Don't Use "I Write Like" meme

[icarus]

From mecurtin:

Don't use I Write Like

Jim McDonald did some digging into that "I Write Like" meme, and what he found isn't pretty.

I looked at the rest of the text on the results page:

Great job! Do you want to get your book published?

“I have personally read through thousands of book proposals in my career as a publisher and agent. I know what these professionals are looking for—and what they are not looking for.”
— Michael Hyatt, Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.


That little bit includes two links, both to the same page: http://michaelhyatt.com/products/ebook-writing-a-winning-book-proposal

Yep, it’s SEO. And they’re using social engineering to get those links wide-spread and high in the Google stats. Helpful little cut-n-paste code to put in your blog!

But wait! There’s more!

Go over to that advertised page, and you’ll find a pair of $19.97 e-books by the above-said and afore-mentioned Michael Hyatt. These books promise to tell you such insider secrets as how to avoid the three items you should NEVER include in a fiction book proposal. Wow, I can’t wait to find out.

So, who’s Michael Hyatt, and what is Thomas Nelson?

Basically, a former legitimate Christian publisher, now a vanity press.

This “I Write Like” site isn’t remotely legitimate. No, they aren’t trying; or, anyway, they aren’t trying to analyze writing samples: They’re trying to lure newbie authors to the rocks and shoals of vanity publication.

I will also note that there's a "sign up for our awesome newsletter!" box on the side, which says that by doing so you can download FREE a "classic" book on writing by Charles Raymond Barrett -- a book which is, it *doesn't* tell you, also available at Project Gutenberg because it's from 1898.

I *strongly* recommend removing any links and code from "I Write Like" that may be in your posts.

Boost the signal.

Comments

[elf]

Tangential, if anyone cares--the free ebook is Short Story Writing: A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story; 54k words long; it defines "short story" as 30k words or less, and is a reasonable overview of/intro to the craft, written in fairly dense turn-of-the-20th-century aca-style. (Lots of 150 word paragraphs. Lots of examples, mostly from White male authors.)

I plugged in bits of my prose to the meme, and found that my essays are like either Dan Brown or Margaret Atwood, and some of my fanfic is like Rowling and some is like Nabokov. Noted that it's not "who do you write like" but "which popular bestseller or classic author do you write like."

I'm not sure "vanity publication" is the evil it once was; it's essentially what Lulu.com and Smashwords offer--throw your work at us; we'll take a cut of the profits to deliver it. A publisher who also offers editing & formatting for a fee isn't necessarily a bad thing. (It becomes bad when they tell or imply to authors that their help *will* make them successful authors, able to make a living typing words onto a screen.)

That said--yeah, it's sleazy of them, and people should know who they're advertising for when they post the meme results.

[amadi]

There's also the matter that of ~50 authors listed, only 3 are women, all are white. When contacted about this, the creator of the site said he would explicitly not add anyone to the list because of their race or gender, because to him, "everyone is equal." So it's problematic from the top down, and really needs to go away quickly.

(It's also fundamentally broken, Margaret Atwood is one of the listed authors, but when she plugged her own writing into the thing, she was told repeatedly that she writes like Stephen King, but never herself. She tweeted about it, in bemusement.)