Morning came, and Lucy arrived at her usual time. “Where were you last night?” asked Meria.
“Home, of course,” replied Lucy.
“I swear there was someone in my house last night,” cried Meria.
“Funny, I thought someone was standing outside my window last night,” pondered Lucy. “Until I woke up and noticed the handprints on the inside of the glass…”
The creak of floorboards awoke Meria. The rush of adrenaline had
her scrambling for the door before her eyes had fully opened. The door
to the next room slammed shut.
Brace yourselves, #PitMad is coming. I mentioned this a few months back right before the last #PitMad pitch-event. I got an overwhelming barrage of “I wish I knew about this sooner,” tweets.
So, here we are. A month before the next #PitMad pitch-war, I’m giving y’all a heads up. The next one’s on the 8th of September.
For them that-wot-haven’t heard of #PitMad, it’s a quarterly event on Twitter where you get to pitch your completed, polished, unpublished manuscripts to agents and editors.
There are regular events like this from other groups on Twitter. But #PitMad is where it’s at. It’s well run and focussed so editors and agents can be a part of this event, instead of being spam-bombed by well-meaning folks trying to emulate #PitMad.
I’m not saying you should ignore other pitch parties, but man, #PitMad is, well, mad.
The awesome thing about #PitMad is you don’t need to be established at all on Twitter to join in. A complete profile helps, but it’s bad etiquette to like and retweet pitches using the hashtag as it clutters the tweet responses. That makes it harder for editors and agents to navigate what they’re looking at and what they’ve already responded too. So yeah, a complete profile helps, but having a following of 0 makes no difference during #PitMad.
So, do you have a work you want to pitch? Go and read the entire #PitMad page on Pitch Wars (link: pitchwars.org/pitmad ). There are rules, guidelines and additional hashtags you’ll need on genres. If you’re going to join in, make your pitch the best-darned pitch you can. If you don’t prepare your tweets, your wasting your time, their time and an opportunity to get published.
“Help,” pleaded another Sprite emerging from the ocean. “I don’t know where I am.”
“The gap between the world of the living and the lands of the dead, yadda, yadda,” replied Cuttle. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Two pills,” sighed Sprite. “One would kill me and the other would make me forget my family.”
The trio watched another Sprite sink into the sand. “I had to swallow one,” it cried, “my child would have the other.”
Man, I need to dip back into horror more. I’m sure this idea was in a film or TV program. Possibly an old Twilight Zone? Be darned if I can remember where I’ve seen it though.
I’ve seen and spoken to a lot of people closing their WordPress sites over this. It sucks. It’s also a wake-up call for a lot of folks. If you put anything online, the odds are, at some point it’s going to get copied.
There’s a lot of short term solutions. DMCAs, messaging hosts, having the content removed from search engines and so on. But long term, this all leads to a neverending, soul-sapping, demoralizing and unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.
It doesn’t matter where you put your content either. If text can be copy-pasted then a bot can scrape it. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tumblr, Medium or Live Journal. Are you a photographer or an artist? Well, you know what I mean. You’ve likely been dealing with your images being copied for years.
The only way to stop your content being ripped-off is to stop putting it online. For me, that’s not an option. I’m still paying my bills off of freelance work mostly picked up from the Fears.
You can try to prevent your writing, art and photography being stolen. But none of us thinks about that when starting an online project, do we? I moved onto fixed panels for social media a while ago. The only reason I haven’t done that on my home page is because of the theme and the way WordPress.com shows image posts where my main following is.
Also, in the current copy-bot mess, it’s three websites in India. I can’t see them having a huge impact on what we do on WordPress. They’re not going to rank on search engines. Your readers and social media followers know who and where you are. New followers are probably never going to see the duplicate websites. So in this case, the way I see it is the only negative impact is on your own mental state. Can you live with the idea a website almost nobody is going to see is duplicating your content in India?
I know to a lot of folks, that’s not a straight forward question. It sure as heck pisses me off. But I ain’t going to let it stop me. Heck, it makes me want to fart out more content for them to copy. Let the buggers pay for hosting all that content nobody is going to see.
OK, so, only you can decide whether or not you want to pull your content from being online. It’s an entirely personal choice. If you don’t want to publish online anymore, we’re going to miss you. Take care of yourself.
If you do want to keep publishing your works to the internet, here, take a hammer. Welcome to whack-a-mole, internet edition.
Please do drop into Ashley’s site and say hello and thanks for post.
Edited to add: Very first comment from Joanne asks “how do you find out contents been copied?” Go to one of the offending websites, Tygpress.com, and copy paste a snippet from your website into their search bar. They’re mirroring websites wholesale. In Europe at least, this is illegal. They’re allowed to post a snippet of your website and link back to your own website with a Read More style link. Not duplicate everything like Tygpress are.
“Do you know what’s odd?” asked Spectre. “Yuffie once said you and I are ideas, hopes or dreams of the same person. I’ve met thousands of Sprites, but I’m the only one of me.”
“That is odd,” sighed Sprite. “Do you know what else is odd?”
“Numbers that aren’t divisible by two,” replied Spectre.
Little Fears 