How to Make Money from Writing – New Directions

Spring is here and with the changing of the season comes a changing of my blogs central theme.

I want to be a science fiction writer, no doubt about it.  The problem is that right now that goal is not paying the bills.  This situation forces me to be a hard-headed realist.  My dream job is to be a writer, in the field of science fiction.  If the latter is out of my control, then certainly the first part isn’t.

Making Money on the Internet

There are many ways to make money from writing on the net, for example: copy writing and article submission to sites such as Constant Content.  While writing copy for others to use isn’t very exciting, it does pay the bills.  Similarly, writing articles for Google Adsense related websites is another means to make money writing for the web.

My only reservation is that I am just not sure how many times I can work a keyword into an article, over and over again and not sound like a robot.  Maybe the fun will be in achieving this without going totally bonkers.

From the sheer number of “scraper” sites on the web, someone, somewhere, must be making money with sites like this though.  Here is hoping that that someone can be me and not just Google.  At least when I make an Adsense site, it will be with my own content!

Anyway, for better or worse I have decided to give being an “internet marketer” a trial for a month and see what happens.  Accordingly I bought six domains this morning and will be developing them over the coming month.  The plan is to publish a frank report on the success or failure of the activity in this blog on the 31^st of March.  To get a fuller picture this deadline might have to be extended, but right now I can’t make a prediction.

If I can make even a small amount of regular cash from these activities it takes some pressure off and allows me to write stuff I am personally interested in with a clean conscience.  That is the plan anyway…

The Future for this Blog

Developing so many websites will necessarily cut down on my activity on this blog, but I still plan to post here two or three times a week.  In a strange way it might actually improve the content here as I plan to write a weekly post about the science in science fiction, as well as a personal post and maybe a creative writing based post too.

Becoming a science fiction writer is temporarily on hold…at least for a month.

Dave Felton.

When you post material on a free content website you do so knowing that others will publish your work for no fee.  This is, of course, fine and as it should be.  The question is when they do so by breaking the original terms and post the work as their own should you take offence, legal action or what?

Please compare:  http://literatureonsite.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-science-fiction-writing-necessarily.html

With my original:  http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Science-Fiction-Writing-Necessarily-Not-Serious-Literature?&id=3753554

(Yes, I have taken screenshots in case the “author” decides to “edit” his “work” at a later date.)

The differences between the two articles at time of posting are very few.  The owner of the website appears to think that by altering a few words here and there it will become an original article.  Maybe he also thought that by performing such small alterations the plagiarism would escape detection.

The site that has posted this appears to be merely a “scraper” type site for the purposes of hosting Google Adsense adverts.  I say this because the site seems to have little original content, but merely endless cut and pasted articles taken from elsewhere.  This would appear to be an Adsense violation also.

When I discovered the site earlier today I admit I was annoyed.  If the author would actually acknowledge where the article came from (backlink) I couldn’t care less where it is listed, providing he would also list it unaltered.  Indeed the link to the original author and publishing the work unaltered is the agreement under which the site he downloaded it from operates.

The guy who listed this clearly cannot speak English.  It is because of the atrocities committed by Google translate that I finally had to laugh.

Take this as an example:

‘When science-fiction writing effective form of this connection with the reader, then, how can it as “poor literature will be judged”?’

Sorry, what did you say?

I assume because of the apparent inability to speak English that he is poor and is performing his acts of piracy to earn some money.  I don’t begrudge his efforts to make money from writing, as since my hospitalisation, I am unable to work at present and in a similar situation.  What annoys me is the lack of acknowledgement of the original source and the mutilation of my work in order to try and escape plagiarism filters.

The article was already listed for free.  What more did he want?

Dave Felton.