More on Elsie Metz

Elsie Metz 1902

Continuing with my research on Elsie Metz, I turned to Google Books as a resource. It is amazing what you can find on this site. It has a search bar just like google.com, but it looks for your search terms within the context of books and magazines. I have suggested to house researchers that they enter their address, street and town to see what results they might find. But the same approach works for genealogy as well. When I searched for Elsie I was able to find references to her in a number of publications, including the yearbooks from the University of Cincinnati. If the scanned images are in the public domain, you can download them onto your computer. If they are not in the public domain, you can still do a screen capture to save the information to your computer. This photograph is Elsie's senior picture at the University of Cincinnati in 1902.

As I looked at each of the four yearbooks in which she appeared, I was struck by the fact that while there were 141 students in her freshman class, only 48 graduated in 1902. I guess the drop out rate for college students was high even in the early 1900's! But the bigger surprise to me was that 26 of the graduates were female - over half the graduating class! In the year 1900 only 2.8% of the female population went to college, and women obtained 19% of all undergraduate degrees in the United States. So what made this graduating class different? It would be interesting to know, but I am not sure I will have the time to seek out the answers to that question.

Blogging and Copyright

As authors, publishers or anyone trying to establish a platform on the Internet it is recommended that you periodically Google yourself to see what results you get. After all, this is how most other people will be trying to find you. I did this search on myself this morning and was pleased to see that nearly all the listings for the first 7 pages I looked at referred to me - blog posts, my presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest, Youtube videos, Slideshare, etc. But as I looked closer at a couple of entries I became somewhat perplexed. The websites listed did not sound familiar to me even though my name and a blog post I had written on my personal blog appeared in the title of these two websites.

When I clicked through on the links, I saw that my whole blog post had been placed on these two websites with no credit or link provided back to me. I did a search about what to do when someone steals your work on the Internet and found this wonderful article How to Complain and Report Spam Blogger Blogs. The post has a lot of great tips, and after I read it I could readily see that the two blogs who stole my posts were indeed spam blogs (aka splogs).

Neither one of the blogs has any advertising on it, or I could report the abuse to Google Adsense. For now I have filed complaints about both of the blogs with Blogger since they are in violation of the Terms of Service. I am not sure how effective that will be, but it is a first step. In the meantime I will continue to look for other things that I can do to these two thieves. My advice to you is Google yourself - you might be very surprised at what you find!

Backing Up Your Blogger Site

Having gone through (actually still going through!) this fiasco with Google and Blogger, I was thinking about how disastrous it would be if any of my blogs totally disappeared. It was my understanding that because Blogger is hosted on the blogger.com website it was not possible to back it up. I did a little research and in fact, that is not true.  Here are the steps I followed to back up my blog to my computer:

1. Log in to your blogger account and go to your blog's dashboard.
2. On the left side of the screen you will see a list of options. Click on Settings.
3. Under Settings, click on Other.
4. Up at the top of the page you will see Blog tools with the option to Import blog, Export blog and Delete blog.
5. Click on Export blog. A dialog box will open; select Download blog.
6. A new dialog box will open; select Save File.
7. A Downloads box will open; right click the blogger.com download and select Open Containing Folder.
8. You can then rename the downloaded file and save it to a location on your computer that you will remember.

This will back up all of your blog posts, but not the design of the blog. If you or someone else created a special theme for your blog, that will need to be backed up separately. I just used themes available from Blogger and customized with my own photos, so recreating them would not be a big deal. Having to recreate all the posts would be impossible. I feel a lot better knowing that they are all safely backed up on my computer. Don't let your blog be an accident waiting to happen.

My Frustrating Experience with Google & Blogger

If you have been trying to access this site and gotten the dreaded 404 error code, you were not alone and I apologize for that. Apparently Google/Blogger knew that they had a problem with bloggers trying to switch to custom domain names as early as September 7th, but they continued to let people purchase domain names through them for more than a week. By the time that they finally posted in their "Known Issues" forum that there was something terribly wrong, those of us who had bought the new names essentially had our blogs shut down.

This has been a long, extremely frustrating experience with little communication from Blogger, which is owned by Google. There was not much buzz about it on the Internet either, which kind of surprised me. But then I realized that the professional bloggers (those who earn a significant income from their blogs) are not on the Blogger platform. I am positive that had the professional bloggers been shut down, the issue would have been resolved in a day or two.

Two days ago Blogger stated the the problem was resolved, so I waited in vain for my blog to come back up. Back in the forum, which was the only place I could find any information at all, I could see that others were not back online either. The forum moderator kept telling us that we need to add two CNAMES. I don't even know what that means, let alone where I was supposed to add them. The reason I chose my domain name through Google, who then turfs the sale off to either Go Daddy or eNom, is because Google said they would do all the redirecting of the blog. I would not have to do anything. Ha, ha.

So you would think that the least Blogger would have done is issue a set of step by step instructions. Most of us are not techies - if we were, we would be over on WordPress and not on Blogger. Instead, we are all asking the same questions over and over in the forum trying to figure out what we are supposed to do. One gal finally posted what she had done to get the CNAMES and place them where they are supposed to go. God bless her! But when I tried to follow her steps, I could not find the CNAMES where she said she had found hers. I suspect that she was sent to Go Daddy for her domain name and not eNom where I was sent.

At that point I copied all the notes I had and sent them off to my daughter to see if she could see what I was missing. As you can tell by the fact that I am able to post, she got the blog live again. It works for the old domain of writeformation.blogspot.com, but if you try writeformation.com you still get the 404 error. Half the issue is solved for now. The site will probably be down again at some point while she tries something new. Patience...

Amazon Follow-up

Keys to Unlocking House History

Once the red haze cleared from my eyes over Amazon implying that I had either a) stolen another author's work and put my own name on it, or b) gathered up a bunch of free material on the Internet and placed it in a book to call my own, I turned to Google to see who else had been put in a similar situation. As it turns out I had plenty of company. In fact in the Kindle Direct Publishing forum there was quite a lively discussion that had taken place. I had to sort out the responders who were throwing around comments about KDP Select (another program entirely where you do agree to have your book listed ONLY with Amazon for a set period of time) but I finally found a couple of authors who explained what they had successfully done to satisfy Amazon that they were, indeed, the authors of the books in question.

Basically you need to relay to Amazon all places on the Internet where you have the book listed for sale and/or have published excerpts from your book. One author went above and beyond and just gave them the urls to all of her online social media. That seemed like a good plan to me - if they wanted urls, they were going to get urls. So here is my response back to Amazon:

Hello,

In response to your inquiry regarding Keys to Unlocking House History, I am the author of this ebook, which is an original work. The book is sold and/or mentioned at the following websites:
http://myhousehistory.net/
http://writeformation.blogspot.com/
http://kimwolterman.blogspot.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?trk=hb_tab_pro_top
https://twitter.com/#!/compostqueen
http://www.facebook.com/kimwolterman
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Kim_Wolterman
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/62244
http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/kim-wolterman/keys-to-unlocking-house-history/_/R- 400000000000000444927
http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Keys-to-Unlocking-House-History/book-RVvhhafv9EqIvA_fb4KoiA/page1.html?s=zf4QceoyoUmJgTHJ-WQbwg&r=1
http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/item/SW00000062244/Wolterman-Kim-Keys-to-Unlocking-House-History/1.html
http://provenancepublishing.com/provenance-publishing-store.php
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/keys-to-unlocking-house-history-kim-wolterman/1104223740?ean=2940011387999

Please let me know if you have any further concerns about this title.

Kim Wolterman
Owner of Provenance Publishing LLC
Author of Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)?
Researching a St. Louis County, Missouri Home;
Keys to Unlocking House History; and
From Buckeye to G.I. LeRoy C. Kubler The War Years, 1942-1945

From what I have read it can take one to two weeks to receive a reply back from Amazon. In the meantime you just pray that they don't take your book down until they make their decision. Amazon will have you believe that they are doing this to protect the rights of authors, and to make sure that people aren't just scraping up wiki material on the web and turning it into a book for profit. The Amazon conspiracy theorists believe that this is another attempt by Amazon to try to get authors to only lists their books for sale on Amazon. I suspect there is some truth in both opinions. Another lesson learned in this new world of publishing. Stay tuned for how I make out with the Goliath.
 

Amazon is at it Again!

As I have mentioned in the past, I wrote an ebook entitled Keys to Unlocking House History, and it is available through smashwords.com and on Amazon through their Kindle Direct Publishing subsidiary. The ebook sells much better, relatively speaking, on Amazon. When I got home from the St. Louis Publishers Association meeting tonight, which was a great discussion about social media, I found this waiting to ambush me in my email inbox.

Hello,

During a review of your catalog, we found that one or more of your titles contain content that is freely available on the web.  Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has their work claimed and sold by anyone else.

Keys to Unlocking House History (ASIN:B005UD7UWI)

If, in fact, you are the sole owner of the publishing rights for the books listed above, please provide the URLs for all websites where you have previously published this or any other Kindle content. Please respond within five business days with the requested URLs so we can verify you have the sole publishing rights, or the books will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store. If the content of your book(s) are in the public domain, please confirm this and include the information you used to make this determination.

If you have already unpublished the books listed above, please reply with that information.  We ask that you unpublish any other book that closely matches content that is freely available on the web for which you do not hold the sole publishing rights, or whose content is not in the public domain.  If we discover any other titles you have submitted fail to comply with these conditions or do not meet our Content Guidelines in any other way, your account may be terminated.

Instructions on how to unpublish your books can be found here: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A36BYK5S7AJ2NQ#3-2_Can_I_remove_content_unpublish

If you have any questions regarding the review process, you can write to us at kdp-quality@amazon.com. To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit:
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/contact-us

Best Regards,
Amazon KDP

I don't even know how to respond to this. First of all, I must do so within five days, so the pressure is on. Second, I haven't published this information anywhere else on the web. Why would I have written a book if I had already put it all out on the Internet? So how do I prove I wrote this ebook if I cannot provide any urls to them? It reminds me of that old joke "When did you stop beating your wife?" There is no good way to answer the question. Time to Google the problem and see what other authors say. I can't believe I am the first to receive this email. I will report back with the resolution.

What's in a Name?

A friend of mine is getting ready to set up his own publishing company, and he asked me how he can make sure that the company name he selected is not already taken by another company. The first step is to just enter the name in a Google search and see what pops up. If you don't see the name or anything close to it, then you go to the website of the Secretary of State's office for the state in which you will be setting up your business. The website will indicate an area to navigate to for questions about businesses, and will often have a helpful section on setting up a business. You can run your potential name through a search on their website to see if the name has been taken in your state.

But my friend had a followup question. How do you know the name hasn't been used in another state? The Google search would have indicated that in a lot of cases. But what if someone else using the same name doesn't have an Internet presence of any kind? The only way to be 100% sure is to hire an attorney who specializes in business law to do a thorough search, including trademarks with similar names. It is too bad that there isn't a website you can search for all the possible matches U.S. or even world-wide. But if such a thing exists, I haven't found it.