I'm Just Sharing

Back in August, I wrote about trying to join, then finally being accepted to, Demand Studios as a writer. I thought I’d post a follow up to let you know how things are going.

Let’s start with this; I’ve made money. That’s a big deal, I must say. I’ve made $15 for every article I’ve written except one, where I made $7.50. I was doing really well with it until Mom got sick; then I just couldn’t concentrate on it. At some point, once a consulting gig I’m doing completes, I’ll get back to it.

Next, finding things to write on isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. They set all the titles, and you don’t get to change them up. In my field, there are some titles I haven’t touched because they just don’t quite fit, and I couldn’t figure out what kind of article to write about it. With others, I knew the information, but one of the things Demand Studios wants are links to places where people can get more information, and that I just couldn’t find. Well, some of it I could, but it’s restricted, which means no one else could get to it.

Titles are my worst problem, though. When you run out of titles in your topic, and you will, then you have to determine to see if you can write on topics you know nothing about. That’s where the research part comes in, and I’m not bad at that. What I’ve found happens often, though, is that there’s either no information about something or the information you find doesn’t conform to the article title you’re hoping to write. For instance, there was one topic on something that wanted an article on the side effects of this one thing I’d never heard about. I went looking for information and it turned out there were only two side effects; headache and nausea. Kind of hard to write a 400 word article on two things, so I had to give that one up.

Next, you find that trying to write to someone else’s style can be difficult. They require what they say are action words, not passive style words, and passive is the style I write in best. So, we’ve had some issues with that one. They also say they don’t like any throwaway sentences; in other words, you can’t set things up for the big hit. I find that hard to do also, since it doesn’t quite conform to storytelling, but of course this isn’t storytelling with them. And sometimes it’s confusing when you use a term that they pick out and say they need more information on it, when at another time they didn’t pick it out at all. Adding definitions helps you with the word count, though, so there’s no real gripe there.

I’ve had all except one of my submissions approved. On the one that wasn’t approved, I actually rewrote an entire article, just so the guy could tell me that he didn’t think he was learning anything new. Well, sometimes you’ve communicating information that someone else just might already know; that’s the title you selected after all. My thought is that not everyone else would know that information, but they have their standards. I’ll probably find a place for that article somewhere; have to work on that one, though, as it’s a topic that doesn’t fit here in any way.

If you can figure out a way to write at least one article an hour for 7 hours, you’ll earn $105 a day. That’s not so bad if you have nothing coming in. I haven’t tried to write any of their revenue sharing articles, which I mentioned in the last post, mainly because I haven’t seen a title that I feel I can research yet. But one of these days I will, if I need to. After all, it would be nice seeing some residual cash coming in from something I wrote.

These folks aren’t easy to write for at times, but overall, they’re fair, and it’s money if you can write at all. Of course, me being me, I’m always on the lookout for better paying things. As I find them, I’ll mention them; stay tuned.