If you love concept art like I do check out ConceptArt.org for about a million pieces of cool art. The site has so many amazing artists on it and great pieces.

My only problem with it is that it is sometimes slow to browse. Some big flash galleries of fifty images would be nice I think.

This piece above is by Jason Chan. You can check out his website and more of his art here.

Project Gutenberg is (as they say on their website) the place to download more than 30,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, iPhone, Kindle and various other portable devices.

Check out the top 100 downloads

Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, The Kama Sutra, Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, The Prince … and thousands more.

Sites like Project Gutenberg may not exist in the future because of the ongoing battle by corporations to extend copyright forever and ever. Instead of creative works becoming the common property of all humanity, they will remain the intellectual property of for-profit corporations.

I’m a big supporter of short copyright terms — something like 50 years after the death of the author/creator or even less would be good.

iFreelance is both excellent and … not so excellent.

If you’re looking for competitive bids from freelancers all over the world – check it out.

If you are a freelancer you can sign up to supply services.

But there is that … race to the bottom. A full-time freelancer in say, Australia, can’t really compete with a stay-at-home mom from America who is married to a partner with a full-time income. Australian writer/designer/programmer bids $2000; Mom bids $200.

I’ve personally lost jobs in Australia because I couldn’t underbid some US writer. Even as a matter of quality, $200 for 75% good beats $2000 for 95% good.

I’ve used iFreelance twice to hire writers for Two Sentence Stories. After my old host wiped out my site I wanted some stories to bulk it back out quickly. One of the writers was awesome. The other – not so good.

Remember if you’re hiring to check their reviews or if they are new on there, to ask for samples first.

Ah Torrent sites, home of pirates and vagabonds!

Well, not exactly. They do also offer legal distribution of content (or distribution of legal content depending on how you look at it).

Mininova used to be a pirate site but then they got smacked and so now they’re a legal torrent site.

The good news for content producers (a term I don’t like much but then “creatives” sounds wankerish) is that you can upload your own content and have it distributed for free around the world!

Some tips first!

Do your keyword research. If you are putting up a book of poetry then go to Google’s Keyword Tool and find a bunch of relevant terms to put in your title and body copy. Instead of “Lovely Poems by Author McAuthor” go with “Free Online Poetry eBook volume 1 by Melbourne poet Author McAuthor”.

Fill your body copy with these terms but make it readable. Don’t randomly fill the text with keywords but be sure to use enough of the top ranking ones.

Put in links to your websites, sale sites or whatever else you want to promote.

Name your file – instead of Lovely Poems.pdf call it Free_Online_Lovely_Poems_eBook_Author_McAuthor.pdf.

Recheck your titles and your text because once you uploaded you’ve only got one chance to get it right.

Once you have uploaded your torrent, other torrent sites around the world will add your torrent to their listings. This results in a massive number of links. Get your keywords right and you can push your ebook or song or movie to the top of the search results.

That one chance to get it right? You can edit your titles/body copy later but the changes don’t cascade through the network.

If you are uploading a pdf make sure you embed links back to your sites in it. Add a footnote and also an author note, for example.

If you google Flash Fiction eBook you can see  the very small pdfs I released to promote Two Sentence Stories take up much of the first few pages. The website has also received a lot of traffic from these eBooks.

Torrent sites – not just for pirating movies any more!

Project Wonderful really is a wonderful way to advertise online. It works on an infinite auction model, which essentially means that so long as you hold the highest bid, your ad will be displayed.

You pay for days, not views or anything else. For example, you might bid 1 cent to have your ad on a particular site. If you are high bid – you win and your ad is displayed. You are being billed 1 cent per day to have your ad up.

If someone outbids you (say 2 cents per day) then their ad is shown until it either expires or someone outbids them. While their ad is shown, you don’t pay anything more.

The interface takes a little time to learn but it’s quite easy to jump in, put up an ad and see what happens. You will need to know how to produce images in something like PhotoShop or another simple image manipulation program.

There are thousands of sites you can bid on and the whole thing is based on transparency. You can see how many hits the sites get, where they are coming from, who clicks on your ad and a lot of other detail.

Even if you don’t have much money you can get your ad on premium sites and capture a bit of their traffic flow. From my own use of it, ten minutes on a high traffic high popularity website can be worth more in clickthroughs than weeks on lower traffic lower cost websites.

If you have a website yourself, you can easily add Project Wonderful advertising to your site and make some money. Wordpress has a plugin and for other backends like Joomla, it’s a simple cut and paste of code. Even if your ad sales only generate 10 cents per day, you can use this to fund continuous advertising online.

I’ll put up more posts in the future about Project Wonderful and how to get the best value for money (like working out your price-traffic ratio, how to get your ads on high traffic sites with low investment and how to find the best sites to put your ads on).

Licensing Biz

Global licensing trade website. Features news, features (features features?), Company Profiles, Brand Profiles, and Event calender.

I subscribe to the RSS feed – easier than visiting all the time.