Writing for a ghost writer: an unpleasant experience online
Of being contacted by a big global mobility website, meeting a ghost writer and the theft of my content.
I practice Linguistic Empathy and I expect you to do the same. Please bear with me if my English is not perfect.
A while ago I was contacted by a global mobility website. They had read some articles of mine and had been impressed. They asked whether I was interested in writing for them.
I admit I felt a bit lost. Their website is really high level – under many points of view: content, language, graphic, dynamic. However, I thought that giving it a try would certainly do me no harm, and I accepted.
My contact person explained she would send some guidelines I was to follow dutifully, and a topic to develop in my article. Should this have been of their like, we would have started to collaborate regularly.
A couple of days later, I received a list of guidelines that was longer than the shopping list of Bottura, and a topic, which made very clear what tone my article needed to have. I immediately understood the thing wouldn’t have worked: guidelines were so many and such that only following half of them would have killed all of my creativity. Besides, the required style was far from what I like.
What shocked me the most, however, was a little clause at the bottom of the guidelines. It said that my article would be signed by one of their ghost writer.
At that point I started wondering how the world works. If these people were quietly admitting that they would not credit me for my content, how were they expecting me to be excited to give my time and professionalism to their site?
I therefore answered that if they did not grant me visibility, I wanted to discuss what my monetary income would be.
Such an income – I discovered when my contact person answered me – was just enough to buy the equivalent of the chewing-gums I consume per week. I tactfully declined any collaboration.
The person must have seen a promise in me, howeve. She came back a few days later telling me that she had talked with the high spheres, and everyone agreed to credit me with the article I would write. They even wanted to add a couple of biographical lines.
So, I wrote it.
A lot of hard work and several hours later, I sent it (despite having promised I would deliver it on time, my contact person kept on pushing me because she was afraid I would be late), and all was followed by a thick silence.
I had almost forgotten that I had written for them, when the contact person came back with a mortified tone. She told me my article had required tons of modifications because my level of English was not adequate, but that it certainly showed I have a lot of experience in living abroad.
After she had reinvented the wheel, I did not worry to follow up. I had already understood that there would not have been any collaboration, and I said goodbye without thinking – and therefore asking – what would happen with my article.
A few days later, I saw it shining on their website. It was obviously credited to their ghost writer (who is really a productive guy!).
I found this all very unfair. Even if they had to correct and rearrange it, the article had been conceived, built and structured in details by me, based on MY experience and MY ideas.
I also wondered whether this is common procedure when providing content to other websites.
In the end, who cares! It has been an unpleasant but illuminating experience. I even felt vaguely sorry for them: having to act this way certainly means that they do not abound in quality content, which is the case, for instance, of my beloved Expatclic. And there must be a reason for this 🙂