Bella A.

If you want a market for your articles and don't mind CC taking a whopping 35% cut, then fine. It is nice to write what you want and the writing standards are high.

But be VERY careful with the "projects" or "casting calls" that you often see advertised on the website. Sometimes the management will get in touch with you personally begging you for help and saying the pay is really good and there's plenty of work for everyone. And then you sign on, make time for the project, attend the meetings, and find out that not only is there no work but the pay is not as high as you thought it was. Furthermore, clients for these projects are trying to save money on their own end by making everything "publish ready" - so they don't have their own editors, HTML coders, or researchers. You have to do all of that. What's even worse is that the editors will tell you, "sorry there's no work" but they'll be lying. Some writers from the group will stay on the project and others will simply get ghosted.

So, to sum up...
1. They lie about the project in the first place
2. They lie about the amount of time required
3. They ghost you when you try and find out what's going on.
4. They allow the client to make changes and demand rewrites that you won't get paid for.

This has happened to me no less than four times in the past year. The last time this happened, I had finally had enough. I confronted a person in management about this, a person I have otherwise worked with amicably for YEARS (I've been on CC since 2010) and instead of dealing with my concerns he kept mindlessly repeating, "This is what the client wants" even though what I was telling him had nothing to do with that.

I'm actually surprised they haven't been busted for fraud by now because of this practice. I'm lucky, it's just me and the cat. But I can imagine the grief this would cause someone who has a schedule, other clients, or a family to feed. It's more than just unethical. It's cruel and totally unnecessary.

UPDATE: The latest project has turned me off the site completely. After a number of articles were sold and the writers had already been paid, the articles were returned and resold again at a lesser rate. The result of this is that my account there is now in the negative and other writers have the same problem. They have no asked me for money, but I sure don't plan on working my way out of their hole.