. I was using Adwords for Flying M Air in an effort to sell my multi-day excursions. While I’m no Adwords expert, I think I had it set up well. I know I was paying for a ton of hits. But I also know that my phone didn’t ring. While this might mean that people don’t want the service I’m offering — chances are, they get sticker shock out when they see the price — it also might mean that the clicks aren’t being made by serious customers — or even by humans.
But it also means that my Adwords payments might be going to sploggers who have built sites to draw in visitors who then click on my link. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they were buying — one sale would pay my Adwords bill for a year — but they’re not. So I could be paying, through my Adwords account, for sploggers to steal content from honest bloggers, some of whom, according to Jim Mitchell, have had their AdSense accounts yanked for reasons never explained.
I guess what I want to know is this:
I hope Jim gets his AdSense account back. And I hope that other bloggers do their best to report feed scraping and splogging activities to Google or other ad sourcers whenever it’s found.
What my quarterly royalty statement tells me.
I make my living as a writer. Sure, I do other stuff and bring in money doing it, but when it all gets down to dollars and cents, the money I receive from writing is what pays the mortgage and puts food on the table.
With a new royalty statement in my hands, I thought I’d take a few moments to explain to folks interested in writing how the royalty part of writing works and what can be learned from a royalty statement.
Money from my writing work comes in three ways:
After doing this for 15 years, I’ve come to think of advances as my “bread and butter,” payment for articles as “fun money,” and royalties earned as “icing on the cake.” I won’t write a book unless the advance is enough to cover the amount of time and effort I put into writing the book. (I turned down two low-advance projects just last year.) This way, if the book doesn’t earn out, I’ll still make enough to keep paying the bills. If it does earn out, great. And since I don’t do a lot of work on articles — it’s just too much effort to get the work lined up — I don’t rely on that income for anything. That’s kind of unfortunate, because I can usually bang out one or two articles in day, so the income would really be great if I’d get get more of that kind of work.
As you can imagine, royalty statement time is a big event at my house — especially when Peachpit royalties are due. The statement comes in a big fat envelope. The reason: there are lots of pages. But one of the first pages of the package is the royalty check. And a quick peek tells me just how much icing I’ll have to spread around for the next three months.
The reason my Peachpit royalty statement comes in a big fat envelope is because there are lots of pages. The statement sitting in front of me right now is 61 pages long. I can’t even get a staple through it for filing.
The first few pages — 4, this time around — is a summary of the ISBNs covered by the statement. This list of ISBNs — 34 of them this quarter — are the books the publisher still has in its accounting system.
I need to make a distinction here between titles and ISBNs. A good example is right on the first page. My 2004 title, Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide, is listed three times: the original title, the German translation, and the French translation. Sometimes translations get their own ISBN and sometimes revenue for a translation is listed for the main title. It depends on how the translation rights were sold. Also, since Peachpit is now selling PDF versions of some of my books, those versions appear on a separate line.
Still, a quick count of titles on this quarter’s statement shows 28 titles listed. Whew! Even I think that’s a lot.
In my case, the vast majority of my work these days is in revisions. So each statement might show multiple versions of the same book. This is especially true for titles that are still “alive.” For example, my America Online: Visual QuickStart Guides (a 2-part — Macintosh and Windows — nightmare completed for version 3.0 years ago) are “dead” titles. They came out, sold poorly, and were not revised. These book are dead and buried and the only reminder that I ever did them are the author copies of each book on my author copy shelf. But my Excel for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide is alive and kicking — in fact, I just finished the revision for Excel 2007 this week. Three editions appear on my royalty statement: 2000, 2002, and 2003. (2007 will appear on the next statement.) And my Mac OS: Visual QuickStart Guide takes up the most lines: seven editions going back as far as the edition covering Mac OS 9.
For a title to appear on the royalty statement, it must be either earning money or losing money (by returns) with a more recent edition to suck up the losses. This is an important clause in book contracts — one that’s important enough to discuss in a little more detail here. Commonly known as cross-accounting or cross-deductions, it means that returns on one title can be applied to net revenue on another. So, for example, if my share of returns on an old edition of my Excel book was $43.54, that amount could be deducted from or charged to royalties on a more recent edition. That’s normally why books stay on royalty statements for so long — there’s still accounting for them.
It was kind of a good thing that my AOL books didn’t have more recent editions. Neither title earned out, so the money I was overpaid for those books could be deducted from future editions, had they existed. Instead, the publisher cut their losses by not doing new editions (a wise move) and simply stopped accounting for the existing books when the numbers stopped coming through. The books “fell off” my royalty statement.
(If you’re ever given the opportunity to negotiate a book contract, do not sign a contract with a clause that says all of your books can be pooled together for cross-accounting. (I don’t know the exact wording of a clause like that because I’ve had it removed from every single draft contract it appeared in.) Agreeing to this may prevent you from ever getting a royalty check if you write multiple titles for the same publisher and any or them are dogs. If you’re really lucky, you won’t even have cross-accounting for the same edition of a book — I was lucky to have that situation with one of my Quicken titles years ago. But I think it’s fair to do cross-accounting with different editions of the same book, so I don’t mind signing for it. I just brace myself for the returns every time a new edition comes out.
And returns, in case you’re wondering, are returns from retailers/wholesalers, not consumers. If Barnes & Nobel buys 1000 copies of a book and sells 200 of them in the time they allotted to give the title shelf space, 800 copies come back. That’s a bad thing for the author.
Still with me? Here’s a bit more that the summary pages tell me.
For each ISBN, the summary page has 6 numbers:
Of course, this is the format Peachpit uses. Other publishers may use other formats.
So when I get a royalty statement, the second thing I look at is the summary. (The first is the amount of the check, of course.) The summary tells me which books are earning money for me. That’s usually current editions of books. This is where I can see at a glance whether a new title has earned out. I can also see which books are earning me the most money — the titles with bright and happy futures. The bigger the payment due on a title, the more likely that title will be revised in the future. (Unless the software publisher decides to kill the software, as Adobe did to PageMill years ago. That book was doing very well when it was killed.)
Sometimes I get pleasant surprises. For example, my Excel 2002 book is still selling. That book was published five years ago and it earned $262 for me this quarter. Okay, so that isn’t enough to host a big party, but it’s a nice thing, a good thing. After all, the average life of a computer book is 18 months. So to have one that’s still bringing in a few bucks for me after five years is great.
The summary statement also tells me which titles are dead. These are the titles with previous balances that are negative numbers and no revised editions to earn more revenue. Sometimes these titles have ugly negative numbers in the Earnings column, indicating returns. My QuickBooks Pro for Mac book is in this situation. Although it’s the only title covering that software, there simply aren’t enough users interested in buying a book to make the book earn out. So when my editor says the publisher is not going to revise the title, I can look at this royalty statement and understand why. The book is dead.
Want more detail? The summary pages are also a table of contents for the 57 pages that follow them. That’s where I can find information about units sold, subsidiary rights (like translation rights), and where the books were sold: U.S., Canada, Export, etc. To be honest, I don’t look at these pages for every title. Heck, I have enough to do in a day.
Looking at the royalty statement is like peering into a crystal ball. I learned that there are certain topics I probably won’t be writing again and other topics I’ll be writing about for years to come. I learned which of my books is doing best for me (still Tiger, after two years!) and which ones I might want to promote a bit more to liven up.
But with 61 pages to review, that’s about all.
With regular readers comes responsibility.
This morning, I noted that the feed for this blog has exceeded 100 subscribers. The 100 mark is a milestone for any blogger, and it’s no different for me — even though I’ve been at it for some time now.
I’ve been blogging for over three years and my blog doesn’t exactly follow all of the “rules” of blogging. I’m talking about the “stick to one topic” rule and “blog multiple times a day” rule. People say rules are meant to be broken, but that’s not why I break these rules. I just blog the way I want to blog and don’t really pay attention to the rules.
My blog started out as a separate entity from my personal Web site, a way to share whatever I was thinking about or doing with people who might be interested. It was a personal journal, slightly filtered for the public. It was a way for me to record my life so I’d have something to look back on in the distant future. I didn’t care if anyone read it and was often surprised when someone I knew commented about something I’d written in my blog.
Back in those days, my blog wasn’t something I worked hard at; the entries just came out of me, like one-sided conversations with friends. Perhaps it has something to do with my solitary work habits — many people gather around the “water cooler” at work to trade stories about their weekends or opinions about world affairs. There’s no water cooler in my office and no co-workers to chat with. My blog may have been my outlet for all these pent-up stories.
A little over a year ago, I combined my blog with my personal Web site. I did it to make my life a little easier. I’d already decided to use WordPress as my Web site building tool. Why not just make my personal blog part of the site?
My Web site has been around in one form or another since 1994. I built it to experiment with Web publishing and soon expanded it to provide a sort of online résumé and support for my books. Support for my books often meant additional tips and longer articles about some of the software I’ve written about. This is fresh content of interest to people who use that software, even if they don’t buy or read my corresponding books. Since writing this content is relatively easy for me, I have no problem offering it free to anyone who wants it (as long as they don’t steal it and pass it off as their own; see my © page).
One of the great things about blogging software is that it automatically displays the newest content on the Home page and archives older content by category and date. In the old days, I’d have to manually create new pages for every article I wanted to put on my Web site and then add links to them. It was time consuming, to say the least. Sometimes too time consuming to share even the quickest little tip with visitors. So I didn’t publish very many articles. But the time-consuming, hand-coding aspect of my site is gone, and it takes just minutes to put any content online, whether it’s a link to an interesting podcast I just listened to about iPod microphones or a multi-part series of articles explaining how to use WordPress as a content management system.
What’s odd about the merging of the two sites is that my personal blog entries now commingle on the Home page with my book support entries. So these 100+ subscribers are seeing (and possibly reading) all kinds of stuff coming out of my head. (Now that’s a scary thought!)
As my blog/site audience grows, my responsibility to provide good content for readers also grows.
The way I see it, when only a half-dozen people read my blog regularly, it was okay to bore them with stories about my horse eating corn cob stuff out of the bottom of my bird’s cage or rants about the quality of “news” coverage. Now, with over 100 regular readers, I need to think more about what would interest my audience and concentrate on producing the articles they want to read. (You can help me by voting on this poll.)
And that’s when blogging becomes work. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does take more effort on my part.
And it may push me far from the original purpose of my blog: a journal of my life. That’s something to think about, too.
I just want to take a moment here to comment on some of the other blogs I’ve seen out there. The vast majority of them are a complete waste of bandwidth. Some exist to echo the sentiments of others and show very little original thought. Others are complete blather, written in a style that makes me mourn for the failure of our educational system. Like chat room comments. Ugh. I don’t see why people waste their time writing this crap and really can’t see why people waste their time reading it.
But there is a small percentage of blogs that provide good, informative, or at least interesting content, written in a way that’s easy to read and understand. Those are the blogs that serious bloggers should be reading and learning from. Those are the blogs we should try to emulate, not by simply copying or linking to content, but by adding our own original material to the blogoshere.
That’s my goal and my responsibility as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, is it yours, too?