Hi, all -
I recently started a new job, and with all that excitement comes its attendant responsibility. As part of my job, I need to solicit huge amounts of written content that we can repackage and sell. It’s for test preparation, and we’re gonna pay them a little bounty for each bit of content they sell to us.
I would never, ever try to solicit on the Straight Dope - I am a man of honor who respects the rules - but I know that there are a lot of Dopers with a literary bent who might know places where I can go fishing. Where on the Internet do hungry, ambitious word-smiths go when they need some skrilla? We’ve already found a couple places, but I’m hoping that people who might actually participate in these forums would know better.
Thanks in advance; if I do a crackerjack job, then I might just get upgraded to my own personal office…
Off the top of my head:
absolutewrite.com (they have subforums for soliciting both free and paid submissions.)
constant-content.com
odesk.com
elance.com
Note that the latter three have a lot of ESL, cheap content writers.
Absolute Write is more of a “serious writer” forum, so it depends what you are looking for.
It would help if you explained a bit more about what you’re looking for. Fiction/non-fiction? Topics? Audience? Existing content or to be written to your needs?
Gracias to chiroptera for that; those will be very useful to us. I actually just put an ad up on AbsoluteWriters, though I’m afraid that the price my bosses want to pay might be a little too low for them to take…
The best way to start would be with the audience. We’re doing test preparation, so people who want to take any of the big standardized tests can practice with our application. We want to keep this on a tight budget, and our best course of action from here seems to be soliciting content over the internet any paying cash on the nail for it.
To that end, we need… well, in the fullness of time, practically everything. Our audience is high-schoolers who are going to read these passages and answer questions about them. Right now, we’re starting our collection efforts with prose passages of 700-850 words, but as we expand our methodologies we’re going to open up to different kinds of articles about things like science and the humanities.
The biggest constraint is that we have to completely own the rights for whatever we get, and to that end we want all content to be original - we really don’t want to have to deal with a court challenge later on down the line.
Hm, sounds like using Wikipedia content would be ideal here. But although I think you can use it, you don’t get to own it. 
Content that would probably also work well would be news, but a news organization is probably going to ask for a lot of money.
I think what I would do is search for travel stories on blogs and then if a blogger has a bunch of stories (that aren’t the typical self obsessed stuff that bloggers tend to write about) offer them some money for all the ones that you like, that would be more efficient than paying for individual stories.
Or make a deal with Cecil. :smack: