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Open Post for Demand Studio Editors
Felicia | May 31, 2009 | Comments 180
Recently I was contacted by a writer for a rather popular magazine and was interviewed about my experience with Demand Studios. I won’t mention the magazine as I’m not sure if my comments will be included in the final piece (If it is, I’ll post the link here). The interview gave me the idea for this post.
I felt it fair to create an open post for Demand Studio editors. There’s been lots of comment activity from freelance writers for Demand Studios, but the editors have not been represented. Some writers are very happy and others, including myself, express frustration at the editing process. I would love to hear from a few of the Demand Studio editors.
Writer Frustration
From my own experience, my frustration with Demand Studios stems from two areas:
- Some of the editors appear to be unfamiliar with the article subject matter. As a result, they request rewrites that would not be necessary if there was a familiarity with the topic.
- On many occasions there are conflicting edit requests. Sometimes there’s a direct conflict with the Demand Studio writers guidelines and other times the rewrite requests contradict instructions required by another editor. Not being totally sure which editor will receive the article, Demand Studio writers sometimes feel it’s a crapshoot whether or not their work will be approved when they click the ‘Submit’ button.
Open Communication with Demand Studios
In an attempt to keep this post open and non accusatory, I won’t go into things such as edit review time, title availability and other issues that can crop up from time to time with any freelance writing arrangement. After all, we’ve all had to deal with software glitches and fluctuations in work load.
I believe the major frustration (and if I’m wrong, my readers will correct me), is that the editing process leaves many Demand Studio writers scratching their heads wondering if some of the editors are fully familiar with the writer guidelines and wondering why there is such a lack of uniformity when it comes to article rewrite requests.
Demand Studios Freelance Writer Cattle Call
I’ve noted that Demand Studios frequently post ads looking for freelance writers. It seems to me that if the communication or ‘training’ so to speak between the current editors and writers were better, more freelance writers would stay and the need for new writers would diminish.
In today’s economy, writers are looking to remain loyal to paying customers. I think a few tweaks here and there would help to develop a long lasting mutually profitable relationship between Demand Studios and their existing freelance writers and editors.
Comment Invitation
I look forward to input from Demand Studio editors and writers. I know some writers are very passionate about their dealings with Demand Studios and I ask those writers to use their stellar writing skills to convey the point without allowing too much venom to spew forth.
Filed Under: Demand Studios • Freelance • Legitimate • Opportunities • Writing
I have the same thing for my blog… Kindle readers can get a subscription to access the blog on the Kindle. Very cool.
Hi, Felicia, I notice the Amazon link and monthly charge for your blog. What’s up? I wish you well with whatever you’re doing, I’m just not sure if access to your blog is limited unless the fee is paid.
That only applies to the Kindle. Amazon charges a fee to blog subscribers if they choose to access blogs using the Kindle.
I was accepted to write for Demand Studios but I have yet to write one article for them. I am not a DS editor nor do I represent one; however, I thought many of the writers and editors here would find this article a very interesting and amusing read. I would encourage you to read it in its entirety.
http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/my-summer-on-the-content-farm
You will gain new insight into the workings of Demand Studio, and perhaps get a good look into the belly of the beast. It is written by an ex-DS editor who could barely stomach to work for them more than a couple of months. This is all to say that the perception of Web content writers has not improved. Professional writers are expecting to be paid what they’re worth. It has become a challenge to separate the wheat from the chaff, both in terms of meaningful content and qualified writers.
Interesting read.
I’ve been writing for DS for a month, and I love it. I’m never thrilled to have to do a rewrite (who would be?), but so far the comments I’ve gotten from copy editors have been really helpful, and no one has been rude. Felicia, thanks for starting this thread. It’s interesting to hear about everyone’s experiences!
Been on DMS for a short while as a copy editor, and I’m making the same style and sentence-structure corrections for copy online as I’ve made at newspapers for two decades. That’s why we’re copy editors and you guys are writers.
Anne, you can select from an area of interests and that should help get more articles that you like in your queue. You do get to choose from 10 articles at any given time, so you do have some ability to pick and choose. If I really don’t see anything I like at one time, I’ll just wait a few minutes and hit refresh and a few new articles will pop up. However, if you do select and open an article, it is yours. You can’t back out of it. Actually, you can, but if you let it expire without editing, it probably wouldn’t look very good.
I wish you well that the work will continue and you can put food on the table. I was doing that as well, and I was canned.
I was also let go from Mahalo after being answer guru because I could not devote a days to the answer shift. I got on with them at the same time I got an out of the house job. I finally got a job where I can make good money working only twice a week to four times a month and having a ball doing it. Its far from writing but it allows me to work on the college text book I am writing for cultural anthropology.
DS has recently been in the financial news and in scuttlebutt on the writer’s boards as is Mahalo. Now Mahalo does pay. The people are nice and most communicate openly and will talk you through lots of things if you have problems. If you can keep up with demand of the answer guru team and can do the page and article writing.Textbroker.com is a great company to work for and has lots of work for articles. But nothing that I am expert in. So if you are writing you may want to look at those two companies to help supplement.
I haven’t written anything in a while. I sort of gave up on writing as fulltime career, It’s now a secondary avocation
I am considering copy editing for DS and would like to ask those of you with experience there if you have any say in what you edit (apart from a broad subject area)? What I mean is, can you look at an article and decide you’d rather not copy edit it? Are you penalized if you don’t edit every one sent to you? (What is the process for receiving the articles?)
Thank you so much for your help.
Thank you Felicia for your advice (yet again!) and also to Julia. While I do have issues with aspects of the DS model, I also acknowledge at the moment they are the biggest player in enabling me to put food on our family table, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Hi all, I have been reading intently this continuing thread. And I have to say, while it was stagnate for a while, it seems as though more and more people are recognizing that DS is not what they claim to be and certainly not what one would expect from a content supplier.
I have to agree the smoke screen and charts, acceptance and declines, rejects and pretty picture graphs of how well you do are nothing to those who really are in charge.
While I could for a few months use that money that I made to pay some bills. But in truth in the end after working for DS I got a learning experience and I know now that not all flash and glitz is legit and professional, and thankfully through this website I got better paying opportunities.
All I can say is, if you are unhappy, leave DS, find other writing work while you are on top before you get that “Thank you but you are not needed anymore” email.
julie
PS thank you for the web sites that have great work!
After another few weeks of putting much effort into writing for Demand, I’d like to make one last point. My gripe isn’t with the rewrite requests or the rejects, I’ve had one reject that I felt was extremely unfair, but I have taken a lesson from it not to pick titles that the majority of CEs will not have any knowledge of.
In general, I have felt the rewrite requests I have had received have been justified, and I also feel I have learned from the CE’s comments.
The only problem I have (luckily with a minority of the CEs) is the complete lack of manners they display when commenting on an article. It doesn’t cost anything to be polite, and for their information, they are not my employer.
I wonder how they would feel if they had spent two hours producing something, and then written to as though they were something the cat had dragged in?
As I say, it is a small minority of CEs that are guilty of this, but if I were a boss at DS I would take a very good look at it. A basic skill of being capable of addressing a writer politely in the written form, in my opinion, should be mandatory, and a rule to be upheld at all times.
I don’t care at all if my article is rejected, it is part of the package at Demand, but I do care if the person who chooses to reject it, also feels the need to comment to me as though I was a pile of dog’s mess he happened to tread in.
Diana, I agree with you. There’s no excuse for rudeness. The anonymity of the internet gives some folks a false sense of power and security so they say things they wouldn’t say if it were a face to face conversation.
I actually feel sorry for folks who need the internet to make them feel powerful. Kind of makes me think of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz (or for cartoon buffs, Pinky in Pinky and the Brain). Don’t let the unhappy and rude CEs cause you to lose focus of your earnings goals. As long as the money shows up in your PayPal account, it’s all good.
Thanks for the advice Felicia, I see that as a positive of writing for them – it teaches you to become thick skinned!
On the upside, I just had my second reject (out of around 25 submitted pieces) but the editor was so absolutely apologetic, and obviously sorry to have to reject it, it made me feel sorry for her (him)!
There are some decent folk working as editors, it’s just the luck of the draw I guess.
I wanted to comment about DS. I was hired on in March of 09 and I actually was doing pretty good until April of this year. I received contradicting corrections from different editors. As in, one said; ‘Yes, take out the extra blah blah’, and another says, ‘No, the blah blah has to be in there.’
It was confusing! After that, every article I turned in came back with confusing edits. I thought perhaps I was losing my shine or something, so I stopped there and ventured out into other opportunities.
However, I believe it was Angela’s comment about pushing the ego aside that made me think, maybe I need to give it another try? The constant rewrites did strike a blow to my ego. I thought perhaps my writing skills weren’t as good as I had initially thought.
But, I really found truth in your post, Angela. So, I am attempting some articles at DS once again. Just wanted to drop that in there
. Good advice and tips from others on this topic as well. Thanks!
- Nita
I started with DS about a month ago.
I was very excited to be accepted, although needless to say my enthusiasm has worn off somewhat – I find the titles rather hard to work round generally, and the presentation style of writing bland and boring.
Most of my experiences with the CEs have been positive. The negative comments I have received are generally deserved, delivered politely and constructive, however on a few occasions comments have been rude, misguided (not conforming with the DS guidelines) or they simply didn’t make sense in regard to the article subject.
Unfortunately those bad comments seem to stay with me all day, whereas the positive ones are quickly forgotten – I guess there is a lesson in there somewhere!
I hope I am not dependent on writing for them for too long, however at the moment I am grateful to have the opportunity, as the payments are twice a week, and enough to pay some bills.
Thank you for this blog by the way, I have only came across it today, but will be returning regularly.
Diana, try to turn those comment reactions around. Let the good ones stick with you and let the negative ones go. Learn what you need to learn from the negative (and hopefully constructive) comments and then go on to the next.
As writers we have to develop a thick skin and learn how to see the positive in criticism. If the criticism isn’t constructive then ignore it entirely and go on to the next. I know this is easier said than done, but in time you’ll find it a necessity to protect your sanity.
I don’t know…I have only had a small number of rewrites that were allowed to expire. Most of them were pretty straightforward rewrites so I guess the writer just never got around to them. I suppose if one CE had a huge number of expired rewrites, DS might want to take a closer look at their editing skills.
What happens when an editor has an inordinate amount of rewrites that writers have allowed to expire? Is that a sign that there might be a problem?
Hi Crystal – The editor still gets paid whether you rewrite it or not. I guess they figure we’ve spent time working on it either way.
I recently let a rewrite expire and it got me to wondering what happens on the CE side of the fence? Do they still get paid for the edit or is that lost income and wasted effort?
Crystal recently posted..Great Advice from The Mom Writes Blog
I agree with Felicia and Angela; there is no sense in wasting effort on a major rewrite for an incompetent DS editor. Each writer faces possible crazy-editor problems each time he or she submits and article. DS hires only two editor types:
- Nice, reasonable Reform Rabbis
- Not-so nice, unreasonable Orthodox Nazis
If an editor requires minor changes, I make them, relatively confident that DS will publish my article. However, if an editor requests too many changes, I simply let the article expire, and then publish it elsewhere for a few dollars. Usually the article looks better because I can then format it more properly than possible for DS.
I shared with you guys in another thread that I’d been accepted at DS. Things have been going well. The feedback on my first few articles was glowingly positive with only suggestions in the area of style. Today though I finally got an editor whose editing process is reflective of the many concerns that I’ve seen raised here. Even factoring in that the vantage point from the editor’s side of the table is different from our own and that writer’s ego must be pushed aside, the requests that were given for the rewrite of an article that was deemed “an excellent first draft” with absolutely no major fundamental flaws were ridiculous.
Although I welcome the editor’s attempt at specificity, the point-by-point nitpicky, and I by no means am exaggerating, instructions for change were unreasonable for an article of this type. Along with this, it was clearly obvious that the editor had no grasp at all of the industry about which I wrote and many of the changes she suggested would not be appropriate in context.
As a long-time writer I’m very familiar with the dynamics of the editor/writer relationship and I’m comfortable with the process. I welcome constructive feedback and have been appreciative up until this point of the very helpful and valid commentary that my DS editors have provided. This particular editor, however, leaves me without words …
Fortunately because of what I have been reading from the experiences that you all have shared I’m prepared for this day. I plan to let this article quietly expire and make its way back to the queue. No stress, no worry.
Angela recently posted..Insights on Going Through
A very wise solution to the problem, Angela.
I just started copy editing for Demand Studios this week. So far, I think it is going well, although I am not sure if I am supposed to be “tougher” than I have been so far. Aside from a couple of articles, mostly everything has been well written, aside from a few typos here and there. I only sent a few back for rewrites that very obviously did not make sense in areas.
I know it must be frustrating having different editors looking at your work, but there really is no way that every editor could be totally consistent. I try to give writers the benefit of the doubt and stick to a friendly tone, but I am sure there are many other copy editors who take a more aggressive approach. Just as the writers are challenged by some of the different editing styles, we editors are challenged by the many different writing styles!
Hello Felicia,
Thank you for this website. I have found it very informative, and keep it as a bookmark on my journey to becoming a successful freelance writer. I recently found one of your posts regarding TextBroker and decided to apply. They accepted me with a rating of three stars. I also decided to look at Demand Studios. I was however reluctant to do so, because of the way they took over Ehow.
Just when I actually started to earn money with Ehow, it felt as if they ripped the rug right out from under me. They also removed some of my articles, and just sent me an email inviting me to apply.
Now my interest has peeked again, so I will start over. I do have one question. Demand Studios requests a resume that is relevant to the position you are applying for, I do not have one. I am very new to freelance writing online. Am I correct in saying that I cannot relate to the content that I do for TextBroker because it is Ghostwriting? Text Broker is the only company that I have. Where do I go from here?
Natalie, check out this post. It should address some of the concerns you have about a resume and being accepted at Demand Studios.
I’m not going to say CE’s are unqualified, but they are inconsistent. I have proof of two articles that I wrote this week that were edited differently. I purposely wrote the second article based on the corrections made by the CE who edited the first article. Guess what? The next CE made the opposite corrections! Wonder why writers are confused and frustrated?
Editing is up to personal preference. I am sure of this.
BYW, I only have 3 rejections, the last two of which I requested. I could have let them expire, but I wanted to communicate to the editor why I was not going to rewrite it.
I’ve been working for DS for about a month as a CE. I have 12 years experience as an editor for newspapers and online content. Many of the writing I’ve encountered is green and DS probably would be served well to have an associate editor or metro editor position that would work with writers to get a good draft before it’s submitted to CEs. With only one chance to request a rewrite, if the writer inserts new errors, many times I have no choice but to reject it. Also for those that complain about CEs not having the background to edit certain content, they’re wrong. These how-tos, lists are supposed to be written for people who may have very little knowledge of the subject. I’ve read medical content that was well-written and understandable and I’ve read muttled directions on how to plant a flowerbed. Oftentimes, it’s not that the subject is complicated, it’s that the writer is unable to convey the subject clearly and concisely.
Felicia is absolutely right. They are clients, not employers. Are some of the CEs moronic? Oh yeah. Then again, so are some of the clients I’ve had in the past. Are some of their guidelines nonsense in the context of some titles? You bet. But it’s a gig. I can write a $15 article in about 30 to 45 minutes, and usually write about $100 worth a day. How? By playing by their rules, no matter how stupid they might be. Would I prefer to focus on writing high quality content that I’m genuinely interested in? Of course, and I’m working on other side projects to make that a possibility for a sustainable living. Julia’s story is an unfortunate one, but as she herself demonstrated, this is part of the importance of diversifying your income sources. In the meantime, I’m working for a finicky client known as DS, among others, that pays well and reliably at my experience and productivity level.
.-= Lauren´s last blog ..Challenges on the Horizon =-.
I’m wondering if a class action lawsuit couldn’t be brought up against them. They’ve got to be breaking some laws somewhere.
I would love for them to just go completely out of business. I’ve never seen such BS before in my life.
And it seems to me that the people who got fired “complained” about things. And someone targeted them. Because their firings really don’t make any sense at all.
DS is just screwing themselves over. They’ll end up with a pool of more and more incompetent writers and CEs because they treat people so poorly.
Eventually the CE requirement will be 6 months working as an editor, and writing will be “just send some samples” and if it’s “almost English” you’ll get in.
I don’t foresee them lasting over the long haul at all.
J, I think I can understand your frustration with Demand Studios but keep in mind that DS is a client and not an employer. As freelance writers we get to pick and choose who we will and will not write for. Similarly, the client gets to set the rules and choose its writers.
Whether DS lasts for the long haul or not, I’ve got to say that a lot of writers have earned a lot of money with them and would like to continue to do so.
Since we are not employees of Demand Studios both parties have the right to terminate the relationship at any time. It’s when we take on the employer/employee mentality that we begin to lose perspective.
I’ve written here on NJFM about my frustrations with them on several occasions. When the frustration level gets too high, I walk away and write elsewhere. That’s one of the great things about freelancing. Walking away for a while is not an option in an employer/employee relationship.