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I did. Nothing happened. I made a subsequent query and received a prompt reply that they would look into it. Nothing. I made a second query after a month. Nothing.
The platform is great – really good idea. But there is just something wrong with these people. They need to get editors who are not fantasizing that they're working for The Atlantic.
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The cons? Constant Content takes a whopping 35% of every sale and does very little to earn that money. So self-promotion is mandatory because a lot of writers are selling their content for peanuts.
The biggest con would be dealing with the editors and their respective quirks. Most of the Constant Content editors that I dealt with were knowledgeable and professional in spite of their quirks. However, there was one editor in particular who was rude, entitled, a liar and laughably incompetent. This became more evident whenever I wrote about subjects that were clearly outside his/her wheelhouse. And as luck would have it, I soon found myself dealing with that insufferable [rear orifice] most of the time, which is why I quit.
My advice to management would be this: Remember that writers are your bread and butter.
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Ive written hundreds of articles for my own blog and when I can get a fitting article from them I JUMP ON IT. They are always well written so adding my own technical facts is simple.
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I am a top-rated author on another site. Constant Content is not accepting good content, nor are they constant in their responses!
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Their support doesnt answer any email and they work too slow. We paid money to credit our account and we waited few days. And We sent an email to them to credit our account as soon as possible, after the email they suspended our account.
I called their phone number, and some guy helped me to re-activate our account. But still not deposited. We decide to wait a bit more, and few hours latter suddenly, they suspended our account again.
Question; We paid money, and we cannot get the service which we paid for it. Isnt it a FRAUD?
Question; Why the support doesnt answer the emails if they earn salary to answer the messages?
Question; How can I buy articles that I need on that bad web page and untrustable system.
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However, now I'm done with Constant-Content. In 2017, I accepted an assignment on a topic with which I'm quite familiar. I wrote a high-quality article, and it sat in Editorial Review for awhile before the client finally received and accepted it (yes, I got paid).
Then, I accepted and completed a second article for that client. I received a message that CC had sent the article to the client for review. However, the article apparently fell into a black hole, as I never heard back from the client again. I messaged her twice with no response. Next, I contacted CC for help. Several days went by, and CC finally responded, but said they couldn't reach the client. I tried two more times to reach her, without any response. CC stopped responding as well. Bottom line: The client vanished, CC vanished, and I never got paid for my work. Never again.
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But be VERY careful with the "projects" or "casting calls" that you often see advertised on the website. Sometimes the management will get in touch with you personally begging you for help and saying the pay is really good and there's plenty of work for everyone. And then you sign on, make time for the project, attend the meetings, and find out that not only is there no work but the pay is not as high as you thought it was. Furthermore, clients for these projects are trying to save money on their own end by making everything "publish ready" – so they don't have their own editors, HTML coders, or researchers. You have to do all of that. What's even worse is that the editors will tell you, "sorry there's no work" but they'll be lying. Some writers from the group will stay on the project and others will simply get ghosted.
So, to sum up…
1. They lie about the project in the first place
2. They lie about the amount of time required
3. They ghost you when you try and find out what's going on.
4. They allow the client to make changes and demand rewrites that you won't get paid for.
This has happened to me no less than four times in the past year. The last time this happened, I had finally had enough. I confronted a person in management about this, a person I have otherwise worked with amicably for YEARS (I've been on CC since 2010) and instead of dealing with my concerns he kept mindlessly repeating, "This is what the client wants" even though what I was telling him had nothing to do with that.
I'm actually surprised they haven't been busted for fraud by now because of this practice. I'm lucky, it's just me and the cat. But I can imagine the grief this would cause someone who has a schedule, other clients, or a family to feed. It's more than just unethical. It's cruel and totally unnecessary.
UPDATE: The latest project has turned me off the site completely. After a number of articles were sold and the writers had already been paid, the articles were returned and resold again at a lesser rate. The result of this is that my account there is now in the negative and other writers have the same problem. They have no asked me for money, but I sure don't plan on working my way out of their hole.
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There was a time when approval used to take more than 10 days, but lately, that has come down to 4 days, which is very acceptable.
During the initial days, rejections were common, but I learned from each one of them and improved my writing. These days, only about one in 10 articles is rejected and it usually takes me only a couple of minutes to fix them. So, I have no problem with the editors.
Although most of my work is eventually sold, some articles tend to sit in the catalogue for months. I have noticed that these articles sell faster if I take the effort to promote them. When I am paying 35% of the price as commission, which is usually over $20 an article, I expect that effort to come from CC.
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Here's my experience: They emailed me asking me to submit "at least two" writing samples for a travel writing job, which paid pretty well. I took a couple hours to put together the writing samples, wrote a cover letter and sent it to them.
After a couple weeks they got back to me and said the position was filled, but they had another last-minute job I could help out with. The pay was really, really low, $2.50 for 100-word pieces. Even though the pay was low, I thought that if I helped them out to get this last-minute project done, that they would consider me for better-paying work.
I agreed to do the job for them and pulled an all-nighter to get it done. I worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. to create 3,000 words of content. After doing the work and submitting it, they notified me that I was going to be paid 35% less. Not because of bad quality or anything else. They were going to keep 35% for themselves because "that was their cut."
Perhaps a writer living in India or the Philipines could survive off that kind of pay. I don't know how it's even workable for anyone to live off that little. It was content for product descriptions for Target. I wrote 3,000 words of content, pulled an all-nighter and received about $48.00. They paid 1.6 cents a word for my content.
If you're thinking, "Oh, you must not have understood their offer. They must have told you about the 35 percent somewhere." Well, they didn't…
Here is the exact wording of their bait-and-switch offer. First, they got me to apply for the high-paying content writing gig, and then they said that the position was filled and offered me drastically lower-paid work.
I am cutting and pasting from two different emails:
"Thanks for your interest in the Travel SEO Content project. That casting call has now been filled. However, we have another project going on right now for the next two weeks. Its writing product descriptions for Target. The descriptions are about 100 words with 3-5 bullets and a long description. Each description (SKU) is priced at $2.50, but there is a ton of work available (they are bundled in batches of 10/request)."
"Were looking for writers to help out with product descriptions for Target. Each description is 50-100 words and 3-5 soft bullets @ $2.50 gross."
They told me I was supposed to understand that the word "gross" means I don't get to keep all of the $2.50 for myself.
When I said I wanted my full pay, they refused. I asked for my content back because they violated the agreement and employment offer they made me in writing. They refused. Ultimately the pay was so little to begin with that it wasn't even worth arguing.
You could look at this in a lot of different ways. The way I look at is this: Constant-Content stole my work from me and refused to pay me what they agreed to pay me. Eventually, I realized the poor guy on the phone was stuck in their office probably from 8 to 5 every day, and his hands were tied. He couldn't help me. I felt bad for him when I realized the owners of Constant-Content were exploiting him out of his time just as much as me, so I dropped the whole thing.
I wanted to write this review so that other writers don't get screwed by Constant-Content. I also wanted to feel that my all-nighter wasn't the absolute complete waste of time that it was. If my experience can help you avoid this company, then it was time well spent in my opinion.
It's hard to make it as a freelance writer, and these content mills seem like easy money. What actually happens when you rely on them is you get stuck in a cycle of crap pay and ultimately the quality of your writing will suffer as you struggle to become a "speed writer" just to survive. I wish companies like this didn't exist. They are middle-men treating writers like slaves and constant-content is one of the worst in the business.
1.6 cents a word? Give me a break… I don't care who you are, or where you live in the world, your writing and your time is worth so much more than that.
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CC has very high standards. And don't get me wrong, I personally think that high standards are a very good thing – but only if there is some common sense attached to them. In the case of CC, their high standards verge idiocy. For example, your work can be rejected because of the words "may be" as, in the editor's opinion, it "implies uncertainty" – and that's among many other ridiculous things.
It seems CC has a lot more writers than clients, and its editors are instructed to reject as many articles as possible for whatever lame reasons they could contrive. As a result, you dedicate lots of your time and effort to your article and then it stands a high chance of rejection. But even when your work gets approved, it doesn't mean the article will be bought. It can hang for months before it's bought (if ever).
So despite the promised high earnings, they are just potential earnings that you can (or in most cases, cannot) get. Moreover, keep in mind that CC takes one third of the cost of your article as a commission. In all, CC appears to be one of the worst platforms for writers, in my honest opinion.