Friday, March 13, 2020

Hello, Guru Clients...

What a pity...Guru was going so nicely. I used that site to earn over $700 so far this year, mostly by writing e-books and "reports" for clients. Every single one of those clients gave my work full marks. Every Guru client I've had has always given me five stars.

Credit for this should go to Guru as well as me. At other writing sites I've earned good ratings, but, as they say, nobody bats 1.000. At other writing sites I've had clients who happened not to want what I was able to deliver. (Guru made it easier to avoid those clients by steering them to this web site, where they could see the range of types of things I write.) At one site the system fouled up one job because neither the client nor I realized that, within the time allotted for the job, the number of revisions I was allowed to give the client would be arbitrarily limited. Guru's never done that. At another site the system never worked to the complete satisfaction of anybody because it processed everything through "i-frames" and, "for security," the local server automatically scrambled part of anything processed through "i-frames," so the clients would get 90% of the documents they wanted followed by 10% gibberish. Guru's never done that. So it's been built into the structure of Guru that I've been able, and I suspect other writers have been able, to connect with the right clients. As a matchmaker site for writers and clients Guru has had no equal. At that site and no other, quite a few writers have been batting 1.000.

$787 Earned/Yr
Feedback/Yr

(Firefox won't paste the buttons as graphics. My loss is your browsers' gain. That's what Guru clients have been seeing on my profile page, and if they click over to read clients' reviews, they've seen this...)

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Feedback (9 Total)

  • Priscilla is an awesome writer. She takes the time to property research her subjects and follows directions perfectly. She asks great questions for clarification as needed. Communication top notch. Will continue to work with her!

    Priscilla King is a fantastic writer! On top of that great communication, transparent, prompt, truly cares about the quality of their work and expect to be wowzy by their creative writing. I definitely look forward to work with you again! Best!
     
  • Priscilla is an excellent writer and we will certainly be using her services from now on. She has excellent communication with us and understands our projects. We look forward to more projects with Priscilla.
  •  
  • I was extremely satisfied with Priscilla's work. Priscilla appeared to be very confident in the work they did & do I will refer them to all of my business partners. Thank you once again Priscilla.
  • Really great work from Priscilla. Thank you very much. On time and top quality!
  • Priscilla was a pleasure to work with. She over delivered on the word count and delivered on time. Her work was very eloquent and clever. I would definitely hire her again!
  • Priscilla King took this job and said she could expand and make this chapter come alive. I was pleasantly surprised to see that she did indeed fulfilled her promise. She took a chapter which lacked depth and made it into something that was a joy to read. She’s very creative and backs up her words w  ...Read More 
  • Excellent, very much enjoyed working with Priscilla and will certainly hire again. Great writing style, good grammar and interesting topics.
  • Great work!
     
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Then a client tried to use a loophole in the system to avoid paying for a document. Then a Guru employee who obviously resented having to bestir himself to collect the money just happened to notice that...actually writing sites are supposed to file tax information after a writer has earned $500 in one year. However, I'm sharing Firefox's text-only version of what I saw on the tax information page as a fairly precise list of what NO citizen of these United States should EVER transmit via any electronic medium. If a web site asks for any of this information, we should always say "Bad Question! Transaction Cancelled!" 

(In theory, Gentle Readers, refusing to interact with sites that are careless with sensitive data--i.e. that even suggest that you might put any of this information on any device that connects to the Internet--might cost you money. In practice, I've found that it costs those sites a lot more than it does me. Be brave. Own your power. And urge your Congresspeople to enact legislation that criminalizes electronic storage or collection of accurate information in any of the categories below. THIS INFORMATION DOES NOT BELONG ON ANY COMPUTER, CELL PHONE, WEB SITE, SOCIAL MEDIA PAGE, OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT CONNECTS TO THE INTERNET. NOT EVER. Allowing it to appear on electronic media is at least a potential act of high treason--the more useless your identity is to common-or-garden-variety credit fraudsters, the more valuable it is to violent criminals.)

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If Guru prefers to work with cheating clients rather than honest writers...that can only possibly be their loss.

There is no way to keep people who cheat writers out of the Internet. There are, however, ways to limit their cheating. For example, the loophole that's allowing one person to cheat me will also work to allow the four people who've posted payments for my work to reclaim their money. Much as I hate to recommend that, the appearance of this horrible-looking screen has prompted me to do so.

I can still build documents that upload right into Kindle, with notes, tables of contents, indices and all. And I still will.

I will be posting the e-book I wrote for the cheater as a series.

I will be able to confirm authorship and lack of payment to prove plagiarism if the cheater is collecting any money from this e-book, although frankly, without more information about his marketing strategy, I can't imagine how he ever thought he'd do that. The document is pretty generic, as it stands. The topic has been better handled by better known authors. And I don't know about the cheater, but I happen to be in a position to fix that when building it into a real book.

 If Guru can convince me that they are legitimately trying to continue connecting writers with clients, I'll resume working there. If they're trying to enable cheating and destroy the good reputation they've built, I won't, and that will be their loss.

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