What to do with Unsold Articles
April 3, 2009 by Allison Boyer
Filed under Jobs
Every so often, writers have articles left over from a project. Sometimes, a client changes his or her mind or there’s an issue with payment. Sometimes, rights are reverted back to you after a certain amount of time. Sometimes, you misunderstood the guidelines and have to start over. Whatever the case, I don’t know a single writer who has NEVER had leftover articles.
So what do you do with them? Here are some ideas:
- Sell them on Constant Content. I LOVE this website. You can sell articles for high prices, even if they’ve been published before (as long as you retained your rights). There are lots of options, and the site is fairly busy with buyers.
- Contact your other clients. If you have other clients who run similar websites, they might be interested in purchasing your unused articles at a discount. Even selling the articles for half of what you’d typically charge is better than having them just sit on your computer.
- Start your own blog. If you have enough articles, you can use them to start your own blog on the topic. WordPress is my platform of choice, but Blogger is another great option. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll need to devote time to upkeeping the blog, even after you unused articles are all posted.
- Use them as pieces for an online portfolio. Every writer should have a website, if for no other reason than to legitimize your business and get a business email address. Here’s my website, for example. You don’t have to have an online portfolio with examples of your work, but if you do, this is a great place to use articles you haven’t sold.
What about you – have you ever had a case where you had unsold articles? What did you do with them?
Image via sxc.hu.
I don’t like constant content. They reject articles for little to no reason at all. Once I even got an article rejected because, they said, it was already published. That was completely untrue, as I know for sure the article was never posted anywhere on the web. Plus they charge way too much for what they offer, 50% of the price of articles sold is really, really not fair, especially since they don’t really do anything.
EugenS,
I do have to disagree that they reject articles for no reason. They have VERY strict standards about the typeface you use, formating, no links, no bio, etc., but that’s because they offer licenses that don’t allow the buyer to change the article at all – so a unified submission system actually helps you sell your articles.
They use copyscape to see if an article was already publish, so if you used quotes or had similar info it could have gotten flagged. With an automated, some people are unfortunately going to be flagged even if they are legitimate unique articles. As a freelancer, I HIGHLY recommend purchasing some copyscape searches for yourself (100 for $5, so it def doesn’t break the bank). I would never, ever plagiarize, but sometimes it is really easy to use similar wording as someone else, and if you have a number of your own articles published online, it is easy to use similar wording because of your personal writing style.
I also disagree that they charge too much. They actually take out 30%, not 50% (and 5% to a referrer if there was one). However, I’ve found that I can sell my articles for double the price or more on this website – I’ve sold 700-word articles for $100+, which is next to impossible to do on a content website otherwise, and even hard to do when you’re working directly with clients. I do feel like they’re justified because they screen every single submission, which keeps the quality of the content on the website really high – hence the higher article prices. As a comparison, eBay charges about 12% plus has a ton of other fees (n my experiences, bring the total closer to 18-25%), and they have very very little quality control.
I do know that some people have had bad experiences with CC though. That’s just totally no been the case for me – I LOVE the site.