Writing Wednesday: There's Always a Catch

A couple weeks ago I got a private message on Twitter asking, "Would you like to write a series for Channillo?"  To which my first thought was, like yours probably is:  the fuck is a Channillo?

So I went to check it out.  Basically it's a Wattpad kind of service where authors post stories in small bites, either short stories or serialized novels.  The difference being that unlike Wattpad, you get paid based on the number of views for the parts of your story.  Which since you can use a book that's published so long as it's not free anywhere, I thought since they don't allow erotica I'd put up my latest normal release Justice for All.

Well you know what they say, right:  anything too good to be true, probably is.  Also:  there's no such thing as a free lunch.  So, here's the rub:  in order to subscribe to any series on the site you have to buy a membership, ranging from $5/month to $20/month.

Now the caveat here is you can post a series without buying a membership, but as with Wattpad or Twitter, it's probably better if you follow some people if you want them to follow you.

The site seems fairly new and I don't think there are enough members that it would be worthwhile to post there.  In all honesty, I don't see how it can really be a profitable venture for writers.  I mean if I'm paying $5-$20 a month, I'd have to make that back per month just to break even.  The site itself is not very sophisticated and I don't think they have a mobile app.  Since Wattpad has all that and is FREE, why would I as a reader want to use it?  If you want to read stuff and pay money, a Kindle Unlimited subscription would be a much better value.  I'm just saying.

Meanwhile, I was browsing Snagajob for no good reason and this ad comes up for trucking school.  They'll train you and guarantee you a job!  Sounds like a good deal, right?  Well of course there's some fine print.  If you pass the training and get your CDL license and all that (which is pretty iffy I think for me) the job they're guaranteeing you is for 10 months you spend 3 out of 4 weeks driving across the country in a "team" with one or more other person.  Which for some people might seem awesome, but to me sounds like crap.  Not the being away from home part (obviously given what I was doing a year ago) but I really don't want to be stuck in a truck with some random stranger and staying in crappy motels and stopping at crappy truck stops and all that.  Though if it were just me I'd probably end up crashing and burning, so maybe neither option is really good.

Another recent example is the big Michigan-Michigan State football game was on ESPN and I don't have cable, so I decided to try Sling TV on my Roku.  It promises that you can watch live TV through the Roku without paying for cable.  Of course the hitch is that you need a really, really strong Internet connection.  Trying to watch the game, there was so much freezing, buffering, and outright crashing that it was really frustrating.  It's especially bad for scripted shows or movies because it'll freeze or crash and then you end up missing stuff.  So yeah, too good to be true.

Anyway, the point is whether in writing or job searching or life in general, there's always a catch.  You don't get something for nothing.