Studio Blog

Hi Everyone,

You should be able to submit your articles now. Thanks everyone for your help and patience!!

-DS

We have received many inquiries about the other freelance opportunities (copy editing, title proofing, transcribing, expert) posted on Demand's homepage. Currently, we are only accepting applications for writers, copy editors and title proofers. If you are already working for Demand Studios in some capacity with an existing account and are interested in other work, please do not submit a separate application. Instead, please email the Help Desk at editorialteam@demandstudios.com and place "Applying for _______" in the subject line. Insert the job title you wish to be considered for in the blank. If you're interested in two, insert them both and separate them with a backslash. You may include your bio and/or cover letter in the body of the email.

Please note: If you are interested in copy editing, we require that you have at least five years of solid copy editing experience in your resume.

Thanks,

Chai

Hello Writers,

As you know, we have been working through a significant bug in our tools for the past week. Some of you have been able submit articles, but many have not. Because of this, we are going to extend deadlines once more.

All active assignments will get an extension through Tuesday, November 11th. We hope that this will alleviate some of the concern over submitting your articles before they expire.

Our engineers have been working around the clock to isolate the problem and fix it, and we hope to have a solution in place before the week is out. In the meantime, please avoid using the following characters in your submissions as they seem to be contributing to the problem:

Open and closed single quotes: ‘X’ Open and closed double quotes: “X” test” – emdash quarter ¼ half ½ ¾ 3 fourths Euro € £ pound ¥ yen © copyright ® registered ™ trademark ± tolerance µ micro ÷ division × multiply

é accented e ≠ not equal ≤ less than or equal ≥ greater than or equal ∞ infinity α alpha β beta π pi Ω omega ∑ sum J smiley face

You can also refer to the following thread to see which solutions worked for other writers here.

Thank you again for your patience and for your help investigating the bug. All the information you’ve given us has been a great assistance.

-The DS Team

Thank you all for letting us know about the issue regarding disappearing content. The specificity you have offered has been a tremendous help in narrowing down the cause. We are still working to solve the issue and in the meantime we have a few possible workaround solutions for submitting content.

The problem seems to be related to the rich text in Microsoft Word as well as some other word processing programs, such that copying and pasting from a Word document will cause an error in the system. Here are three temporary solutions, but as with any detour, you will unfortunately have to go a little out of your way. We are genuinely sorry for the hassle:

Option 1: Type your article manually into the submission page. If you are concerned about spell check, you can use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser which offers its own built-in spell checker. If you don’t have Firefox, you can download the browser for free in about two minutes. You can access it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Option 2: Write your article in Notepad which is another standard text program offered by Microsoft Office. You can safely copy and paste articles from Notepad into the submission page and you will have a backup of your work should anything go wrong.

Option 3: Write your article in a Word document, copy and paste the article into the body of an email and send it to yourself. You will need to select “Plain Text” in your email to ensure that your article is converted to plain text. Then you can copy and paste your article from the email into the submission page.

Please keep in mind that this is temporary and we are working hard to solve this problem as soon as possible. To ensure that your work is not lost, please choose the “Save and Preview” option before submitting for publication. If the article text appears then you can submit the article. Thank you all again for your help, and please email us at editorialteam@demandstudios.com if you continue to have problems.

UPDATE!! Please try the following:

If you are cutting and pasting from Word, please disable "smart quotes," the character that seems to be causing the problem.

Here's how:

1) In Word 2007, find the file menu (it's that circle with the interlinking shapes in the far top-left corner of your screen). Pull that menu down and select the "Word Options" button in the bottom right of that menu.

2) Under Word Options, select Proofing on the left. When that screen comes up, click the "AutoCorrect Options" button. Then, select the AutoFormat Tab.

3) In that Tab, uncheck the box under Replace that says, "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes."

Those "curly" quotes used in Word are one of the characters we found that are causing this bug. When we find more, we will post about them, but please make sure only straight quotes are used when you submit articles.

Again, this is temporary - we want to get this problem completely fixed. Thanks for your patience!

Demand Studios will be performing maintenance from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. PST. Please save all your work and log out by 3:15 to avoid disruption. If you have trouble upon returning, please log out and back in again.

Several writers have reported that articles in their Published Work queue have been labeled "Payment Processing" for several weeks. Normally the status of an article turns to "Paid" after payment is sent to your PayPal account, but a bug in our system prevented the nomenclature from changing. Rest assured that payments have been made every week -- only the wording on the site did not change. We have since fixed the bug, and everything should display normally on your Published Work tab. Please check your PayPal accounts to verify that payments have gone through. If you feel that you still have articles that have not been paid, please email us with the titles, and we will investigate.

-Demand Studios Editorial Team

Hello Demand Studios writers! This is just a small note to let you know that you may notice missing images in your "How Does" articles published on eHow. This was because of a formatting problem on the destination site. Rest assured that your photos wont be lost, and we are working on rectifying this situation.

-Liana

When you log in to Demand Studios after 4:00 p.m. PST today, you’ll notice that it looks a little different. In addition to updating the look and feel of the site, we are folding in some of our other work functions.

The updated site is still in Beta, and in the coming months we will enhance the design and add new features.

What does this mean for you? When you come to the new site, you will log in via a log in link in the top right hand corner of your screen.You can navigate to your dashboard from the rest of the site by clicking the Get Work tab. For the moment, the dashboard you see when you log in will remain the same, as will the tools you use. When the time comes to make any changes to the functionality of the site, we will let you know.

Thanks for your patience while we work on these improvements. We hope you like the new look! -The Demand Studios Team

photo by clspeace

Hi, this is Robyn, the Director of Content for Demand Studios. I know many of you have questions about our decision to change the compensation for writer-suggested articles, and I wanted to explain the reason for the switch. This essentially was a business decision. Our data demonstrates that the titles we assign consistently outperform writer-suggested titles. So we needed to find a way to encourage you to write more Demand-generated titles. Our editorial team reads your feedback in our forums, blog comments and on other sites. Many of you have noted that the prices advertised as "variable" seem stuck at $5. We are taking steps to move toward a wider range of payments, even though this may not be evident now.

If you wish to write about topics that you can’t find among our titles, we encourage you to submit your ideas. We want you to write about topics you're passionate about. However, you also have to make a business decision, and we understand if you decide it’s not worth your time to write an article for what we’re willing to pay. Demand Studios will always tell you how much we will pay before you decide whether to write your article. If you choose not to submit new titles, your earnings don’t have to diminish. We are committed to actively pumping more Demand Studios titles into our system to supply you with plenty of work at the $15 level. A primary goal for this team is to create as many earning opportunities as possible for our writers, today and in the future. As long as you continue to deliver quality work, we will continue as a reliable source of income for this talented community – and that commitment includes managing the business so that we can increase our investment in areas like our $15 articles. I hope you’ll be patient with us and continue to speak out. Demand Studios appreciates the feedback, suggestions and ideas that come through the forums, blogs and other areas.

Thanks, Robyn

The email we sent out yesterday regarding the price reduction for user suggested titles has understandably caused a lot of questions. We have read your forum posts and comments to the blog on the same topic. We did want to remind everyone that we still have hundreds of titles available in the title pool that are worth $15 each. And, we have plans to continue feeding that tool with $15 titles.

To answer some of your questions:

• Will we be offered a chance to accept or decline an offer?

Yes, you will always know the price we will pay for an article before you decide whether or not to write it.

• Will we be updated with a breakdown of price ranges, topics that are more lucrative?

We won’t be posting a breakdown of price ranges. We estimate that the majority of suggested titles we’ve seen so far would be placed in the $5 range.

Again, there are many titles available for the $15 price point and we are feeding more in everyday. We know that many of you rely on Demand Studios as a main source of income. We hope this clarification sheds some light on the situation and the opportunities that are still available.

Are there any other major questions you saw that need clarification?

-Demand Studios Editorial Team