Well, if you haven’t heard yet, Amazon has offended the writers’ and POD publishers’ communities with strongarm tactics.

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One day in Film Directing class, Dr. Stenholm was lecturing as usual when she began, “If something is worth doing…”

With a mental eyeroll and a nod, I finished it in my head: “…it’s worth doing right.”

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As you may be aware, I follow a few writing websites and newsletters, and I generally take a look at the freelance job postings, because 1) I am very good at writing, and 2) making money in my spare time is an appealing thought.  Anyway, today I came across a job posting that sounded mildly interesting, if only because they’re looking for multiple writers for projects they didn’t bother to describe in detail.  Out of curiosity, I checked their webpage.

Holy Wall-O-Text, Batman!

I debated sending them an email advising changes in their web design, but I’ve found that most people don’t want to hear it.  Their web designer is quite possibly related to the publishing company, based on the fact that the web designer’s page includes an affiliate link to a web business book on the publisher’s site.  They are (still) attempting to make horribly-out-of-style reciprocal linking work for them, they have cute-but-tacky images everywhere, and for some reason they insist on linking every possible category at the top AND left of the page.  Worse, the top links are rainbow file tabs, with the remaining links that wouldn’t fit in tabs lined up under them in a row that won’t fit neatly in my 1024×768 screen.  Last I saw, the majority of web surfers were still sticking with 800×600, though 1024×768 is gaining in popularity with the growth of higher resolution video cards.  My current card won’t go lower than 1024×768, and I don’t want to go higher, because I’m already nearsighted enough.

I don’t know what they’re using for a cart system, but it’s…well, ugly.  I’m much happier with what I’ve managed to do with OSCommerce for CDLauryl.com (not that you can see it yet; I’m still working on it - maybe after New Year’s I’ll be ready to bring it live).  I think they’d be better off using OSCommerce, too, if they’re able to handle CSS at all.

Anyway, I decided I didn’t want to apply.  If I wanted to write How To Get a Job guides (and comparably mundane non-fiction), I could publish them myself and skip the middleman.

(I miss the LJ mood-kitty.  I need to see if I can find a WP plugin to do moodthemes.)

These people have chutzpah.  By the time someone is published twice by major publishers and has significant publishing industry contacts, I suspect they don’t go through Craigslist looking for unidentified companies to hire them.  I have to wonder how successful they are if they’re looking to exploit hire authors with existing contacts.

I wonder if I may be a bit too vocal about my opinions on the state of copyright; I had two different people tell me about the article on Slate yesterday (and it’s almost the day before yesterday - I’m staying up too late!). One was my boss, who told me about it at work. I checked it out and sent myself a link so I could refer back to it when I got home. When I checked my email, I had two messages with the same link - the one I sent myself, and one from my mom.

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