I have decided to take the highly successful ‘Become A Published Author’ course live and online. Instead of just offering it at Macarthur and Nepean Community Colleges four times a year each, I plan to have it ongoing and online. So far the pricing and basic set up is yet to be finalized but I envisage a cost of below $160 including a copy of the published book delivered to each writer. This is what students pay for the face to face course, so I think a discount for the online delivery should be fair all round given the extra costs in having to ship each student their copy rather than share the shipping across all students and deliver them in person at the final session.

The benefits to be had include instruction and mentoring in short story writing (although memoir and other genre are accepted for publication) as well as being published both electronically here on Dangerous Ideas and also in print, on paper, for real, ISBN included. Once a writer is a published author, that hurdle is no longer to be leapt. It is behind them. They can now focus on their next book, polish their skills, improve their craft, sell something! Stay tuned for more details. The first course will commence soon!

John Locke recently sold 1.1 million copies of his books via Amazon.com. He is the first self published author to join the  Million Seller Club at Amazon. The other 8 members are all backed by mainstream publishing houses. Congratulations John.  John sells his eBooks via Kindle for just $0.99, of which he makes just $0.35. But 35% of 1.1 million is over $350,000. I would love to have to pay the income tax on a third of a million bucks. Made in just five months! John wrote a book about how he did this and has it for sale for $4.99. I bought a copy. Wouldn’t you?

I must say he was already a wealthy man when he started writing and he spends a couple of thousand dollars per title using a company called Telemachus Publishing to professionally edit, format and publish the books. His cover art is terrific, but you would expect it to be. Still, there is no reason cheap skates with no capital like yours truly can’t replicate much of what he does and get some similar results.

I won’t steal the guy’s thunder or give the game away. Buy the book like I had to. It really isn’t rocket science but it does prove that the method he used, and anyone can copy, does work. Put your prejudices aside and just follow the model like I am and let’s see where it leads. The penny finally dropped if nothing else. I knew all along I have to spend as much time and effort selling the books as writing and publishing them. OK. Now I will do that. I have rearranged my schedule to write of a morning when I am fresh and to market after 10pm when I usually sit at the writing machine for three or fours hours and just mess about and achieve very little. That leaves time inbetween to tutor and lecture (paying jobs, yee hah!) and also exercise. I started this yesterday and while early days, it feels right.

So, if nothing else, my $4.99 investment in the book and maybe an hour or so of my time reading it will be beneficial in ways other than a sudden, penny dropping epiphany leading to riches and happy ever afters. OK. The lesson has been learned. You have to work hard to sell the writing. That is why publishing houses have a large staff of sales, marketing, proofing, art department and editorial people working for the lucky few writers they deign to take on.

OI know it is a business, for centuries it was a processed paper selling business,now it includes downloads. But now we little guys can give the big fellas a run for their money. There is no excuse for not producing a quality eBook, edited, proofed, spell checked and formatted properly. One that doesn’t detract from the content by upsetting the reader with typos, gaps and orphaned words galore.

The more I investigate this topic, the more I find there is an industry out there preying on writers. Many Essay Writing sites are just scammers taking money and delivering plagiarized ‘copy and paste’ collations, often late and after demanding more money. While I have zero sympathy for those with more money than brains and organizational capabilities, these students are getting ripped off. Some pay hundreds of dollars for their essays and term papers and end up getting busted for plagiarizing, which is fair enough.

A legitimate custom essay writing company in the UK says it is not cheating if the student uses the custom written essay as a guide. Kind of like just another form of research notes, a guide to how their own essay could be written. If the student did that and didn’t hand the essay in as their own work then fair enough but we know most students will just hand it in and whine for a refund if they get a poor mark or caught out. There are links on that UK website to newspaper reports on this burgeoning industry that say many students will get access to such a service as a Christmas gift, so keen are many middle class parents for their children to do well at college. Pity they didn’t teach them some character traits like discipline, hard work and pride in one’s own achievements. But then this is so reflective of our 21st Century society it is pointless to expect things to change. The positive side, surely, is that it gives eWriters more opportunities to earn their living writing online. Well it does if they get paid for their work.

There are several essay writing providers claiming to be based in the UK or USA that are actually in the Ukraine or Hong Kong, with new ones springing up in Africa, both in Kenya and the infamous home of scammers, Nigeria. Some, like 4writers.net has a ruinous reputation of ripping writers off and must be avoided at all costs. I think most who fall for these scammers are ESL writers for whom English is a second language and they writer cheap. How some can write for three or even six months and swallow the lies given to them as to why no pay only means they are desperate for the work. But what good is a lot of work if they never pay?

The great thing about the Internet is that it is so easy to read widely. The rhizomatic nature of the world wide web lead early on to the term ‘surf the net’. You surf in and out of web sites and blogs with the click of a mouse, going from cool to boring and back to fascinating in seconds.

In fact there are surveys out there saying you have between 15 and 45 seconds to capture the imagination of the viewer that just surfed in or else they will surf on out again. When you find a site that grabs your attention it is scary how much time you can spend there and never realise it. One such site I found after Googling ‘ewriter’  is The e-Writer’s Place.

The owners are obviously trying to make a living from their site and there is nothing wrong with that. They have it jam packed with free info to give value and I find the ads interesting also.One of the articles (on how Editors are not the enemy) led me to another resource loaded site, Writers Crossing . Com. This one is a little different and looks at work for writers and places to obtain it.

As I followed the various links I was sent to that rip off ‘Real Writing Jobs’ web site I reported about recently. This, if anything, reminds us all to be careful and never forget the admonition to ‘Caveat Emptor’, buyer beware. Just because you find it on an otherwise reputable and informative site, or through a series of hyperlinks to a site you trust, there is no excuse for switching off the scam detectors. The Internet makes reading widely simple, but that doesn’t guarantee everything you read will be totally legitimate and above aboard.

Best thing is to judge for yourself. Surf on over there  by clicking on the hyper link above and as you do, take a moment to savour the speed of light travelling you are undergoing from one spot to another in cyber space. You really have to love this Internet, it has changed all of our lives. It is what makes a writer an eWriter after all.