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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

When I Put Out the Call

Sometimes I almost hesitate to mention that Writing About Writing is always looking for guest bloggers to chime in with their thoughts–both one shots for our once-a-week guest post or in a more regular way like Claire, Amy, and Bethany.

My response rate to these posts is actually quite good. Twenty or thirty e-mails will pour into my inbox over the next day or three.

But then I start to read them.

About half of them are strangely non-English. I don't have any problem with folks struggling with English (they are who I teach when I'm teaching). But for a blog written in English to an English-reading audience, "I am liking to be as guest blogs for WAW" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Then there are the auto-replies. "Hello. I found your most recent blog post to be incredibly educational. (Oh really? The one about how I wouldn't be writing a post today because I'm experiencing explosive incontinence and don't want to leave my apartment? That one?) I thought your last point could use some more detail. (You need to know more about what cleansers work really well on wall stains huh?) I have a proposal for a blog. Please contact me immediately."

There are clear scams: "I would like to blog about how to make 1500+/wk by doing online surveys.

More scams: "As the top financial advisor for Burkina Faso, I can write about how to make money. But first let me show you what I can do by giving me your checking account number so I can deposit 6 mil dinari...."

And still more scams: "My one step trick gets people a guaranteed big five book deal in less than six months. If you let me put up my link."

People who don't even bother to check what the blog is about "I can write about steam roofing!"

Content writers who are trying to make a buck. "Check out this last 200 word article I did for only $5.

Then there's this guy: "I know blogs, I have the best blogs. I have the best, and when you're done we're going to bring great sentences together and make great paragraphs with those words. We'll make WAW great again."

And through it all, if I'm lucky, I'll get about one person who actually seems to have read the Guest Blogging Guidelines or sticks around after I tell them that even though I'm willing to pay all my writers, the "pay" for a single non viral article here is about $2. I guess that makes it kind of a hazing process, and keeps me from having to answer a bunch of e-mails when I'm not.

So yeah, I could use some guest bloggers. Kinda.....

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for this post, Chris—I'm in the final revisions of what I hope will be a good guest post for WaW. The defecation has hit the oscillation here over the last eight months, and I apologize for the delay in getting the piece to you.

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