Skirting Reproduction Issues

About those family photos I wrote about in the previous post, I just had a devious idea.  If I donate the whole box of photos to the Summit Historical Society, I'm sure that they'll grant me reproduction rights to the two or three I want.  Then their provenance on eBay becomes irrelevant.  :)

I found lots of interesting illustrations, including the ad below, at the Historical Society.  When possible, I do follow up.  In this case, PSE&G was kind enough to permit me to use their images and recipes however I wanted in the cookbook.

I do try to observe the proprieties, but what kind of a researcher would I be if I gave up immediately and said, "Oh, I'll probably never be authorized to use that?"

For one thing, the cookbook wouldn't have as many pictures.  Remember, order your advance copy now for $20.

Will these pictures get me in trouble?

Please don't bid against me, but yesterday I bid on a lot of photos on eBay.  They're supposed to show a family in Summit, NJ, in the '40s and '50s.  According to the seller, there are a few of the kind I want, that is, photos of kitchens, dining rooms, and of people eating home-prepared food in Summit.

What if I win the bidding?  Can I use the pictures in my church cookbook?  Obviously, I can.  I have a scanner.  But may I?  I'm hoping the seller can either get the subjects' permission or give me permission as a family member.  What if he doesn't know the subjects because he bought a box of snapshots at an estate sale?

Who holds the copyright then?  If you have any helpful thoughts on this, please let me know.  Otherwise I'll do my customary desultory research.  Then I'll probably conclude that I'm running out of time because I need to get the file to the printer and run the pictures anyway, hoping that the subjects or their descendants never notice.

What was I saying about ignorance of the law being no excuse?

Webmasters need expertise--technical, graphical and legal

It's not enough to be able to buy a domain, design a style sheet and know how to transfer your files to the internet.  As my friend Alan Norton, a writer for techrepublic reminds us, webmasters need to stay abreast of legal developments that affect their sites. 

His article Do Webmasters need to add lawyer and legal counsel to their job description? points out that a morass of legal issues lurks to bedevil innocent internet publishers, especially online retailers. 

Asked and answered, your honor.  The question Alan addresses in the article above is one that people are still grappling with, for example on LinkedIn, where someone recently asked "Does an ecommerce retailer have to file taxes in each state it sold a product in?"


Unfortunately, as John Selden wrote in the 17th century,

Ignorance of the law excuses no man: Not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.

That means the short answer to Alan's question is, yes, webmasters do need to add legal counsel to their job descriptions, at least if they want to avoid legal hassles down the road and sleep easily at night.

All these heavy responsibilities on the webmasters' heads are one more reason why they should engage copywriters--lots of them.  After all, even webmasters can't be experts at everything.

Site Templates Are Your Friends

When you start your first website, you probably don't need a lot of fancy features.  You need to get comfortable putting your message on the interwebs--you can always change it up later.

Templates are your friends.  They give you a variety of looks for your site--maybe not as much variety as you want, but still.  If you decide it's really not you, press a button and it's gone.

If you have a blog, you already know how templates work.  Was I surprised that setting up a "real" website is just as easy.

So find a template you like and concentrate on the more important issues: what you want to say, and your domain name.  I'm happy to help you with both, of course.  But I want you to learn how to update your site yourself, so that you can keep it fresh and keep readers (both human and search engines) coming back for more.

FYI, I created my own website, KatharineHadow.com, using a template. :)

Price

The next big decision our cookbook committee faces is the price.

This book is a fundraiser, after all. It doesn’t serve the organization to think small. And let’s not forget that cookbooks are the second-best selling book genre after mysteries. (Have you noticed how many mysteries feature recipes at the end? Coincidence? I think not.)

Some people are timid about the price, recalling another cookbook 30 years ago. “We had trouble getting rid of all the copies.” 

That’s backward. The question should be “What was the return on investment?” Before they scrapped the remainders, how much money did the book make? 

Here’s why this project is different:

•  It’s not your ordinary community cookbook. The cookbook has delicious recipes like sachertorte. It also offers offbeat ones like “goo on rice,” inspiring witty prose, if I do say so myself.
• Many people don’t read cookbooks for the recipes, but for the text that sets the recipes in the local culture. We have a lot of that, as well as pictures, not of the food, but of the community.
• The text doesn’t center around the church, but around the community, Summit, NJ, which should trigger wider demand.
• Yeah, yeah, we should be asking what recent local cookbooks sell for, but I don't think you can compare a collection of recipes to our value-added production.  Honestly, if Tabasco still offered its community cookbook award, we'd enter this book, after making sure we had quite a few recipes with Tabasco in them.
• Besides me, the committee has experienced marketers with retail experience. We know how to push and pull, but do we know how to price? We’ll find out soon enough. Advance orders will be available next month, after our pricing meeting.

 

Balzac's Ghost

On the web, constant revisions are good. In print, they’re not.

French novelist Honoré de Balzac exasperated his editors by constantly updating his books, even when the type was already set. The printer charged him for each new set of proofs, so Balzac indebted himself thanks to his constant revisions.

When all type is composed on the computer, the deadline seems fluid. I’m working on a cookbook with a terrific committee. We made such a concerted push for recipes that now, months later, people ask if they can still submit their favorites. It seems like no big deal, right? Nothing’s gone to the printer yet. Just toss a few more words into the file, like salting a soup before serving.

In fact, it’ll still take time to organize the recipes and weave them into a coherent book. At some point we can’t accept any more contributions.

I’m starting to feel like Balzac’s editor, one with 21st century tools. I told the committee that if anyone else offered them a recipe they could call me on their cell phones. I’d shriek and gibber loudly enough that the would-be donor would put down the recipe and back away slowly.

By all means, update your online content as often as possible. For print, though, you have to be able to say, “This is as good as it’s going to get,” and mean it, or it’ll never get into print.

This cookbook, and the recipes, will be pretty darn good. Advance orders are available starting next month.

Of course I read your source code

 
Of course I read your source code--you leave it visible.

 

The question is, why don’t you? If you’re taking the time to update the content, update your meta-information, too. As long as you’re already in the source code, add a few keywords. If you want to do a great job it can take longer, but a decent job takes two minutes a page. Just pick relevant search terms that match the text on the page. Even doing it by guess and by golly is better than

• leaving the meta-information blank
• using unrelated keywords
• or using the same ones on every page

The search engines don’t weigh the tags as highly as they used to, but they’re still important, and they cost next to nothing. Relevant tags stop gawkers like me from opening up your source code and asking, “What were they thinking? Were they thinking?”

More on organic SEO.

 

Copying Copy

The point of a blog is to update it frequently, with interesting content that invites readers to stick around, leave a comment, and return to read more.

I don’t have that much to say.  If I had, I’d write a book.  The truth is, my noteworthy insights are rare.

Most of what you find here is what the legacy media would call evergreens, articles that you can hold in a drawer (or on a thumb drive) and run any time.  Many professionals already know what I tell you about the basics of SEO, for example.  It’s true--it’s just not really news.

Then why do people from all around the world read this blog? They can easily find information about SEO or public speaking on better-known, easier-to-find websites. 

Could it be the very obscurity that draws them here?  Search engines look constantly for fresh content, as we’ve said.  So everybody wants new words on their websites.

At the same time, search engines penalize duplicate content.  If they find the same text on multiple websites, the search engines figure that somebody’s trying to game the system.

So what’s a site owner to do?

a)      Write fresh material every day.  It doesn’t have to be newsworthy.  It just has to be new

b)      Find fresh material, um, somewhere else and copy paste it

c)      Find fresh material, um, somewhere else, and mash it through article rewriting software to change the nouns and the verbs

d)      Offshore the process

A relatively obscure blog like this one is a good place to find words to copy, because other people are unlikely to find it and copy it.  

I'm not really worried about duplicate content yet.  I am worried about looking ridiculous.  Spammers have run my press releases through rewriting software before.  The results would have been hilarious--if my name hadn’t been on them. 

If this blog is your, “um, somewhere else,” and you’re here to borrow copy, I can’t really stop you.  All I ask is that you

e)      Take only the evergreens.  They have better search terms anyway.

f)        Make substantial changes, like more than 40%

g)      Please, leave my name off your final product.

If you’re here to read, hi there and welcome!  Please leave a message and tell me what else you’d like to read about.

NJCommunique's New Year’s Resolution

In 2011, I will update my blog more often.

As a writer, I study ways that I can encourage more people to read my work online.  One way to do this is to write so that the search engines find it.  The more relevant the search engines think this blog is to internet users’ queries, the higher up on the page this blog appears on the search engine results.

People are impatient.  The closer a website is to the top of the first page, the more likely they’ll click on it.  If they click on my site, bingo!  I have more readers!

This process is called search engine optimization.

If I know that a lot of people search on the term “LinkedIn,” I can use the word “LinkedIn” and any synonyms I can think of, frequently within the post.  “Aha!” the search engine says to itself, “this post must be really relevant to the query because it concentrates on the subject—look how many times the word LinkedIn repeats.  I’d better recommend this page to people who want to learn about LinkedIn.”

Another way that the search engines check web pages is to see how many other web pages refer to it.  If a lot of other people recommend my page to their readers, my page must be good.  This is especially true if the website that refers to it is prominent.

I use this fact to a certain extent.  My LinkedIn profile includes a link to this blog.  If I think my friends might be interested in a certain post, I also mention it on Facebook.  If I wanted to, I could visit strangers’ blogs, leave comments there and include a link back to this blog.  I don’t usually bother.  I do have an offline life.

Another thing the search engines look at is how frequently the website is updated.  If nobody updates the website, the search engine figures it’s been abandoned or that the information on it’s outdated.  Search engines want to see sites with frequent changes. 

I like this blog to have good search engine results, which is why I vow to update it more often this year.  Thanks for visiting, and y’all come back now, you hear?

Contains historical facts and conjectures!

This is why you should avoid committee meetings:

I showed up at a committee meeting for my church last spring.  “Gee,” said the chair, “it would be great if we published a cookbook.  Katharine, would you be interested in taking it on?”

Actually, I was and am interested.  I assembled a formidable committee; we’re making great strides.  The problem is that we know that most people who want recipes look on the internet.  Who needs another cookbook?

So we decided to intersperse lots of commentary among the recipes.  We also decided that focusing on the community might make the book appeal to more buyers than those within our church.

I started assembling the commentary, a decade-by-decade retrospective of cooking in Summit, New Jersey, over the last hundred years.  Now I find that because I’ve begun the task, no one else is inclined to take it over.

Historical research is more difficult than I thought.  You find snippets here and there.  You try to knit them together, even if the connection is tenuous.  Then you find another nubbin that throws off your entire storyline.  Or you find that you have far too much information about one era, so much that it makes the other sections look scant.

Clearly, you then have to discard some of the information.  But what?

I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I never dreamed that it would be one so far out of my field.  Wish me luck, please.

My Cringeworthy Website

Please don’t visit KatharineHadow.com. 

Whenever I visit it I tell myself that it looks disorganized and unprofessional.  Then I do what anyone else would do.  I close the tab.

I started my site for two reasons:

1. as a portfolio for my print work, so I could send URLs instead of attachments
2. to show that I could produce and maintain a website

 It serves those purposes, but it’s unwieldy now.

It needs to portray a bold, confident marketer who can size up customers and bang out compelling copy on tight deadlines.  It, well, doesn’t.

But, ugh, the thought of rewriting all that copy from scratch, finding the perfect USP and call to action feels so overwhelming.

And yet, I do it daily in my pitch letters.  Pitch letters are easier, probably because I can tell myself that no one reads them anyway.

My project for today is to cull the best lines from my pitch letters and refashion them into exciting web copy for KatharineHadow.com.

About perfection—It’s actually good if the web copy isn’t perfect.  If the site were perfect, I’d never change it.  Then the search engines would assume that I’d abandoned the site, and eventually my rankings would slip.

So, in web copy, as in life, the goal is

Progress, not perfection.

Copywriting Prostitutes

My favorite clients are the ones whose writing skills are undistinguished, whose writing doesn't reflect their other accomplishments.  They appreciate good writers.  They may ask for minor rewrites, but on the whole we get along well.  They’re pleased, and they say so.  They pay on time.  We both walk away happy.

Then there are the ones who write decently.  They believe that they could do the work themselves.  Some of them could.  As a result, they don’t really value my services.

And there are the ones who patronize the furtive writers who stand on the corners in mini skirts and fishnet stockings.  These pros shame themselves by writing academic essays for lazy students who’ve probably spent too much time playing beer pong or otherwise disporting themselves.

For example

Just ask the Doc…

If you are looking for help with your academic work, you have come to the right place. I have helped hundreds of students just like you. My high quality work is always on time.

I am a Phd and a Harvard Graduate. Outside of running my own business, I freelance in academic writing and take on about 3 new clients each week. Many of my clients are repeat customers who know they can rely on me to get the job done. 

• I am an expert in APA, MLA and Chicago formatting.
• I have written dissertations, theses, capstones, literature reviews and research papers.
• I can take on rush assignments with a turn-around time of less than 24 hours.
• My rates are reasonable and include unlimited revisions.

There is no project too big or too small. Please give me a call today: (phone number) or email me at (email address)

No exaggeration.  I copy/pasted "Doc's" ad.  “Doc” is too lazy to type an apostrophe ("If you are looking"), or to capitalize properly ("PhD," and "Harvard Graduate").  Is the "shift" key so hard to reach with that left little finger?

Yet his or her work is probably better than his or her clients’. The clients are probably grateful.  The problem is that "Doc's" writing penalizes students who attend college to learn, who turn in less-than-perfect papers, and who seek honest feedback from professors.  “Doc’s” clients graduate and find that they can’t write worth a bucket of warm spit.  They become my grateful clients.

In the meantime, “Doc” cheats students and educators simultaneously.  Hope they're wearing protection.  “Doc” is a prostitute among copywriters, degrading us all. 

To Every Cow Her Calf

"as to every cow her calf, so to every book its offspring"

Having now taught, bought, begged for, and bartered copywriting, I enjoyed reading Intellectual Property, edited by Jennifer Peloso.

Jeff Beale reminded me of the 6th-century copyright decision above in Broken Links and Broken Laws: Copyright Confusion Online.

The most interesting article in the review was Plagiarism by Denise Hamilton, with its profile of the students most likely to copy their essays and why.

Fair Use/Abuse

As a content writer, I am very much interested in the issue of copyright abuse. With screen scraping, it's easy to do. (CNN might even accuse me of it for my posting on McCain and Fannie Mae.) And, what the heck? It's just words. I hear that a lot: "Just put in some content," as if no actual work was involved.

I had to work for that content. I had to gather and organize all the material, then try to inject some original thoughts. The stakeholders had to approve it, and then I had to get the legal department to sign off on it. It's not "just" content. It's work and you should respect it.

An article in the New York Times points out that publishers object to extensive quotes, even if the writer who appropriated them gives back links. The person reading the rehashed article may not follow the links, so the original publisher is not getting the eyeballs he or she needs to win advertising dollars. Another point the Times did not bring up is that Google takes points off PageRank for duplicated content. That's why everybody wants original content, both for their readers' pleasure, and for better search engine rankings. But, as I said before, conceiving and delivering original content is a lot of work. Which is why it is so much easier just to scrape someone else's off the screen.

Chris Crum of WebProNews invites us all to weigh in on this matter.

No SAT Words, Please

Yesterday I fielded a request to write my web content for the "lowest common denominator." This was a response to some copy that included two-syllable words that a high-school junior should reasonably expect to encounter on the SAT.

The request reminded me of my early career, communicating with corporate headquarters in Paris and with steel mills in "Province" (a region I sought vainly on my map of France and finally concluded was anywhere that was not Paris.)

My colleagues in Paris tended to use the informal "tu." Their sentence structures were clipped, rather American. My colleagues at the mills, on the other hand, used the formal "vous." Moreover they wrote long, flowery faxes and emails that ended with lovely phrases like, "Please accept, Madame, my most distinguished salutations."

Because of the time difference and my own halting French, I preferred to write to them rather than to telephone. I soon learned that I could make my point more effectively if I larded my prose with respectful "Madame"s and "Monsieur"s. Instead of pegging me as a brash and illiterate American asking for yet another favor (such as being sure to ship before the Great Lakes closed), the language I used made it easier for them to give me what I wanted.

I hit the goldmine one day when I found a French-English dictionary published in 1912. It oozed with the unctuous greetings I needed to go toe-to-toe with my French counterparts.

I still have that dictionary. It reminds me that different vocabularies suit different populations. Some readers appreciate and respond well to SAT words.