Fishing for Free Work? You Decide.

 I have had two people contact me about freelancing jobs whom I believe are fishing for free work. 

The first one, I was dumb. I set up our contract so he paid in three payments. I usually weight the first payment so if a person doesn't follow through I won't lose as much. So, for example, if the job was $120, I instead of having three $30 payments, I would do $80, $20, $20. By using SafePay, it ensures that I will at least get $80 for the job. In this case, I delivered the full rough draft after one payment. A week after delivering it, he told me he was busy and he would get to reviewing it soon. I haven't heard from him since. I know that what I have given him was plenty to complete the project. I keep hoping he will eventually get back with me, but he kept saying how he was in a hurry to get this project out, so I am pretty sure he has been "busy" getting it out. 

How can you as a freelancer protect yourself if something like this happens? If you are the only author, you should immediately register your work with the copyright office here. It costs $45--so if the work is worth more than that, definitely do it. 

I would like to think that he will come back, and if he does and pays me in full, even though I have registered the copyright, he will still have all the rights to it until he dies because that is in my contract. However, I retain all rights until I am paid in full. The problem is that this is not his first time in the business. He has produced other works. that is why I am afraid my money is gone, for now.

Once you register something with the copyright office, you can always loan or sell your rights to someone else. Unlike other means of trying to make legal claims on any work you created, including scripts and artwork, the copyright office registry is the only way to officially protect you.

This brings me to my second potential fisher. She posted a job about a month ago, and I sent in a bid. Like the above guy, she has her own business and has apparently been doing this a while. In the job post, she wanted me to use "Illustrator" to do what I already do in Word. I told her in my quote I would do this if that is the program she uses. She then contacted me and told me it was Adobe In-Design. Again, I told her I could do it in that program if she prefers. She then asked if I had any samples of work done using In Design. At this point, she also went from solely talking about book layout to now talking about cover design--something that was not in the job description nor discussed before this. I repeated that I do not usually work on that platform. (Adobe constantly sucks up memory when I am using its programs.) I then told her that regardless of the program I use, my layouts will be the same. I sent her links to books on Amazon (where she could presumably see the layouts) and one file of a book cover. She responded that she was in a hurry, and she could not open anything. 

Now, at this point, I almost was about to throw in the towel and tell her to just hire me, and I would refund her money if she wasn't happy. Please never suggest that in a quote! You basically are telling them they can only use you once, but they can get it free. I learned this from experience. 

With some of the jobs, I do give people the option of paying only $25.00 and I will do 5-10 pages of editing (for example) so they can get an idea of what working with me is like. The fact is, though, I have tons of samples in my portfolio--they may not all be updated, but there are many samples that show my work. There should have been no reason for her to even request the things she already has. So, before making the rash decision I would later regret, I sent her more samples and links. I still haven't heard from her. 

I mean, the money goes into SafePay. I can see not wanting to work with a freelancer and waste time, but this job has been posted for a  month. She could have hired me--I quoted 2 days to finish--and if I didn't complete the work as she wanted or if I didn't meet the deadline, she could have filed an arbitration with Guru and gotten her money back. She must have liked something about my bid, or she would not have started talking with me. The work I am willing to do for her for $175, she is selling on her website for $450. She had over 50 people apply for this job. I imagine most are lower than my bid, but I wonder how many are giving her free work?

Why You Should NOT Let AI Make Your Pictures

 So, I had an employer give me a children's book to upload to Amazon. If you aren't familiar with this process, there were two major mistakes she made that caused her to hire me, and these are the main reason I get hired: (1) Amazon paperback books have to have a minimum number of pages--24 pages for a paperback and 75 for a hardcover. If you have fewer pages than this, you will get an error. 

You can fix this by writing more or by only putting out a Kindle ebook. In her case, since she had done a children's picture book with relatively few pictures, I had her give me more pictures, which is another option for expanding content. You cannot simply add 20 blank pages to your 4 page book. Kindle will not allow this and will flag you if you try to do this. 

Now, adding more pictures can be a problem if you commissioned a set of pictures and you would have to pay to have more created. I could have taken the pictures she had and photoshopped some of them to change them enough to be another picture for the book if necessary. This would have probably been cheaper than if she commissioned entirely new artwork for which she wanted all the rights. (When you commission artwork for a children's book, you have to make sure the person creating the art knows what you intend to do with it, and I recommend signing a contract with the person that states it is okay for you to use the work in that way.)

She, however, bypassed the above trouble because all her pictures were AI generated. Now, bypassing the above trouble by using AI is not necessarily a good alternative. Although it was relatively easy to go back into the program and spit out 5 or so more pictures, the pictures were awful. I am not talking about just the new pictures. All the pictures were awful. There were five-legged cats and one chipmunk had a foot instead of a tail. The animals were not proportional to each other--with a giant rat towering over a small skunk. One picture had a happy woodland creature returning to its home--except there as a demon or something that looked like a demon with evil teeth and empty eyes waiting on the porch. 

There are plenty of critiques of AI-generated children's book art, so I won't go into all the details, but in addition to the above, the main characters did not look the same from page to page. 

You may think--what does a 4-year old care about real art? And, to some extent this is true. However, as an adult with children there are several things I know--one is that if I don't like reading a children's book to my kids, it will "disappear." I also believe that a parent's primary goal should be to educate their children so they can become participating members of society. If they learn at 4 that there is nothing wrong with five-legged cats (or worse they learn not to scrutinize art), they are never going to have a sense of when it is okay to actually draw a five-legged cat (i.e. for the cover of some fantasy novel that contains a creature that looks like a five-legged cat). If we don't teach kids the rules, they will grow up unable to follow any of them or to know when is a pointed time to break them. We feed into the Tiktok society where they only read headlines, scan clickbait articles, and watch brief, poorly-done video clips on repeat.  

We are already reaping the rewards of giving children "participation" rewards for doing nothing and not rewarding children who actually achieved things because we wouldn't want their peers to be jealous. What we have created are adults who have no reason to try to accomplish anything because someone will cheer them on regardless and the government or their parents will give them everything they need to survive without effort. These adults get a job but don't work. 

With the AI binge and no gatekeeper, our next generation of kids will no longer care about good artwork or good literature. They won't have attention spans long enough to bother with it. 

Internet Archive Password Security

 So, Internet Archive is one of my go-to resources for older books (along with Google and Gutenberg). During COVID, they apparently stopped keeping track of how many copies of newer, still-copyrighted books they were allowing people to browse at the same time. This led to a copyright lawsuit they lost--in case you haven't been following the news. So about three days ago, I decided to create a free account to be able to officially lend some of these books. 

...And then they were hacked. I normally use different passwords for just about everything I have an account for and these are randomized letters numbers and symbols. However, I am getting a little lazy in my old age, and although my G-mail account has a different password, I decided to link the Internet Archive account to my G-mail. So, although the password itself wasn't a big deal, I was concerned that the hackers might have been able to find a way into my G-mail account. 

This meant, that I immediately changed my password for my G-mail. 

The irony is that I was actually musing about a week ago that I was surprised our government (or any government) has not hacked into Internet Archive and gotten rid of some of the data stored there, but I digress. Allegedly, a pro-Palestinian group did this. 

There are two important lessons you should learn from this (1) the Wayback Machine (run by Internet Archive) is an amazing resource for saving web page history. I frequently use them for citations I put in my books. If you are looking for a charity to support, I recommend supporting them so they can upgrade their security and keep this valuable resource protected. (2) Don't use the same passwords for different accounts and don't link one account to another. I believe the hackers just wanted to make the news and probably wouldn't have gone any further, but they did publish what they found. If I had the same password for my G-mail account, it might already have been compromised. 

For some freelancers, a compromised account might be nothing more than a headache. However, I frequently work under NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). I take the security of those who hire me seriously. That means that don't store their projects on the cloud, and I follow other best practices--especially if they hired me and requested an NDA. If, however, I had been more lax in using the same passwords and in storing stuff on my Google account, I could have had a security breach as well. 

I encourage writers who deal with this sort of work to make sure your passwords for different accounts are truly different. There are free online password generators you can use if you have trouble thinking up random ones, I would just change them up a bit before using them to be safe. I then keep password hints (without writing out the full password) and the accounts each belongs to on a list in a drawer.