Is It Time for Maven to up Their Standards for HP Publishers

Let's face it, we write for the money and not for our own entertainment.

You see, HP is my writer's site and I now write informational articles that they share for me on the web.

I've been here, plodding along and learning my craft for ten years now. And honestly, when I found HP, I was just a Storyteller with a Technical Writing background. I was cocky about how I could hold an audiences attention with my stories.

But now, I call myself a writer and I need more. You see, I have evolved from being a pretty good Storyteller to being a confident Writer. How good a writer I may now be I hesitate to say; but I will say that I and my readers believe I am pretty good.

What I need now, is for HP, or their owner Maven to help me take the next step and be a great writer. I'm ready to do more in my role as what Maven calls a Publisher, and I'm ready to earn more money on my writings.

I also believe it's time for HP to evolve and sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. They need to somehow separate the beginners from the ones who are ready to rise to the challenges of a publisher "internship" and produce better works for a higher audience level.

Oh, I know, you use your niche sites as a sorting mechanism by subject, but I see that as a knee jerk reaction to lost revenue in the past. And honestly, it works, for now.

I need to ask, what does it take to have your "editors" start sorting the good from the horrible and placing us into quality groups or whatever that the potential audience would be hard pressed to notice. But for some reason, they have no common look which I believe would give them a shared identity.

And no, I'm not looking to have my writings look like they're on a "WIKI-???" site, but rather I do think a professional magazine looking template could help a lot.

You see, my problem is that HP takes in the worst writers along with the best, without any discrimination about the quality of the works submitted, and uses Google to place ads from their commercial customers into the works for the readers to trip over and maybe even purchase what is being advertised.

And honestly, it works, for now.

But, Google has grown and now they are keeping more and more of their ad money and showing those ads themselves. I know, I have a Shopify Store of my own and Google is pushing me to place my own ads with them so they can get their piece of the advertising pie.

From my perspective, HP is just a middleman right now, standing between me, the publisher and the commercial advertiser that relies on Google for exposure. Everyones problem on the web right now is that Google is so darn large that whatever they do as they grow their business, I and my writer's site HP, have to jump through whatever hoops Google places in front of us.

I have to ask is; OK, HP as their niche sites, but what is next. What do HP and Maven have in store for me, the good writer. And what do they have in store for the many "pilot fish" who are now riding along and feeding off of my works?

Just So You Know!

When I started writing on HP, I was a storyteller. not a writer. As a Storyteller, I didn't have to worry about such things as; punctuation, spelling, sentence structure and the other structure requirements for a good article. But, I really was and still am, a darn good storyteller.

I learned this art by listening to my extended family tell their tales to each other as they sat around their living rooms when I was a kid. Their tales filled me with wonder, and joy and sadness as they worked their way through the tsk of builing a life for themselves and their families.

They would try to talk themselves through an understanding of what they saw and did during WWII. They would moan over how hard it was to fight the elements as they tried to make a living on their farms, They would laugh together and tell their stories of their Hunting exploits and how their children made their hearts swell with Love.

They were storytellers in the purest form of the word. They might not have more than a 5th or 6th grade education, like my Dad, but they they could mesmerize me with a three minute tale of how it felt to kill their first Deer.

They could make me cry with them as they told how they jumped into a bomb crater on some island in the Pacific and when they turned to their friend his friend's body was still sitting there, but his head was gone.

They could make you so angry when you heard your Aunt talk about how her husband would beat her, regularly.

Yes, they were storytellers and I grew up listening to such wonderful life stories and I am pretty good at telling such stories like what I had heard "way back when" myself.

Well, I want to see my articles displayed on a Quality site along with my peer's articles. I want to see good grammar, near perfect spelling, and a story that captures the reader's attention and holds it until the read the last word.

I do not want to pour my coffee each morning and spend more than half of my time tripping over horrible attempts to write, as I look for the entertaining and informative ones that capture my attention.

That's not so hard is it? Place the "good writers" on display, grouped together and place the submissions of the learners, the copiers, and the "please rewrite this for me" people together also.

And of course, have a path for the learners to do just that, learn. As the old adage says; A Baby has to Crawl before they an walk; well, a person who truly wants to write must fail, over and over, before they can write good articles.

Yes, as I let my imagination fly free, I like to see HP as a newspaper from yesteryear. It has editorials and informational articles written by their best people, and they have a large section full of local commenters. The professional writers wrote to a higher standard and captured the audience's attention.

The comment section on the other hand, was full of just that, comments and complaints from the public, These comments were not expected to be professionally written, just to be there for others of the public to read.

Well enough said! I have a vision that I hope is shared by my fellow publishers.