Category Archives: Suite 101

Buildipedia, Suite 101, Writing

Small Payouts Ahead

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My income from writing remains small, but is coming in slowly but surely. Most of it is produced by my Buildipedia articles. I have a twice per month column on construction administration. Here’s a link to my profile, which includes links to articles. I earn $100 for each of these articles. Payment comes about three weeks after the article appears, by check. I have a contract for one more of these, but the contracts have been coming in like clockwork, and my articles going out. My accounts receivable right now is, I think, $200 for two of them.

My Amazon income is slow. For my four titles on Amazon Kindle, along with the print version of Documenting America, I’ve made just over $56. More than half of that has come from personally selling print books. Amazon pays out once you accumulate $10 in royalties, during the second month after you get there. I had done so in December, and in February I had my first Amazon payout, $10.97 by direct transfer to my bank account. If my current calculations are correct, I’ve since accrued $10.44 in Kindle royalties. That means I can expect another transfer in June. A small account receivable.

Over at Suite101.com, despite the hard times they have experienced due to changes in Google’s search algorithms, and despite the fact I haven’t added any articles there since February 2011, I continue to ear some money. Revenues were really low the second half of 2011 and January 2012. They began to pick up some in February, and have remained up. The payout threshold at Suite is only $5.00. Through April 28 I had earned $5.17 in royalties in April (having made payout in February and March. Payment from Suite comes via PayPal, always before the 15th of the month after you hit payout and usually the first Tuesday of the month. Since the first Tuesday of May is the 1st, I don’t expect payment till the 8th.

All of which I’m sure has some readers laughing, that I would bother to track and worry about these minor income streams. I need to for tax purposes, of course. Someday I hope they will be bigger, much bigger in the case of Amazon. Learning to track them now and properly account for them should help in the future, when [dream alert!] I’ll be raking in the dough from several sources.

Buildipedia, Engineering, Suite 101

2011 Writing in Review: Non-fiction Articles

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It’s Christmas morning, and not everyone is up yet. So I think I’ll try to dash off the next in my year in review posts, this time about non-fiction articles.

I started 2011 with a renewed interest in writing articles at Suite101.com. For the first six weeks I added at least one a week, and had a couple of others in the hopper. Then around February 22 a major change in the Google search algorithm went into effect. Called “Panda”, this algorithm change pretty much killed content sites such as Suite101. Page views and ad share income dropped to very low levels over night. A slight recovery occurred in August, but then another Panda update killed it again. As a consequence, I have not written another article for Suite, and don’t intend to for a while.

I was contacted in March or April by a transportation industry newsletter to write an article for them. This was my first time to have an editor solicit me for an article. She wanted an engineer for this article, not a freelancer,  had seen some of my engineering articles at Suite101, and so contacted me. The pay was good, and writing this article required me to do some interviewing. That was good experience.

I wrote about ten (maybe a few more) articles for Buildipedia.com. That started out strong early in the year, but by June it started to fade, as they were assigning only one of every six article ideas I pitched to them. But they had an editorial change in November, I pitched a column on construction administration to the new editor, and it was accepted on a trial basis. At the end of the year I have had two columns published, and contracts for two more columns.

So it was a good year for non-fiction articles. Almost all my writing income came from them. It’s something I plan to keep doing into 2012.

Engineering, Health, self-publishing, Suite 101

Things I Don’t Understand

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How my blood sugar can be 122 before a late supper, 127 at bedtime (3 hours after supper), take a higher Lantus dose as recommended by the doctor, do nothing for the next 5.75 hours but sleep and pee (not at the same time), and have my morning blood sugar 165. What’s going on? Do I have a very slowly acting metabolism? Did I have a stressful dream I don’t remember?

Why the note I just posted to Facebook shows up on my profile but not in my news feed.

Why Google chose to de-rate Suite101.com in their last algorithm update, so much so that I make almost nothing there now.

Why I procrastinated getting abstracts in for the Feb 2012 erosion control conference so that now I have only two days to get ’em done.

Why this company I work for (actually just the chairman) thinks I can write a bio paragraph for some project they are going after without knowing anything about the project or the form of the proposal.

Why my e-short story and e-book have each sold only three copies. Actually, I know the why to this one: the lack of promotion to make them stand out from the Kindle clutter.

Why I still have that desire to be published by a traditional publisher, knowing the odds of that ever happening.

Why almost no one in my family give a rat’s whisker about anything I write.

Why my rheumatoid arthritis seems to be getting worse as I lose weight.

Why my beta readers totally failed to do what they said they would do on Documenting America. I had zero beta reader response before I went to e-publish.

Why I can’t concentrate on engineering today.

Suite 101

It’s Not So Sweet in Suite-land

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On February 23rd or 24th, Google changed their main ranking algorithms. Over years and months Google had figured out that a lot of web content wasn’t really original content. Unscrupulous writers had “scraped” material from other sites, typically reputable sites, and passed it off on their own sites as if it were original material. So search for any subject, and you would find that a lot of it was the same. News site JKM had the exact same words as the New York Times. PQR Blog was identical to Wikipedia. And they all could rank high in a Google search engine results page (SERP).

Google knew it was long overdue to fix this. And fix it they did—or, from some perspectives, break it—in a new ranking algorithm last week. The objective was to weed out the scrapers and weed out the content farms from ranking high in the SERPs. By content farm, I mean those sites that hire a bunch of writers to rush out loads of low quality articles—400 hasty words about something popular. Get it posted, get the ads automatically running, get readers finding the pages then clicking on ads. Money into the coffers.

Suite101.com, where I have 127 articles posted, is a site that many consider a content farm. The writers of it would beg to differ, however. Yes, we have a lot of poor writing on there. Some is from native English speakers but a lot is from ESL people who have trouble with smooth composition. The writers who hang out in the Suite writers forum don’t think of ourselves as a content farm.

Google disagrees. We’ve been hurt bad by the algorithm change. You can see the graph accompanying this post, which shows my page views cut in half since the Google change. My articles didn’t change and I haven’t added any for about three weeks. Whether they were good, bad, or indifferent quality, they didn’t change. But Suite now has less “Google juice”, and my page views are suffering. It’s a little to early to know if my revenues have taken a similar hit. They’re down, but they fluctuate enough that they might just be on the low side of normal. It’s going to take another week or two till I know about revenues.

What to do? I never made a lot there anyhow. I enjoyed writing the type of articles I wrote there, however. Whether it’s done anything toward establishing my writer’s platform I don’t know, but I suppose not if it has now been relegated to the bush league. Plus, if I’m going to self-publish my stuff, the platform carries less importance.

I’m so into writing Documenting America right now, and so close to finishing, and have so many other writing projects begun, under research, or cued up, that a hiatus from Suite might be a good thing. Let’s see how it all shakes out in a week.

Buildipedia, Documenting America, freelance writing, Suite 101

Posts in Real Time

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I have been away on a working vacation from February 17 until today. I attended the annual conference of the International Erosion Control Association, where I delivered three papers, met a lot of the leadership, and attended my first meeting as a member of the Professional Development Committee. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were all business. The other days were driving and vacation.

Before leaving, I took time to write a few posts for the blog, and scheduled them to post about every two days. I also wrote one from there and posted it for later appearance. I like that feature of Blogspot, something I never used before, and which turned out to be incredibly easy. It lets me keep the blog fresh while being unable to write and post.

During the trip I had a fair amount of reading material with me, but found less time for reading than expected. I had volume 4 of the Annals of America, which is my first source for documents for Documenting America. I read the first item in the book, a report from 1797 by Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Austin, of a trip he made from Virginia to the Ohio River valley and even to St. Louis and a little beyond. The document was fascinating, and I have written two chapters from it, one during the trip and one today, typing both of them this evening. The book is now up to 29, 275 words, so is still coming along.

I also had a notebook with various writings of John Wesley in it. I read some in that, both on the trip and today, but found it more difficult reading. Still, I have pretty well identified some material that will form the basis of a chapter in my Wesley small group study, so the reading, if limited, was profitable.

The week ahead looks very busy from a writing perspective. I have to prepare and send an invoice for some writing I did, the first of those I’ve had to do. That’s a tomorrow noon thing. The editor for Buildipedia asked me to try to move forward an article I thought I could take till next week to do. That’s a tomorrow evening thing. Despite some new troubles at Suite101 concerning changes Google recently made in their search engine algorithms, I’d like to write at least two articles this week for Suite. They will be Tuesday and Friday things.

And, while away on the trip I learned from Facebook posts that a woman in our church is a writer, excited about recently having sold some of her writing. I contacted her, and she is interested in seeing a writers group formed at church. I know of five others who in one way or another have either written things or have expressed an interest in doing so. This will be a Wednesday thing, I think, to see what can be done about organizing this group, with an eye to begin meeting maybe in April.

So the week looks full, and I hope on Saturday I can make a report of incredible productivity. Of course, I’ll be writing here before then.

Documenting America, Suite 101, Writing

Another Snow Day, a Little Bit of Progress

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The forecast was for 4 to 10 inches, then 4-9, then 4-8. Last night at 11 PM the storm was hanging out just north of us, and I wondered if it would pass by to the north. I set the alarm to get up at the normal time, in case the forecasters had it wrong. I was up at 3:45 AM and looked out. 1-2 inches had fallen; the snowfall right then was heavy. I turned off the alarm and went back to bed.
When I got up at 7:30 AM, we already had 7-8 inches, and the snow was still falling. I had my devotions, then went downstairs to lok at stocks on an unusual day at home. By the time the snow ended, around noon, we had 12 inches, maybe a little more than that.
On such a day as this I should write. And I did. I finished edits to my article for Safe Highway Matters, after calling the Michigan Department of Transportation to get additional info and quotes. I then wrapped up a Suite101 genealogy article. However, when I tried to upload it I was foiled by my old, old computer. The hard drive had been crunching forever, and it kept doing it and didn’t load the article publishing page at Suite. I gave up, went upstairs, then out to shovel the driveway. That took an hour, then back in for some soup and back downstairs. I decided to do a files cleaning of the computer. I figured at the same time I’d install updates and re-boot. This took forever.
So I came over to Lynda’s computer (which she almost never uses), much newer than mine and more powerful, and I began this post. Meanwhile the old computer finished all its crunching and deleting and uploading and restarting. I’ve been going back and forth between the two, typing on this post and starting Suite101 again and getting the article uploaded. That finally worked.
Meanwhile, as I’ve had to wait on web page loading, I’ve been able to do some research for Documenting America. I also began putting together my next brown bag presentation at work, this concerning floodplains.
It’s now 4:16 PM as I write this. Hours and hours remain in the day. I’ll spend a little more time on the floodplain presentation prep, then finish reading the document for my next DA chapter, then maybe go upstairs and read some in the John Wesley biography I’m most of the way through and enjoying immensely.
Another snow day is a productive day, perhaps helping me to see a little more what a writing life would be like. Now if I could just get these fool pictures to place correctly in my blog, I’ll be happy.
Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, freelance writing, Suite 101

A Chapter Here, An Article There

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So far this weekend has been productive. I wrote and posted one article at Suite101.com. I don’t think it’s one of my better articles, but it’s up and available for making money. I wrote a chapter in Documenting America. This was with research and writing complete in one day. I also did a little bit on another chapter. If I can complete the other chapter, and rewrite the third chapter to expand to full length, I will, with this blog post, have completed my writing goals for the weekend. I could then go and work on the research for two Bible studies. I’ve already done quite a bit on one of them Friday night and last night.

Well, my other writing goal was to research e-self-publishing some more. I left some things hanging on Friday. I’m pretty sure I don’t have the whole story concerning what to do with the mechanics of eSP. I found a good reference for that today, and will read it later. Events are moving in the right direction for this. I took some pictures yesterday to serve as a basis for the cover of “Mom’s Letter”. Hopefully they will work out. My goal for publishing that remains around March 1.

I have two other reasons for making this post. I want to test the feature for “scheduled posts” on Blogspot. I knew this was possible, but never saw how to do it until Friday. So I’m going to schedule this to post about an hour after I finish it, just to see how it works. The other is I want to post a couple of figures of my statistics for Suite101, for page views and earnings. Friday evening I merged several spreadsheets, so that I have graphs covering my entire time there. I’ll post them below, or at some place on the post. One is page views, per day and the seven day moving average. As can be seen, my page views are not going up even though I ad articles. The other shows the amount I make per article per month. This is also not going up, indicating that my articles are not gaining revenue over time, but in fact may be earning less revenue as they age. It’s perhaps too early to tell what I should do about this. For now it’s just data tabulated, graphed, and waiting for analysis.

Documenting America, self-publishing, Suite 101, Writing

More Snow, More Writing

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Beginning last week the weather folks were predicting a major winter storm for Tuesday. By Sunday some of the numbers had firmed up: 6-12 inches in our area. So Monday morning, to allow me to get to work the next two days over short, flat roads, I packed to stay two days in town with my mother-in-law, since Lynda was in Oklahoma City and not planning to be back until Wednesday, after the storm. However, as she got news reports there she decided to come back Monday, before the storm. So I came home, knowing that if the weather people were even close to right I would lose at least one and probably two days of work.

That’s what happened. We have 7 or 8 inches of snow, on top of about a 1/4 inch of sleet. It fell mostly during the daylight hours yesterday, so we hunkered down, read, used the computer, and ate. Today has been a mix of sun and clouds. I got out early to shovel the drive to let the radiant energy dry it out. I also cleared off my pick-up early (it’s parked well up the road, not quite at the top of the hill). I also shoveled our large deck, which had an average of 12 inches due to drifting. So today has been busy.

But on both days I was able to write. Yesterday I completed chapter 22 in Documenting America. I decided to use the extra research I did on Rev. John Urmstone and wrote a second chapter from some of his writings. I also began research for the next chapter. I read one document which, unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to use. I scanned several others.

Today I wrote an article for Suite101.com, the next in my series of genealogy articles. I don’t know if this is a correlation or not, but January is a record revenue month for me at Suite, 37 percent higher than my previous best month. January last year was good too; it’s my third best month, not topped until last November. So maybe January is just a good month, or maybe my genealogy articles are making some money. Either way, I have quite a few more in the series to write before I run out of ideas.

Now I’m going to start the next chapter in Documenting America. I found a document I can use, some of the writing of William Bradford of the Plymouth colony. I’ve also spent a lot of time these last two days reading for my next two Bible studies, and beginning to outline one of them. I’ve also studied (some) in the e-self-publishing market. I’ve printed out a lot of Joe Konrath’s blog posts, and the comments, to look for ideas and for guidance on the nuts and bolts of creating the e-book once you’ve got the words finished.

So these two days—the second one still with 6 to 7 waking hours in it—may not have been my most productive, but they have been good. Back to work tomorrow, with deadlines two days closer without commensurate production. Not looking forward to it.

Buildipedia, Documenting America, freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

The Storm is Almost Here

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The winter storm that is so much in the news is bearing down on us. The winter storm warning from the National Weather Service starts at 6:00 PM tonight for us, so that probably means we’ll start getting some frozen stuff around 8 PM. The forecast has called for sleet, ice, snow, mixture—it keeps changing. That’s to be expected as the time nears and the computer models come together. The best guess right now is we’ll have a half inch of ice followed by 3-5 inches of snow.

Rather than negotiate the hills of Bella Vista tonight, I’m going to stay in Bentonville with my mother-in-law. Here apartment is about 3 miles due north of the office, on flat streets. If need be I could walk to work from there. Tomorrow should be the worst, with an inch of snow on top of the ice at the time of morning commute, snow still falling. She doesn’t have a computer or Internet, so I’ll probably stay at work late, or perhaps go to the library until it closes.

The storm is hitting at work and in writing as well. I have to have one of my flood studies re-submitted by Thursday. I worked on it some Saturday, and am in good shape with the computer modeling; now need to have the CADD tech do the mapping and pull a brief report together. It would be a snap except yesterday our 18-inch diameter water transmission main advertised in the newspaper, so today we should be deluged by contractors coming by to obtain drawings and specs—which aren’t ready. Hopefully they will be by 10 AM. Plus I really, really, really need to make major progress on my Rogers flood study. I’m so close to being able to run the first computer model. Four hours of undivided might do it.

In writing, I will be a journalist this morning. I have phone interviews scheduled with two DOT officials in two states, for information on my article for Safe Highway Matters. That’s due on Wednesday, and since this is the first time I’ve written for them, I’d like to get a draft in Tuesday. It’s only a 400 word article, but short doesn’t necessarily mean easier. Then I have an article due for Buildipedia the following Wednesday, and another the Wednesday after that.

Meanwhile I’m working on Documenting America and on articles for Suite101.com. Both of these are discretionary, of course. I could drop them at any time. But if I did, I would in effect be saying, “I don’t have what it takes to be a writer.” So I keep going, keep my schedule a whirlwind, hoping that I get to the point where I have something more than freelance articles published. Having decided to go the e-self-publishing route, this year is the critical year. More on that in future posts.

Buildipedia, Documenting America, Suite 101, Writing

The Schedule is Getting Crowded

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I mostly took yesterday evening off from writing. The reason? My wedding anniversary. Our 35th. We had plans to go out to eat. I scheduled a 4 PM meeting with a client who is only three or so miles from the house, which put me home about 4:30 PM. But we stayed home. Lynda had a persistent headache, and my stomach was doing jumping jacks for some reason, so we stayed home, worked on a puzzle, ate left-over enchilada soup, read some, watched a couple of our favorite news shows, then three episodes of Criminal Minds. A good evening, despite the change of plans and doing nothing special for our special day.

While we were sitting and watching TV, I worked on the next chapter of Documenting America. It’s going a little harder than I’d like. Later, from 11:00-11:30 PM, I read in a biography of John Wesley, which I consider research for a future small group study I’ll write. But that was it for evening writing.

Of course, during the work day, in my pre-hour and noon hour I worked on some things. I did some research for the article for the “Safe Highway Matters” newsletter. I read two writing related blogs, one by an agent and one by a writer. That’s not a lot of writing work, but it counts.

Now, I have a week and a day to complete the highway article. Tomorrow I’ll have my call with the Buildipedia editor and we’ll establish a schedule of articles for the next couple of months. Those will all have fixed deadlines. My two floating deadlines are articles for Suite101.com and chapters for Documenting America. I’d like to write two of the former and three of the latter each week. However, that alone would require about 15 hours, perhaps more than I can dedicate to them.

ETA: Shortly after I posted this, I learned of another on-line writing gig that would be just up my alley, I think. Did a little investigation on my noon hour, and it continues to look promising. The pay would be great, if I would be approved for the premium section of the website. I’m waiting on replies to two e-mails before I do anything else about this, other than some more research into the site tonight.

So I see things backing up very quickly, as they often do, and a logjam not too far in the future. I’ll just have to see if I can do a good job of managing my time and completing as much of this as I can. Lofty goals are good, so long as they don’t become stressful. As an long-gone evangelist in our church is quoted as saying: “I’d rather shoot at a star and miss than shoot at a toad in the road and hit it.”