Linking to articles

[boatbaby]

I want to get some clarifications about linking to published writings relevant to a thread.

You can link to an article, but you can not link to an article you wrote? What if you did not get paid for the writing? What if you got paid, but it was a one time payment and the number of people who read it after the fact has NOTHING to do with your profit (and it DOES have to do with the thread topic)? What if it was something you wrote FOR Mothering? What about the whole "Are You Published?" sticky in the writing forum?

I write often for sailing magazines. By the time they get online they are out of print and I have already been paid a flat fee. So if I wrote something about raising a kid on a boat, and wanted to link to it in the decluttering-simplifying forum to show how you can live in a small space -- is that kosher?

I just want to be clear on what is allowed and what is not?

thank you!

[JessicaS]

As far as linking one's own articles like you stated that depends on a few different issues.

There are websites, like Associated Content which pay per clicks. While this doesn't usually generate a lot of profit for the author we do want to avoid promotion which can be viewed as "spam" or is just unfair to paid advertisers.

Another concern is blogs which contain advertising, which again is unfair to paid advertisers. We cannot moderate which blogs are and are not profitable to the owner so we have to ask people not to link their blogs that contain ads.

If someone wrote a book that can also be viewed as promotion, we have several published authors of fiction as well as non-fiction. It isn't fair to the other authors who are not linking their books to have people "spamming" their work.

I know a lot of people would probably like to know which books were written by Mothering members. I have bought several. I think it would be good for people to utilize the "I have been published" thread for that.


We also watch for websites, which might not have "ads" but do have "donate" buttons. The donation must go directly to a 501 (c) 3 which is a Federally Registered not for profit organization. We cannot moderate who is and is not a genuine charity, we have no way of checking that so our only option is to restrict it to federally registered non-profits.

We have several people who have been published in print and those are generally ok to link, for instance your sailing articles are probably ok.

Let me know if you have further questions.