I happened across A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ blog, Writer Beware Blogs!, which details how they find and research writing scams for their Writer Beware pages on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. site. Crispin and Strauss are both published authors and well known in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy world. While the blog is fairly new, Strauss has been offering information to writers for a long time. In fact, she was one of the few authors online when I first hooked up my computer and started my adventures into the strange new world called cyberspace. While her genre wasn’t what I was interested in, her advice was always well thought out and relevant for most writing genres.

I was excited to find this blog. Not so much because of the scam information but more because blogs about writing in general are hard to find. The posts on this blog are not entirely about scams, though they are all relevant. An example is A.C. Crispin’s newest post, What Does a REAL Agent Do?. The information is basic but new authors really should read it. New authors in particular are susceptible to scammers and their scammy ways, simply because new authors are often desperate to get their masterpieces published. It’s not easy to get published in today’s market and there are many excellent writers that can’t get an agent to look at their work, let along get a publisher interested.

This blog is well worth the read and I’m sure the authors would welcome well thought out comments.

As a side note: These two authors are doing something important in several areas. One, they are informing the writing community of what to look out for when pursuing the publishing industry. Two, they are marketing themselves, though that may not be their intent, it is an added benefit and writers should take note of how these two authors are creating interest in a very creative way, not in just their scam information but in each one as a human being, which in turn creates an interest in their books. How they present the information is as important as the information itself. I have purchased books based on something that intrigued me about the author’s personality or character, usually because of an interview with the author that went beyond talking about his/her book(s) and revealed something unique and/or interesting about the author. Once a masterpiece is published, the author will need to learn how to market themselves as much as their book. While some publishers do hard-core-marketing for selective authors, that’s not the norm in today’s market. Authors must become more involved in the marketing process if they want to succeed.

Here is A.C. Crispin’s and Victoria Strauss’ Web sites. I could do an evaluation of both of these two authors Web sites but that is better left undone for now. I’ll just say that Victoria Strauss really should get her own domain name and Web designer.

I came across this article at TechNewsWorld.com, written by John P. Mello Jr., about copyright issues specifically related to the blogging community. Basically it says that many bloggers are copy-and-pasting copyrighted material with little regard or knowledge that they may be breaking copyright law. Copyright laws are complex and with the Internet communication age, copyright issues become even more complicated. Since I’m not an expert on copyright law, I don’t have much I can add to the article, nor can I debate the issue intelligently. But I do think everyone should read the article and take note of what is acceptable and what might be problematic when using some other persons content. Giving credit to the original publisher of the copyrighted material may not always be good enough to keep you out of court. It’s worth reading.

What I really wanted to write about is the hotlinking issue that’s brought up toward the end of the copyright article. Hotlinking is when someone links to an image on another site. While it’s questionable on whether or not hotlinking is a copyright infringement, it is a theft issue. When someone hotlinks to an image on your site they are stealing your bandwidth and with many hosts limiting the amount of bandwidth a site can use monthly, your site could be shut down for exceeding your bandwidth quota. And that could happen in a very short time frame, depending on where the hotlink is located and how busy that location might be.

I believe that those who hotlink don’t really know what they are doing or the harm they are causing the image owner. Most of them don’t have websites and have no clue what having a site entails but that’s not a good enough excuse since they do know they don’t own the image. I had one client who almost exceeded her bandwidth in less then 24 hours (5 GB of bandwidth), all because of one hotlinked image that was posted on myspace.com. Myspace is like a free blog host and many young people use it. The person that hotlinked my clients image was using that image as her calling-card and she posted comments on all of her friends free blogs. I was amazed at how many showed up in my clients server logs and how much bandwidth was being sucked from her site.

I knew about hotlinking and I knew that I could have banned the IP address but that only solved the problem for that one site and not for any other site the thief might use the hotlink on. My servers do have hotlink protection but it’s used about the same as banning an IP. I wanted something that would stop anyone and everyone from hotlinking to my clients images, something that I didn’t have to implement after the fact. So, I went in search of a better solution. I found Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention, by Thomas Scott, on A List Apart, a well respected webmasters resource. This solution to hotlinking uses Apache’s mod-rewrite rule and a php script. It’s very simple to implement and it works beautifully!

If you’ve never had a problem with hotlinking, you can count on having one in the future. This blog has been online since 2003 and I had never had anyone hotlink to any of my images. I didn’t worry about it since I don’t have a lot of images on this blog but a few days ago I found someone hotlinking to my wolf-woman image. Fortunately, I found it before it became a problem and setup the php script and the mod rewrite. I then did the same for every one of my clients, even the few that have no images except for their site graphics. Prevention is far better than having to pay for more bandwidth or fixing the problem after it cost you in down time.