Author Archives: Ben

Fame and fortune and everything that goes with it

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Along with the usual random collections of invitations to bid to write someone’s medical research paper or biographical squibs for a website featuring nude Bollywood stars (I know, I wish I was making this up too), this morning’s inbox delivers the following treat.
“Dear Ben
This is $SCAMMING_COW from $SCAMMING_COWS_INC. [Names changed not to protect the innocent – as if – but because I have no intention of publicising their scamming set-up.] We are a full service media relations company that works with authors, speakers, thought-leaders, coaches, internet marketers, business experts, health and wellness leaders, etc. to secure media exposure for them and their businesses. We’ve taken specific interest in you and your business as someone we’d like to represent and would like to further discuss the possibility of representing you.”
Well, I do have an agent, y’know, but okay, I’ll read further. Nice to know someone thinks I could be a thought-leader, or even a thought leader.
My eye is caught further down by a very promising list of prices. If these people can get me these, I’ll be laughing.
  • Online radio: $60 per booking
  • Terrestrial radio: $100 per show per market (for example, If a show is syndicated into Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago that appearance would be $240)
  • Television: $150 for local, $500 for national
  • $1000 for major network shows
  • Print media: $750 per placement
  • Blog features: $50 per appearance
  • Webinars-hosting and inviting attendees -$250
(Incidentally, are you picking up the vibe that these people think I’m American?)
Except that I then read the bit just before:

“We also now offer pay as you go PR. Experts can join the PR company and pay per booking that we get them.”

So … you want me to pay you $100 to get me on a radio show? In fact:

“Our media relations representation packages start at just $500 per month and guarantee a minimum of 5 engagements per month!”

So I’m paying you $500 a month. My incentive is presumably the carrot you dangle in front of me of fame, fortune and media exposure. What exactly is yours? You’re getting $500 a month, and I’m also paying you for the extra promotion. Why do you want to do anything at all on top of that?
Answer, you don’t. Children, if you get anything like this, it’s a scam. Genuine PR agents take a cut of your earnings: that’s standard and accepted and it’s what makes them tick. No earnings, no cut. That’s how the big wide world works. Sadly, it is a feature of the same big wide world that there are people like $SCAMMING_COWS_INC. out there always ready to prey on the needy.
Like all good scams it finished with a morsel of truth.

“All of the MEGA best-sellers were born in the mass media (Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Tipping Point, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Success Principles, etc.) here’s your chance to do it in a very cost effective manner.”

Well, yes, they grew big through the mass media – but I promise you, their authors did not pay $500 a month for a minimum of 5 engagements. Or even:

“Reputation Management $250 a month -in which we control the search engine to overtake any negative reputation harming search entries and articles.”

Oh, and on the credit card authorisation form that they so helpfully send, they manage to say “Public Relaitons” instead of “Public Relations”.
Back to the attempts to earn an honest living {sighs}.

Quarterly Report

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Well, it’s been three months since the Morning of the Long Knives. How’s the freelancing going?

It … goes. I think.
To recap: summoned to a meeting early at work, told the department was being restructured, warned I was at risk of redundancy, sent home for a week (which turned into three weeks) to think things over. On the understanding that I would be retained to work for the old place for 5 days a month, I took the redundancy and became a freelance technical writer.
Later on the same day as the Morning, I went into London to meet some nice people who wanted me to do 36,000 words of ghost-writing. That was fun, and lucrative, and it kept my mind off worrying what to do next. Sadly that’s now over.
In the meantime I was signing up with various agencies who handle people like me. They were all saying essentially “work’s always thin on the ground at this time of year but it picks up in September”. It’s now September so I’ll be holding them to that.
And meantime – oh, dear – meantime I signed up to websites like freelancer.co.uk and ifreelance.com. I helpfully get sent daily lists of jobs being offered that I am invite to bid on. At first this was almost suicidally depressing; now I just keep getting the alerts as incentive – a dreadful insight into what could be.
Example, in today’s post:
“I will need 500 articles of 100 word length as soon as possible … All writers will be given a list of keywords to write at. You MUST be able to do at least 20-30 short articles a day … My budget is $30 for each set of 100 short articles (100 Words Each).”
So, $30 for 10,000 words.
The only thing more depressing than the tenders is that there are people who still make bids, with persuasive notes such as:
“Respected Sir, I want to establish long term business relations with you because I can do your project and it will help us to develop healthy business relations.Sir, I will provide you high quality work under dead line.”
On the bright side, the 5 days a month at the old place pays the mortgage and fuel bills, so at least I can starve in the warm and dry.
To be blunt, I miss working in a team that I got on with doing work that I valued. I miss my friends and I would much rather have a full time job. However I don’t want one so badly that I’ll just take anything, and I don’t want to have to take a step back: hence, no real desire to return to journal publishing, for instance. I’m a realist and I know that beggars can’t be choosers – but I’m not yet a beggar, and shouldn’t be for some time to come.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s September and I have stuff to do …

Cake or death?

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Interesting item on this morning’s Today programme, and on the BBC site, about thebaptism of hundreds of Jewish children in Vienna in 1938, so that they could have baptism certificates which would help them get out of the Reich.

Not everyone is for it, which looking back does seem a little odd, but you do have to recall where these people are coming from. It is a sad fact that over the last 2000 years forced baptism has been offered as the only alternative to torture and death, both options very often carried out by the same people.

I would not say that this is the same thing. If I believed in any kind of God (and, oh look, I do) then to be worth believing in, he would be quite capable of looking into the heart of the lucky convert and knowing exactly what is going on. Anything else just reduces the baptism ceremony to the level of magic. “Sorry, mate, you’ve had the water treatment. You’re now a Christian for ever and ever and ever, whether you like it or not, ha ha ha ha ha!”

Not everyone agrees with my enlightened insight, not even clever people like Jewish historian Professor David Cesarani of Royal Holloway, University of London, who

“… is appalled by what appears to him like a crass recruitment exercise of vulnerable people by a proselytising church.

“Any Christians who took advantage of the pressure on Jews to baptise them were doing just that. They were using leverage of the most terrible sort.[1]

“There were many other ways that members of the Christian clergy could have helped Jews – offering hiding places, false papers and other kinds of assistance.[2]”

[1] Well, yes and no, yes and no. If they were being expected to renounce their religion and their heritage for all time, else be shepherded into a waiting room from which the Gestapo could come and collect them, that would be one thing. If on the other hand the Revds Hugh Grimes and Fred Collard, who performed the ceremonies, knew that they were just doing this for show and had no expectation of the baptismees ever actually becoming Christian – so what? I repeat: this is not magic. God knows what’s going on in your heart and that is what counts.

[2] Well, that may be so and it would make a great movie. Alternatively, for five minutes of your time and a bit of water, you get a Get Out of the Holocaust Free card. Why is that such a big deal? Let’s see. Trickle of water on the head vs an expenses-paid sojourn to Auschwitz … hmm, tough one. Let me think about it.

So with the hugest respect to Prof Ceserani, whilst humbling acknowledging and not in the least belittling the centuries of genuine Christian persecution of the Jewish people, I do have to say (as the ancients might have put it if they had Google Translate), transire ipse, te magnum crustum.