And Now: Introducing The Best Of beBee

beBee is the social platform that not only lets you reach whatever organic readership you can build but also helps you build that readership.

Imagine that!

Once your article gets 20 relevants and 5 comments, share it to Twitter and include #buzzBeBee in that share. BeBee will help promote your article through their social accounts.

I'm a beBee Brand Ambassador and the founder of myTweetPack.com. MyTweetPack.com drives the #buzzBeBee thing. 

You don't need to be a myTweetPack member to use #buzzBeBee.

That's just me doing my part to promote beBee and all us Bees.

myTweetPack.com is about to do more for Producer Bees. 

It's true that beBee is a Blogger's Dream. Just as importantly, Bloggers are beBee's Dream. I firmly believe that beBee's success is directly related to the quality and quantity of the content people write and share here. 

We have some DFWs over here. No, I don't mean "Down For Whatever." I mean "Damned Fine Writers."  

We have Old Hands like Paul Walters.

. . . and so many more that I had a tough time deciding who to mention.

We got it all, baby!

Let's take it to the next level.

Starting in January 2018, I will publish an eMagazine of the twenty to thirty most popular beBee Producer articles as voted by all of you. Well, to be honest, that really isn't my call to make. I don't own the articles. The authors need to give me permission publish their articles. 

We'll get to how they do that in a bit. 

For now, only English articles will be considered. We'll see how it goes. Maybe we can add more versions later.

I'm still not sure if the eMagazine will be a monthly or quarterly thing. It will depend on how much it ends up costing me. More on that later, too. Don't worry, one way or another I won't ask you to reach into your pocket.

Let's not forget our Talented Photographer Bees

An eMagazine, or eZine, needs a cover. Let's open it up to all you Photographer Bees. I created a Submission Hive where you can submit your pictures. I'll give you full photo credit, obviously. We'll also add a bio for you.

How to Vote for Your Favorites

There's nothing to it. 

You don't need to be a myTweetPack.com member to vote or to be selected. There's no hashtag to remember. There's no song-and-dance. There's nothing special you need to do.  

myTweetPack.com started collecting votes about an hour ago. We already have 214 votes. Voters didn't even know they were voting. 

That's how easy it is.

Any time you share a beBee Producer article to Twitter, you're voting. Don't worry if your Twitter account is teeny-weeny. Share/vote anyway. Every vote counts, and your vote counts as much as anyone else's.

Some of you don't share to Twitter because you figure your account is so teensy that you won't help the author at all. Not so. Your vote counts just as much as someone else's with 100,000 followers.  If the article you share makes the cut, it will be promoted to over 1,000,000 people. That's a lot of eyeballs! 

The author will appreciate it.

Vote, there's no need to be shy!

How it works

myTweetPack.com will monitor Twitter and pull in the shares/votes. Later, it will tabulate them and let me know which were the most tweeted. They are the ones that will go in the eMagazine, assuming their authors are okay with it. 

Right now, we're just looking at "best of beBee." In case you're curious, we're pulling all votes in every language. That means we're also collecting the data for "Mejor de beBee," "Les Meilleurs de beBee," "Melhor do beBee," and "Beste von BeBee." If there are enough Swahili posts, we can even do, "Bora ya beBee."

We'll promote the eMagazine through myTweetPack.com and mention the featured authors' screen names. I expect they will promote it as well.

The Ground Rules

- Anyone with a Twitter account can vote. You don't need to be a myTweetPack.com member. If you don't have a Twitter account, you really should get one. Twitter accounts are free at https://twitter.com/signup

- You can vote for your own articles. I plan to. (Note to myTweetPack.com members: We use a specific search format found in beBee's share to Twitter function to trigger a vote. Your beBee article RSS feeds will not trigger a vote. The #pack! auto-curation will trigger a vote as will a straight manual Twitter share from the article.)

- If you aren't sure if you voted or not, vote anyway. If you already voted for that particular article, the System will ignore the new vote. One vote per person per article.

- You can vote for as many articles as you like. Again, the System ensures one vote per person, per article.

- Don't bother sharing the same article a gazillion times. Your gazillion shares will only generate one vote, and piss everyone off.

- Any article selected for publication will not be eligible for republication for six (6) months. Some articles have longer "legs" than others. It wouldn't be fair to readers to repeat an article too soon.

Authors need to do a little more

I won't publish any blatantly promotional articles. For example, this article mentions myTweetPack.com, Okay, it mentions myTweetPack.com a lot. But, it isn't about myTweetPack.com. That's okay.

On the other hand, my article, "How To Make Email Work for You," is pretty much all about myTweetPack.com's new email marketing modules. That one won't fly for this purpose.

I alone will decide what constitutes "blatantly promotional." You can try to change my mind, but be warned. I can be a stubborn cuss.

Author bios can be as promotional as you like in keeping with Amazon rules. You can't do stuff like push your third-party affiliate links. Amazon can pull the eMagazine if they decide it violates the rules. If I think you may endanger everyone else, and time permitting, I'll ask you to edit it. If time doesn't permit, I'll edit the bio as I see fit. 

Better you do the edits.

I will publish your articles with full writing credit to you. I still need your permission. You can either provide a blanket permission (preferred) or a permission for every post we feature. 

Samples follow . . .

Sample Blanket Permission: I, Ernie Hemingway, gratuitously grant publication rights to Paul Croubalian for all existing and future articles I publish on beBee, providing he credits me as having authored the original work. These publication rights are for the sole purpose of publishing an eMagazine on Amazon and/or other self-publishing platforms. I hereby confirm that I am the legal owner of said articles and that I own the full copyright. I am fully and legally able to grant such rights as I have granted herein. Granted rights are in effect until revoked in writing. Upon revocation, no further publication is authorized. Published works existing prior to revocation will continue to exist.

Sample Single Article Permission:  I, Ernie Hemingway, gratuitously grant publication rights to Paul Croubalian for my beBee article titled, "For Whomever the Ding-a-Ling Toils," providing he credits me as having authored the original work. These publication rights are for the sole purpose of publishing an eMagazine on Amazon and/or other self-publishing platforms. I hereby confirm that I am the legal owner of said article and that I own the full copyright. I am fully and legally able to grant such rights as I have granted herein. Granted rights are in effect until revoked in writing. Upon revocation, no further publication is authorized. Published works existing prior to revocation will continue to exist.

I'll need these permissions by email or private message here on beBee (preferred).

If you occasionally "borrow" other people's work, you may want to give permission one article at a time for those articles that are really yours. I'll have disclaimers covering my heinie. Your's will be hanging in the breeze.

If I don't have permission, I won't publish . . . PERIOD! I don't care if all 12,000,000+ Bees voted for it. No permission means no publication.

While we're at it

Authors, you may as well send me a bio for inclusion in your article. I haven't yet decided how long a bio should be. As long as it's reasonable I won't bitch.

If you don't send me a bio, or just don't send it in time, I'll use your beBee profile description. 

I'll use either your beBee or Twitter profile picture in the bio. Those need to be headshots. Logos or selfies look silly in an author bio. 

You can provide me with a 400X400 pixel headshot, or I'll just use a generic silhouette with "No Author Image Available." 

Your call.

IMPORTANT WARNING to Authors: Try not to change your article titles. Links are built from article titles. When you change a title, beBee creates a new link to your article and destroys the old one. 

Servers are quick but not overly bright. As far as a server is concerned, "New Article by Paul Croubalian" is a completely different thing than "New: An article by Paul Croubalian." 

Any votes you get will be split unevenly between the two links. At worst, you may miss the cut when, in fact, you made it. At best, you will rank lower in the published articles.  

There is NO COST to authors for participation

I'll repeat that to make sure everyone gets it.

Participation in the eMagazine is based strictly on merit with permission.  There is no cost to participate!

I wonder who will be the first to ask how much it costs for authors to participate. It will probably be either Jim Murray. They love being smart-asses, and I love that about those guys. That's one of their more endearing traits. heheheheheh

Phil, Jimbo, and Kevin, author participation is free. (That probably won't stop them from asking anyway.)

I'll front the costs

There's no cost for you, the author, to participate. You just need to give your OK. 

But, there is a cost to collecting votes, tabulating results, chasing authors for permissions, formatting the articles for use in an eBook, creating the reflowable eBook files, debugging the reflowable files, creating issue covers, fixing those darned tables of content, recreating the reflowable eBook files, bookkeeping for profit-sharing, etc. 

Oy ve!

I'll front the costs, but I need to defray some of them, so . . . 

The eMagazine will not be free. 

I haven't decided yet how much the eMagazine will cost, but it will likely be in the neighborhood of U$2.99. I'll balance the two Amazon royalty structures to find the better fit and set the price then. That will have to wait until the first issue is ready to go. I need to know the actual file size to determine its pricing.

Authors and the Photographer Will Participate in Profits 

I must admit, I'm giggling as I write this. As I said, I don't expect there to actually be any profits. If I can cover half my up-front costs, I'll be happy. 

Still, one never knows. If there are profits, it's only fair that I share them with the authors whose talents made it possible.

Let's define profits as whatever royalties are left over after covering my upfront costs plus 15% (fifteen percent). That will be our base cost.

Since losses are really just negative profits and vice versa, I should probably mention that authors won't participate in losses.

Any profits will be split 20/80 with the authors. I'll take the 20% for assuming all the risk. The authors' share will be further split according to the number of articles each author has in the given eMagazine.

I'll have to do the accounting on that. But, I will only do that math for the first six (6) months of an eMagazine's existence. Profit-sharing, if any, will be paid out then. I reserve the right to change this timetable going forward. 

This is a new thing. For all I know, sales may disappear after one or two months (a distinct probability). If so, I'll close the books and pay out as applicable. If by some minor miracle, sales continue in any significant way, I'll continue paying out too. I won't bother paying out anything less than U$10. We'll just let it ride.

Maybe an example is in order. I must repeat, I strongly doubt this scenario will happen. It is presented here for illustration purposes only. More likely, I'll be out about half my cost.

I can live with that.

Every eMagazine will be treated as a separate entity.

Let's assume my upfront costs were $750 and the eMagazine brought in $2,000 in royalties over the six-month period.

The $750 cost plus 15% is $862.50. That leaves $1,137.50 to distribute and $910 (80%) of that goes to the authors.

Let's further assume that there were nineteen articles published in that eMagazine. Counting the cover photo's share, that means each article would pay out 1/20th of $910. Each article's author would get the princely sum of $45.50. If an author had two articles published in that eMagazine, they would get $91.00.

Don't run out to buy a Ferrari.

SUGGESTION TO AUTHORS: Until people get the hang of this voting method, it may be an idea to add something like the following to your articles. "If this article resonates with you, please consider sharing it to Twitter using beBee's share function below. A Share to Twitter is a vote for the "beBee's Best" eZine. Thank you, I appreciate it."