Diary of a Mad Editor

There’s this dude who keeps submitting poems to me. Every day, he emails one poem to me. Imagine finding a really bad new poem in your inbox every single day by the same bad poet. Imagine this is in addition to dozens of other submissions by other writers that also arrive every single day.

Wouldn’t you get really annoyed if you had to send the same person a fresh rejection notice every day if you were an editor of a literary magazine and you had thousands of submissions flowing to you every day, but part of your day was being wasted by a godsmack awful writer who doesn’t follow submission guidelines — a fellow whose submission practices border on harassment. My guidelines firmly state that I don’t want to see multiple submissions (in other words, I don’t want to see new material from the same writer until I’ve read and responded to old material). And I certainly don’t want to see a person whose written 365 new poems send them to me one at a time day-in, day-out.

They have submission services for writers — companies that will submit to magazines on a writer’s behalf so said writer doesn’t have to deal with the submission guidelines or have any direct contact with editors, etc. I wish there was a service like iDump4U.com that actually rejected writers on an editors behalf.

It’s not that I’m a pussy or anything. It’s just that I’m at a point in my life where dealing with certain kinds of writers . . . um . . . well . . . I’m just past it. What this guy is doing is akin to being water-boarded or some shit. It’s a tactic, you know. He thinks if he keeps sending me a poem every day, I’ll get so tired of rejecting him, I’ll just accept one of his shit poems to get rid of him.

No, I’ve already warned him. What does usually happen in cases like this is I’ll just reach a point where I’ll just stop reading his emails and block the fucker altogether. I don’t want to do that, but what has become so tiresome for me over the years is having to explain to dumb-ass, no-talent writers why I’ve rejected them and have them a) respond to me with a dear-in-the-headlights, "huh?" and continue to ignore my attempts to educate them, doing the same thing that annoyed me in the first place or b) respond with vitriolic, self-deluding comments because I dared to reject their work. It would be so much easier if I had a Bradley to contact these kinds of writers on my behalf and have him be the bad guy instead of being pushed into being that bad guy myself.

The other day, I was reading an article on some tech news website in which the author was lamenting the "inevitable" death of print magazines and the lack of quality control online (terribly ironic when one considers that he had written this article for an online publication). I am always suspect of an advocate of print publishing who makes a blanket statement about the poor editorial standards of online publishers. Not that there aren’t plenty of instances of lackadaisical editorial standards online (which we’ll get to shortly), but given that there are plenty of instances of lapses in both editing and fact-checking in offline publishing, it’s not at all fair to say that offline automatically equals quality and online automatically equals low quality. To prove his point, though, the author pointed to a well-known article farm. The term "article farm" is obviously a derogatory term. Simply put it’s a site that offers both free and custom-written articles about a variety of topics based on certain keywords. Like me, if you’ve been involved in online writing and publishing, you’ve probably written for these sites at some point and used some of these articles for your newsletters and websites.

Which brings me to a site called articlealley.com. Just this morning I was asked to review this site. It is, by definition, an article farm that employs many, many writers to produce both free and custom articles. There are a number of custom-writing packages offered ranging from $40 for a single article to $23 per article for bulk purchases. I couldn’t help think about the previously mentioned article while I browsed this site. Although this company promises high standards of quality control for it’s custom articles, I am assuming that the same writers creating this content are the same guys and gals writing the free articles available on the site. If so, let the buyer beware. Having read a number of the free articles on the site, I have to tell you that the quality control is non-existent. The information contained in the article is generic and unoriginal. Copyediting and proofreading are likewise non-existent. Many of the articles don’t even seem to be written by writers who speak and write English as a primary language. One such article, “Kanye West Lady Gaga A True Rock Performer” is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. That gives me pause.  Read that article and tell me honestly you’d pay Azeem to write for your website. Because if you are paying $40 for an article that you have to edit and rewrite yourself, you’d be better off  writing it yourself to begin with and saving your money.

I know of several of these so-called article farms that actually do demand a certain standard from their writers and do take some time with an article and demand rewrites prior to approving an article. Unfortunately, many don’t and that makes everyone who publishes online look bad. My hope is that articlealley.com has higher standards for its custom articles and will be more discerning in the future when it comes to their free articles. Because when it comes to generating traffic and ad revenues, quality is much more important to the equation than keyword density.

Yesterday I was reading an article in a regional newspaper discussing the possibility of legalizing online gambling in New Jersey. In the early days of the Internet, recall that there were plenty of online casinos where players could win and lose real money. However, the government started cracking-down on these operations, largely do to powerful casino lobbyist in Atlantic City and Las Vegas because they didn’t want the competition. As such, many of the older online casino evolved into virtual gaming sites to avoid future prosecution for online gambling. It’s interesting to see, in the wake of a major recession and record losses, casinos are changing their tune. Now that they have something to gain from investing in online gaming, they want to change the rules. What that means is that instead of just having online gaming sites where players play for virtual money, more and more of these site will once again become real online casinos. And, with the resurgence of gambling sites, it stands to reason there will be more sites about gambling sites. Onlinecasinoplanet is such a site.

Onlinecasinoplanet.org is not an online casino. It bills itself as an online resource for gambling enthusiasts. It’s web design is simple with fairly well-organized information. It’s compilation of contact info for offline casinos is rather impressive, but probably not comprehensive as I suspect there are far more casinos in the world than what is listed on this site. The reviews of online casinos are nothing special. There aren’t many of them — only a few and, rather than providing genuine unbiased reviews, the information looked to be taken directly from the online casinos’ web sites rather than being feedback from actual players. There are also some general articles about the most popular casinos games that are written for beginners. As such, this site might have some value for casual gamblers or non-gamblers, but it’s not a terribly useful resource for experienced players. I would recommend putting more effort into having actual reviews on the site and providing content useful to experienced gamblers ( like perhaps regularly featuring articles on high roller games, underground card games, etc.), because those are the people who will bring traffic to this site. There are too many other places for beginners to get useful information.