As with every site and project I operate, I hire outside editors to go back over my work. Mostly they’re just here to fix spelling, word usage and grammatical errors, but often they go far beyond the call of duty and interlink pages, offer thematic revisions and even make personal suggestions and recommendations. See, although I’ve been tested to an IQ of 135 (I’ve always said I’m no genius, and the test that measures it don’t lie) I have a painful lack of attention to detail, and when it comes to spotting my own mistakes, I’m even worse for the wear.
I keep two editors on perpetual, paid retainer. They’re both higher educated than myself, and each with greater attentions to detail… Yes, they’ve both gone over this site and its texts, though not as thoroughly as they would if it was a more mainstream project. Let’s face it, on HeatherwoodMillCreek.com’s best day it’s still unlikely to attract more than a few hundred readers. Other projects I write enjoy millions of readers, and have revenue to back them, so let’s not lose sight of our real priorities.
What limited proofing and copy-editing this site has enjoyed has been funded entirely out of my pocket, and it may sound like a bummer, but the truth is it needs it, so it’s a worthwhile investment.
Both of my part-time editors brought up the same important question; what would I sell the site for? That’s an impossible question because the site isn’t for sale. I have a boss above me who technically owns all my web-work (with about a dozen exceptions, all written in to my contract from before I started working for him), so in a part-and-parcel sense, I couldn’t sell it if I wanted to, not at any price. I could sell the domain name, or I could wiggle some negotiation to delete individual article off of it, but it’s still not quite that easy.
The domain is only worth anything to one buyer, and it’s the very customer I’d be the most resistant to sell it to. It’s a better URL than what my competitor for the same property has, but that’s all the more reason I’d be hesitant to sell it. Even if I tried to sell the domain, it could easily create the appearance of a conflict of interest (or even blackmail), and mostly because it WOULD IN FACT BE a conflict of interest.
If I’d been hired to write publicity for them, the first thing I’d have done would have been to create this domain and demand they use it. I mean, seriously, the one they’re using is nigh about nonsense. Determining the value of my better, vastly more SEO friendly domain is almost impossible. Again, there’s only one potential buyer, and we’re not exactly on the best of terms to even open a negotiation, and the lifetime value of keeping it is likely far more than they’d be willing to pay.
Even as a well-optimized and fairly back-linked park page it would command an easy $1 a day for decades, and that’s without the bother of writing content or opening myself up to liability, as I have.
So with the purchase of the domain technically out of the question, what would it take for me to delete the articles off the site? I could do that, based on my contract. I could not “sell” the articles for someone else to own, use, reprint or republish, but I could just “delete” them and let them die. But what would it take for me to do that?
Tough question, but luckily the answer is awfully easy. Don’t worry, I’ll get to it.
The harder idea would be to sell the articles. Count them up and tell me what you come up with, and then go find a reputable author with any amount of print-cred, and tell me what impact-articles are selling for these days. I’m not talking about the unpublished guy from Craig’s List, because he and I are not comparable, I mean a real writer who does this sort of thing for a living. What would those cost?
Counting the “site pages”, this is the 37th article or page on the site (though 46 are written and scheduled for release). Just to buy license-free (or open license, exclusive) articles is going to run an easy $150 from any professional writer (again I’m excluding the hobbyists), which would make for a sum price of $5,550 (or at the same rate, $6,900 in a week and a half, even if I lose my internet connection for good.) That’s would make for a steep rate to buy a brand new site, but it still wouldn’t include the domain registration, hosting, database development or any of the ancillary costs that come with it, not to mention the advertising value, growing registered membership and otherwise powerful marketing placement of the site. Right there you’re at almost eleventy-thousand mega-ducats, and we’re barely getting even talking about the future income potential of the site.
Tack on to that the countless hours I’ve spent in vein attempts at mitigating concerns with Heatherwood staff (which comes to a total of 8,064 words written in emails – yes, as a former instructor of MS-Office ’97, I’m retentive enough to keep track – and you can see the cost is already getting out of control, even if we devalue the written word back to 1970s rates.
But to answer the question more plainly as to what it will take for me to delete articles off this site, the answer is, “It’s free.” All I need is to see a very passionate and sincere attempt to swing the pendulum back from the plutocratically abusive place it is now tow her it needs to be. Whatever that may cost is none of my business, since it doesn’t have to pay me one thin dime.
If Heatherwood Apartments wants to rewrite their site to reflect the truths of the property, I’ll annotate my articles regarding all the marketing mistruths. If they step out into the community and evidence a concerted outreach effort to make right by the wrongs exacted all these years, I’ll consider going back and deleting them entirely.
For every story I’ve personally heard about tenants struggling to get the most basic repairs completed, I’ll need to hear a story about the maintenance crew over-delivering to fix items for tenants. It might sound impossible, but it isn’t. That’s how IBM kept their maintenance contract with WaMu when complaints became rampant; they just over-delivered in the following quarter and everybody was suddenly happy again because their computers were finally working.
If I’m to kill off the articles about a legacy of over-charging tenants, I need a tenant to step forward and tell me they were under-charged. If I’m to 86 my stories about how tenants have been gouged with exorbitant costs at move-out, I need to hear equal and opposite stories from tenants who had such smooth sailing and got so much more back from their deposit that they couldn’t believe it.
Think of every story I tell on this site, and then imagine the equal & opposite story, and that’s what it’s going to take to get my sides of stories removed.
So what will it take to get this site offline?
1 – Find my boss and negotiate a purchase from him. Nearly impossible, I promise you, and in the two-years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him sell a single project.
2 – Purchase the domain without content, even though it isn’t for sale, and it’s sure as heck worth more to me alive than it is to anyone else dead.
3 – Don’t just fix the problems from the past, but undo the wrongs the tenants have suffered in sincere, proactive ways.
Aside from that, in all honesty, Phil Nored would have to find a way to hire me and get me to sign a binding no-compete agreement. According to Phil, his budget is already stretched razor thin, and he’s a sharp tack, so I don’t doubt he knows his numbers. Especially with the economy turning sour, even a good year in the past may become a business-busting lean year in the months to follow, so that probability is extremely unlikely for more reasons than I have the time or inclination to write out.
So to you readers (and I am responding to your emails as quickly as I can!) and my editors alike, there’s your answer. The site isn’t for sale, thanks to Mark, and the content isn’t either, but that doesn’t mean I can’t edit, adjust, notate or otherwise dispense with stories as times and conditions change. It just means that the likelihood of it happening is slim and waning by the day. Since articles are constantly added, my investment in the project keeps growing, making it forever more difficult to push me out of the equation.
As I said yesterday, I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on bigger, more mainstream actions until I find out if they’re really serious about making real improvements to how the properties are handled. I have faith… won’t you join me in this congress?
Tags: articles, cencosrship, heatherwood, Management, phil nored, publicity, redact