Keep Copy of Your Writing

When writing, get into the habit of saving your articles and posts to your computer. Keeping a copy of all you write has several very good reasons. Your computer allows you to find them in a fast and effective manner. Articles sold to a third party are still accessible to you. And post on publishing sites are safe from loss.

External publishing sites in particular are good at loosing articles or confining them to the bin by mistake. Keeping a copy of your articles on your computer is your best defense against third party carelessness. And keeping them organized there has further advantages for you, your writing, and your publishing.

An external publishing site lost my articles. I was glad I had everything saved on my computer. I also keep an additional back-up on an external hard-drive, just in case. Like this, I was able to republish them almost instantly on another publishing site while I waited for the first one to clear up the mess and get back to me about it. Obviously, the publisher never got back to me about it and did what publishers do best: Nothing. 

Don't think that this was or is a single incident. I am not a special case. There are scores of incompetent online publishers. It is you the writer who has to look after yourself and your work. And it’s not worthwhile blaming someone else when it is obvious that you could have done something about it yourself. Don't get fooled by sites that allow you to write directly online; if you do that, your article is gone when they mess up. Please note: When, not if.

I make my life easy by writing everything on Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has the advantage of providing me with a fairly correct spell checker. Its grammatical hints can be useful, too. If publishing sites provide spell checkers at all, they are often useless. If you chose to write onsite directly, you still have to remember to copy and paste your work onto your computer in some form. Which means you could have written it with a proper program in the first place. 

Keeping your articles somewhere safe will free your mind over the bother of losing your work to the vagaries of online publishers. Article writing is not done in five minutes. There are exceptions among writers and you can see it in their appalling work. Not having to do your good work twice should be a major goal of yours. As a bonus, it gives you handy access to all your work whenever you discover a site that will allow you to republish articles. You’ll be ready to go within minutes of signing up to the new site. With some textual changes, your article will be as good as new.

While you're saving your work, get some order into it at the same time. I have all the internet addresses of my articles saved, too. With your articles saved in a folder, you can use Explorer Search to look for older articles that relate to what you are currently writing about. With internet addresses saved as well, it only takes you seconds to put up links in your new work. As you know, outbound linking improves your Google page rank. Using your own articles will fit the bill as well as any other external address. The links will provide your older articles with much needed backlinks.

Further reading

Google Search Dominance
Becoming an Expert
The Honeypots for Writing