Ghost Writers
It may just be the day and times we live in, but as the volume heads into the 400-700 articles approved per day… I have less and less confidence in ghostwritten articles.
It’s not that I’m against the concept of ghostwriting at all, but that most authors who hire ghostwriters don’t quality control their people and they end up sending in crap that we then have to sift through to reject.
I’m thinking that we should start to label authors with the following grades:
A) Original written material
B) Ghostwritten material (this author may be fake)
C) Ghostwritten material with some original words.
How in the world can a publisher come to our site to find articles that were really written by the authors who say they wrote them?
No, we’re not really going to label ghostwritten articles as “fake” but we are going to pursue this discussion to bring out more value for our publishers who are struggling to identify who’s real vs. who’s not.
One more rant if you’ll permit me:
Last week I busted a ghostwriter who was telling a fictional tale about the author that didn’t exist. Seemed like a lie to me to create a persona or brand out of a alias. Wouldn’t be a problem if this author had only 1 alias, but he had dozens of them with dozens of lies.
I know companies do this all the time (Mavis Beacon teaches typing, for example as there is no woman named Mavis really or Peter Norton, the famous Symanetc anti virus guy who doesn’t really exist)…
BUT, the end outcome here is to raise consumer and publisher confidence in the articles they are reading on our site by identifying the bullsh*t from the quality original articles.
Your thoughts how to solve this issue?
Chris,
A scheme like the one you describe would be great for those of us who use our time and brain cells writing articles from scratch.
Makes me mad that every legitimate means of marketing and getting publicity seems to get hi-jacked by those looking for an easy solution to making money without offering anything of any real value to anyone.
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