This is one of the first questions that plagued me back in the olden days when I first started writing for Demand.
You see an article – let’s say, “How to Eat Fried Chicken”.
You scratch your head. Hmmm. Seems easy enough. I think I’ll claim it and write this article. I call these the “Retarded Articles”, because they seem to retardedly easy to write.
But is it easy? Or is this article just tempting you with the succulent nature of it’s easiness in order to entrap you in a world of rewrites, appeals and other unnameable horrors?
It’s an age old question.
Myself, I tend to grab these types of articles. After all, if you don’t write it, someone else will. I guess, if I were listening to my own advice is that I would grab the article, then post a question on the forums.
But sometimes I can be a dumbass and not listen to myself.
Posting to the Title Clarification forum takes up precious time and energy. Time is money, as we say here at Demand.
So what do you guys do?
Shirley: I used to write for LS until I had a minor disagreement with the head editor there and she started a personal vendetta against me. I should say I FELT LIKE she started a vendetta against me.
Either way, the next day she took me out of the queue because she said my resume didn’t show my qualifications. Impossible, I list my qualifications on ALL my resumes. I asked her to send the supposed resume to me and it looked like a form copied from a website like, say, the profile page.
I was reinstated and then she said that I could only write articles in my area of expertise (exercise and massage) and could not write articles about diseases. If I deviated, in any way, from writing about massage and exercise, then she would immediately remove me.
Here’s the problem. I’M an LMT and, in my state, that means I have a limited medical license. I am licensed to Treat illnesses. I can’t diagnose. I can’t prescribe meds. But I can TREAT. I had to study pathology and eight quarters of med school-level A&P.
I am qualified to talk about the signs, symptoms and causes of Erectile Dysfunction or sciatica or scoliosis or diabetes–and massage affects all these conditions. But, according to this editor, I wasn’t qualified.
Gee, someone should tell the state medical board of Ohio.
So, I quit.
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The TC people took too long to respond so I just unclaimed it. So the mouse dress is out there for whoever wants it….
I had completely forgotten that there were girl mice in Cinderella, lol.
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I am REALLY JEALOUS of the mouse dress article. What are you going to use as a pic?
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Chicklette: Are you sure it doesn’t mean a dress like the one the mouse wore in the Cinderella movie? I could see how that wouldn’t be retarded (ie: a school play).
http://www.imagesdisney.com/images/photos-cinderella-g.jpg
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Back when I first started, when most of the articles we wrote were things we suggested, there was a title that said How To Beat Up Richard Lally. Someone had obviously suggested it and somehow got it approved, then let it expire and enter the database of articles. Let me tell you, I was tempted to take it. No matter how many retarded titles Demand Studios puts out there that one will always be number one with me.
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Just scooped up a gem: How to Sew Cinderella Mouse Dress. As in a dress…for a mouse. This is gonna be a great one.
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I was qualified to write for LS before they opened it up to a bunch of random writers but I never bothered to apply. I’m actually very passionate about what I do, outside of writing, and I can’t handle watching some ignorant fool hack it apart because they saw conflicting information on fucking Oprah or in Cosmopolitan magazine.
I wrote several articles for eHow when I first started at DS using my text books as references AND I went ahead and found online references as well to make the CEs job easier. I got a bunch of stupid bullshit back quoting crap from the fucking biggest loser television show and one nice note from some fat fuck of a CE who calls herself a diet expert because she’s failed every diet she’s ever attempted in her entire fat fucking life. “Sorry, I’ve struggled with my weight all of my life, and this method does NOT work.”
You know what, if I get up every fucking morning for 15 years and attempt to change the oil in my car, but fail miserably each day, I don’t start telling people that I’m a fucking mechanic. Being fat does not make a person “basically” a nutritionist. I don’t even understand why a CE would feel the need to tell me that they’re overweight. I don’t give a shit. The problem is that they’re a bunch of basement dwelling Jabbas with serious insecurity problems so a simple fucking article about not eating so goddamn much crap hits a little too close to home.
Oh, that felt good. I’ve been needing to get that off my chest for a long time. Thank you so much for starting this site Patrick.
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I actually like the tips and short answers. Sure, they pay less than the standard but I can do twenty tips in the same amount of time it would take me to write two or three how-tos, so I make twice the money. And I can do it in 30 – 50 words.
Short answers are a little longer but I can still crank out ten or so without breaking a sweat (or getting burned out). 100 words minimum.
So that means getting $50 for a minimum 1000 words (or $60 for a minimum 600 words). To get $60 from a how to, I’d have to come up with at least 800 words (and that’s for a straight-forward how to with minimal steps.) And that’s if you don’t get a CE with a hard-on for word counts.
I love tips and short answers.
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@DS_Forum_lurker I write on the legal topics, but only because I’m very efficient with legal research because of my paralegal background. I can write a legal how-to in about half an hour, and tax how-to’s in about 45 minutes. More of my time for the legal articles is spent fleshing out my references, since everything I need for the article is usually on one page. The tax ones take a little longer because of all the forms and instructions being on separate pages. That kind of stuff is a cake walk for me. I think paralegals are well-suited for the type of work DS wants, since our job is to regurgitate laws and case precedents for court forms. Lawyers aren’t as good at stuff like that, since they never do any of their own research.
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@Shirly: Oh how I agree with you!!! I snap up those easy articles as fast as I can. If I can’t find any easy how-tos, I’ll write the restaurants, hotels, campgrounds, dance clubs, karaoke bars, dairy farms, dental hygienist schools & so on, in Anytown, USA lists for $15. Why? They’re STRAIGHTFORWARD. Therefore, less chance of ambiguity and no arguing with the CE about use of some prescription drug or whatever.
You know what? The more I read the DS forums, the more I see people complaining about rewrites because they wrote about a ambiguous topic or some kind of medical or veterinary topic. Those seem to cause a lot of stress for the writers.
Granted, I don’t write for LS (don’t want to, frankly. Health topics have no interest to me), nor do I have a legal background, but there are a ton of health topics of eHow, so maybe they *can* type up a 400-word how-to article on How to Measure Arterial Blood Pressure in Mice in 20 minutes.
Of course, these are the people on the forums who think they’re such good writers because they chose difficult topics. But at the end of the day, we’ll both get the same $15 for the articles, regardless of how difficult they are. You wanna write about the diarrhea symptoms in cats? Be my guest & enjoy your rewrite! I’ll go write “”How to Find Your Nearest Coffee Shop” for 200 words and get paid the same as you!
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Adam, if you feel so inclined, please send a link to my fake person email address. I tried to find it, but all I could find was an old eHow article about how to buy bling and another one about making blinged out baby slippers. So yeah, it’s chicklette_dsster@hotmail.com. Yes, I just made that. Woo Hoo!
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This is the funniest thread of all time. I’m literally laughing my ass of at Shirley and i smell’s posts. Some of the shit DS wants to give us money for is laughable. I’ll take it nonetheless.
As to the overwhelming number of appeals, I agree with i smell…rewrite and rejection appeals are going to probably go away. Why give people the option to appeal a rewrite when you can just throw the title back out for the other bazillion zombies to fight over? I never use the appeal process anyway. It’s not worth my time to get invested that far into a $15 article.
@Shirley: You are kick ass. The forum zombies are just jealous that they can’t get far enough out of DS’s ass crack to not care so much about piddly how-to articles. I mean, we put enough effort into the articles to make them worth $15, but it’s stupid and wasteful to put anything else into something so meaningless that we don’t even own. Pay me $50 an article and I might give a fuck. Until then, I’ll spend 15 minutes writing about How to Cut Your Toenails while they make $2 an hour.
@Adam V: How to Bling??? Really?! I need to find this article right now.
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I got an extremely choice title on “How to be Bling” or somesuch the other day. Good times. I wrote on it very seriously which made it even funnier. I go for the strangest titles I can find, usually. Knives. Bouffant hair. Pet rats. Although the one on 24 Hour Asian Milkmaids was a mistake. Don’t Google it.
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Don’t Google it? Will I die in 7 days if I read it?
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@i smell: lol –> retarded titles attract retarded CEs… never thought about it like that before.
Yes, it seems appeals are causing havoc over there.
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Sing it Betty Draper. If you go to a DS-owned website to find the answer to your questions, you are a retard. “How to Become a Licensed Blah Blah Blah in Kentucky” Umm…go the the website of Kentucky’s dept of licensing or whatever. Don’t waste your time reading the summarized DS version, get the info from the official state source.
“How Much Does a 5 Gallon Bucket Weigh?” Step 1: Get a scale. Step 2: Be less retarded.
FWIW, I don’t write the retarded titles anymore because they seem to attract the most retarded CEs. I stick to things I know that the average person doesn’t know, and I usually get good feed back from CEs.
And this message box just popped over my work desk:
“Due to an overwhelming volume of rejection appeals, we are currently behind in our response times. We will review all appeals we receive, so please be patient and do not send in further queries regarding the status of your appeals.”
Maybe DS will revamp the CE system if they get buried in appeals. Or maybe they will ban appeals. Knowing how DS tends to overreact opposite to writers best interests, I’m guessing that appeals will become a luxury of the past.
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WRITE WRITE WRITE! These are my FAVORITE titles to grab. Unfortunately, they all get swooped up quickly (gee, I wonder why?!!)
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I try to write the retardedly easy titles exclusively. I once shared that information on the DS forums as a tip for writing faster and was told that I’m not a “real writer” because I write “drivel”.
WTF ever. I spend 10 minutes writing useless bullshit under a fake name to make $15 while some super important “real writer” spends four hours writing a “masterpiece” for the same lousy $15. Fuck that noise, I write at DS for the cash not some imaginary prestige.
Write those stupid articles. You will get some rewrites over them but they are usually hilarious which makes them a little easier to bear. Everybody gets stupid ass rewrites occasionally and they’re harder to swallow when you give a shit about the subject matter. Some of my personal favorite editing notes on retarded articles include:
“What is a trowel? I have never heard of this and I am quite knowledgeable in home repair. Where would one purchase a “trowel” and how is it used?”
“You chose “easy” as the difficult of this task. The word “easy” is far too subjective and you should never use it in a DS article. Please choose a less subjective difficulty level.”
“This article is fine but you wrote it in first person. First person is FORBIDDEN at DS. I changed it for you this time and sent you the rewrite to make you aware of this problem. I won’t change it again.”
(The article was written in second person. The CE changed it to third person. So, at least one of the CEs is, literally, a fucking retard.)
None of that compares to the editor who just happened to send my rewrite back on one of the nights CEs were bragging about staying up all night to edit articles while drinking. The dumb bitch wrote: “I’m so confused?!?!?” more than a dozen times on the article before sending it back. It was a fucking recipe article for baking dinner rolls or some crap like that. No questions, no suggestions, just “I’m so confused?!?!?” over and over and over again.
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They’re all retarded titles.
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I’ll give a retarded title a whirl if I see some hope with it. Like chicklette, I’m in it for the dough. I hate the trickster titles – they look easy but usable resources are nil.
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I write every article as if I’m explaining something to a mentally handicapped 10 year old anyways so I love the retarded articles. I’m there for the money, writing simple $15 articles in 5-10 minutes makes more sense than writing complicated $15 articles in 2 hours.
I have lost some faith in humanity over these articles though. I had one incredibly simple article that came back with “I’m so confused?!?!?” written on it over a dozen times. No directions for me to follow or questions, just “I’m so confused?!?!?” written exactly like that. I actually passed a copy of that rewrite around to my family and friends because it was hilarious. Must have been one of those nights the CEs all got shit faced and then bragged about their drunken editing in the forum.
There was another retardedly simple article that was a craft project my five year old daughter had completed the week before. I marked the difficulty level as “easy”. The CE sent me back a long lecture about how the word easy is too subjective and I should never use it in an article. I hadn’t used the goddamn word easy in the text, I just marked the difficulty level as fucking easy because my five year old could successfully complete the craft without help. The CE went on to say that this craft would be “incredibly difficult” for him and that it sounded like something only an “expert crafter” should even attempt. I’m not sure if his phobia concerns craft glue or acrylic paints but the guy should really get some fucking help if a kindergarten art project intimidates him so.
Thank you so much for starting this site. It feels better to get it out without worrying about some ball-sucking jackass calling me “ungrateful”.
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Last time I wrote a stupidly obvious title the CE went all “durr I don’t get it” and introduced dozens of inaccuracies into the final piece. Never again.
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I love the stupid titles. I’m all for easy money, which is why I write for DS in the first place. The work I do for DS isn’t work that I readily promote as “my writing” because it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. I’m basically mimicking the DS format by plugging information specific to the topic into a formula. It’s much easier to just piece together information into the “stupid people” format they want than to try and make it my own. Retarded topics are just that much easier to detatch myself from. I reserve my energy for writing on my blog or on Suite 101. It doesn’t pay as well (another reason why I write for DS), but I can exercise my creative freedom a little more and get the extra change the revenue generates. And I do mean change, like quarters.
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I say if it’s easy and you can stretch it out the required number of words (or close) go for it. Maybe put a twist on it by offering different ways. Example: How to eat a slice of Pizza. Well, in NY they like to fold it. Others eat it with a knife and fork. Chicago Style is another animal.
BTW: The best way to use the title clarification queue is to ask the question and work on your other titles (after all, you can claim more once you submit). Then check the queue after a couple of hours. That way, you can still move on to other stuff while waiting for an answer.
And, if you don’t get an answer by the end of the day, drop the title and grab a better one.
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