For Writers, Potential Contributors, Content Experts

Do you want to sell your high quality articles through us?

We created this reprint portal to make it easier for people to purchase a license to use our articles, since we were getting a number of requests. Since we have built the infrastructure to sell articles, it only makes sense to open up our system to other high quality writers, contributors and content experts. This page explains the process (at least as of March, 09).

Overview.

If you have articles on the internet to which you own the copyrights, and you want to see if they can be sold as reprints, this should be of interest. At this writing, all of our reprints sell for $65 U.S. (for a licence that lasts for one year). Also as of this writing, the terms purchasers/licensees need to abide by are here.

Purchasers can only use your articles in print, or in an electronic form that is NOT available to the general public. This is so your search rankings are not diminished. In future these things may become negotiable, and we may be able to customize the terms for your articles.

Some Important Points

• Your articles remain yours. You retain copyright. We will not host your articles, so they must exist on your website or blog. That's a good thing!
• You cannot pick and choose among people who might want to licence your article, since the value of our system is that it is instant, simple and self-serve. Buyers come, choose, pay, and grab the article(s) they want. No fuss no muss. Then again, you get your money automatically, if your material sells. Once it's set up, again, no fuss, no muss. Remember, you are selling a NON-EXCLUSIVE license. That means you can continue to sell the same article over and over.
• Article Quality: Let's face it. Why should anyone pay for an average article when there's so many sources of free material? Your articles need to have something unique, or at least, interesting, to say, or say things in such a unique way that a potential customer will be WOWED, and want it for their own readers/people. So we will only accept the best material we can find. When you submit material for the first time, send a very few (up to 3) of your BEST articles. We'll provide some guidelines later.
• You may withdraw any or all of your articles when you choose. They don't belong to us. They belong to you. So, let's say you find someone who says, we'll buy your article for 2,000 dollars for Playboy, bingo, you let us know, and we remove your article from our listings.
• We may decide to stop making your articles available in our catalog without any explanation or reason. Just as you may withdraw.

Accounting & Money Stuff

You want to know about the money stuff.

All accounting, determination of amounts due, and payments are processed by an arms-length third party, Esellerate.net. It all works pretty much automatically. Once you are set up, and your articles are available, you will receive an email notification when someone licences your article. So, in effect, the issue of trust is minimized. I trust esellerate, and if you do, we're good to go.

Initially we're going to work on a 60/40 split, with you, the copyright owner/author receiving the larger split. It will never go below that. It may go higher in the author's favor. So for each article licenced you receive about $39 U.S. (Note esellerate has a payment threshold of $100., so you only get paid once you hit 100 dollars).The reason the fee is "about" 39 dollars is that esellerate takes about 11% of each transaction to handle all of the processing.

After long thought we've decided to charge a nominal fee of $7.50 for each article accepted for sale. There are two reasons for this. It does take some time to set up the article, and the links. Second, we want to discourage people from inundating us with junk articles. For now, the listing fee will be due AFTER acceptance. So the sequence is as follows:

• you submit articles
• we review and select all, some or none.
• we let you know, and you can withdraw, or pay the $7.50 per article via credit card thru esellerate.
• we list your article(s)
• you get rich (just kidding)

Article Guidelines:

Our own reprint customers include large companies looking for internal newsletter material, trainers and speakers (usually wanting to use material as handouts), companies wanting discussion material for meetings, HR departments, and companies that have intranets. They have also been used in elearning sequences and specialty trade magazines looking for good content.

I assume our customers will continue along these lines. So, we are interested in articles:

• pertaining to business life, careers, small business ownership, management and supervision. Your best bet is to take a look at our articles that we make available here, since that's generally what we want.
• Unless you are Jack Welch or Barak Obama or someone of equal stature, we do not want first person articles. Sorry. In case you don't know, first person is written using "I". First person articles (with the exception of regular columns) appear amateur. Nobody cares about your experiences unless you have a name. Do not write in the first person.
• Article length can range from about 500 words upward. There are two things to consider. First, what is most likely to sell at our price? Second, how can I (the writer) provide enough value to justify the fee and how long does the article need to be to provide that value. "Articles" below 500 words tend to be considered filler and pay rates are low. So we ask a minimum of 500 words, but NO padding. If you don't have to say, don't send us something that's padded.

Author Responsibilities

Actually not much. The whole idea behind a self-serve system is to minimize obligations and responsibilities for everyone. However, there are some common sense things you probably want to do since it's to your benefit.

You will probably want to place a graphic or text on your reprintable articles indicating they are available, and a link to the system where someone interested can order the article. You may also want to link to our terms and conditions or information pages. It's up to you. Clearly, you should promote your material. We'll promote your material too.

You can also participate as an affiliate and promote OUR articles (that means articles written by Robert Bacal, NOT articles available from other participants. If you refer someone to one of our articles and the purchase reprint rights you get 20%, provided you are set up as an affiliate. This is completely optional. You don't have to promote any of our material, or, for that matter, any of your own, but you are nuts if you don't at least promote yours.

Speaking of promotion, you DO have one responsibility to promote (if you do) ethically, and without using spam methods in email, twitter, social networking, etc.

Recommended Steps To Follow

Submission

1. Identify no more than three articles you want to submit (the first time).
2. Include the URL's along with a short 3-4 sentence summary for each. The summaries will be used to describe your articles in the catalog. Send all of this in an email to: [email address to come].
3. Wait to hear back from us -- hopefully with our approvals.

Upon Approval

Setup Fee

Use your credit card to make payment of $7.50 u.s. setup fee for each article approved AS DIRECTED TO VIA EMAIL. Do not do this without instructions.

Setup For Payment

1. Visit http://publishers.esellerate.net/splitpay to set up your eSellerate SplitPay payee accounts.
2. Provide us with your SplitPay ID (available at the My Account page of the SplitPay Manager).
3. That's actually pretty much all you have to do. You may need the particulars for Electronic Fund Transfers to your account. We actually created a separate bank account for all EFT's, and we immediately remove deposits and send them to another account. It's an unnecessary precaution, but we prefer that our regular bank account information remains secret.

At this point we get to work and setup your articles in our catalog, ensuring that you will be notified for each sale, and that you will automatically be credited with your money.

What's Next? Promotion

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