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The New Writer’s Ruse: The Bemused Will Not Work for Hire

The bane of any hopeful professional author — one who writes for money to feed a family and a future fortunate — is the old “Work for Hire” kludge-as-cudgel and it is wielded against unwitting amateur authors, and even published, working, authors, by publishing houses as a “proper payment system” that is both fair to each side and an early warning windfall for the writer.  Unfortunately, none of that is true.

Publishers love to force writers into Work for Hire contracts because the benefit is all on their side of the dyad, and while initial risks are shared, the goal of good fortune tomorrow is not.

I warned of this impending trend way back on September 7, 2007 in my article: “Work For Hire is a Bad Idea” —

If you get royalties you are in partnership with your publisher.  If you are “Work For Hire” you’re used up when you’re done writing.

Publishers live to exploit that hungry author desire for fast money now — and in the process of the “Work For Hire” hiring — the author not only loses a potential profit bonanza, but also sells out their self-respect, self-worth, and fellow authors.

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Why We Converted a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

On Saturday, I made the decision to convert my personal Facebook account into a Business page.  It was not a difficult choice to make because, even though I had over 5,000 friends and 200 followers — when your friends queue is full, Facebook forces them into “following” you — I was really only posting Boles Blogs updates to my timeline.

Even though I don’t make any money from Boles Blogs, creating a Facebook business page offers some unification of thought and clarity of purpose on the social network.  I would “lose” my friends and their updates, as well as my own timeline since 2006, but I would also gain thousands of “Likes” — “friends” get converted into “Likes” when you convert a page — and my “followers” would also, magically, become “Likes” on the new page, too.  I would only have to update one Facebook page instead of two.

Here’s what the new Boles Business page looks like now on Facebook:

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Today is Our Eight Year Anniversary on WordPress.com

This morning, at 2:55am Eastern, as I was waiting for the Apple Store to open at 3:01am — a lovely notification popped up in my WordPress.com admin area telling me today, September 20, 2013 — was my eighth year anniversary on WordPress.com!

Now that is a milestone to celebrate!

I remember I was one of the super-early adopters here on WordPress.com and I was the in the early 500s as a registered user number — there are now over 80 million WordPress blogs in the world.  I loved the idea of Matt Mullenweg‘s WordPress.com right from the start:  An excellent publishing platform that was dead-simple to use all day every single day of your life!

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Revisiting the “Freshly Pressed Effect”

Yesterday, we were delighted to win a spot on the WordPress.com Freshly Pressed page for our Kaposi’s Sarcoma article, and that sort of public recognition has, in the past, meant big booms in readership and other quantifiable areas of blog publishing and — as I did in the past with our first Freshly Pressed win for Black Cat Bone — I will share those metrics with you now.

First, because of our Freshly Pressed feature on June 5th, we enjoyed our “Best day for Follows on Boles Blogs” — that is a big and huge record for us because followers tend to become dedicated readers and they stick around.

WordPress.com followers are counted, and not counted, in odd ways.  Facebook friends are counted in the final, public, tally, while  “moved” followers from old blogs to a new blog do not count.  No LinkedIn connections are counted as followers — even though they should be — to match the same relational logic as Facebook friends.

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Boles Blogs Wins Freshly Pressed a Second Time!

Yesterday, around this time, I received the following email from WordPress.com editrix Michelle Weber:

Hiya David,

Dust off the welcome mat and get ready to welcome some new readers — we’ve picked your post (http://bolesblogs.com/2013/06/04/do-you-remember-kaposis-sarcoma/ ) to feature on Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com!

This must have been a tough post to write, but it’s an important one — thank you. We thought it was a great read and think the rest of the community will agree — we’re really looking forward to the discussion that comes out of it, and are glad we can give it (and you) some more exposure. The wide variety of high-quality content on your site deserves a bigger audience!

Keep up the great blogging! Follow @freshly_pressed on Twitter to be inspired by other great bloggers — we also tweet each new Freshly Pressed post, so it’s the easiest way to know exactly when to start bragging. (I’ve tagged @BolesBlogs in the tweet, so you should get a mention notification as soon as it launches.)

Thanks for being such an awesome part of the WordPress.com community. We couldn’t do it without you!

Cheers,
Michelle

Continue reading → Boles Blogs Wins Freshly Pressed a Second Time!

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Sitting on a Script Professor Domain Squatter

On February 6, 2012 I wrote — David W. Boles is THE Script Professor — because some unsavory person in another country created a new domain based on my ScriptProfessor.com domain by merely adding a “the” before “ScriptProfessor.com” to create “TheScriptProfessor.com” and I was outraged:

Let there be NO DOUBT on the Internets that I, David W. Boles, am, are, and forever shall be, THE Script Professor!  I have been  THE Script Professor since November 28, 2005, so let there be no question to my authenticity as pale imitators and purposeful thieves step forward and try to wrangle in private and modify in public my mark to serve their selfish ends by fogging reality and futzing legal authority.

This week, I was able to reclaim that illegally registered domain and “TheScriptProfessor.com” now rightly redirects to “ScriptProfessor.com” and the world is right and good again as you can see in this partial screenshot of some of the domains I own and operate:

Continue reading → Sitting on a Script Professor Domain Squatter

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Be Blunt and Cruel, it Saves Time

As a proud, but inveterate, INTJ — I have a philosophy of life that few people understand: “Be Blunt and Cruel, it Saves Time!”  I never use that philosophy with others without permission.  That philosophy is fully how I prefer to be treated, but few people are willing to abide the terms of what they perceive to be “rough language.”

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Preventing Avatar Spam and Gaming Facebook LIKEs

If you live on social media networks, or if you write a blog, or manage a Facebook page, you’ve certainly seen a rise in efforts to game the networks for profit.  Way back on September 11, 2006, I predicted right here on this blog that people would begin to use Avatars — their online identity — to make money by selling their craven image to the highest bidder:

What’s to stop active — or better yet, INactive — blog commenters from getting hired by companies to change their Avatar to promote a website or a phone number or some other advertising blitz? Can you imagine being a new beer company and going out and finding the top 1,000 blog commenters and having them all change their Avatars to the logo for your beer?

Why it’s sheer viral genius! You could buy hundreds of thousands of page views on the cheap that could reach for years back into the history of Avatar-enabled blog pages on thousands of blogs — and the beauty part is this: No one would be the wiser.

The Search Engines already indexed and tagged the old content as safe and sufficient and your Avatar Ads would be silently served up when a search return is clicked through to the blog. The Blogmaster would never know — especially if you were not posting recent comments.

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Predatory Pricing Policies and Owning the Right of First Sale

John Wiley & Sons came up bupkis in the Supreme Court of the Unites States in their Copyright infringement case against a Cornell student who was reselling Wiley textbooks published in Thailand in the USA at a highly discounted rate.  One would think that ruling is terrible for textbooks and for authors — the opposite is true.

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One Thousand Boles Blogs LIKES and Counting!

We did it!  With your help over the last six weeks, Boles Blogs won over one thousand LIKES here on WordPress.com!  We previously promised you we’d keep you looped in on our badges of honor as the days pass along — and today we share with you the results of our hard work and your good reading!

Continue reading → One Thousand Boles Blogs LIKES and Counting!