As promised, I’m following up on my Authory free trial experience. I’ve used this new portfolio management tool for a little over a week now, so I want to share what else I’ve learned.
Problems With Authory
Let’s start with the negatives and get them out of the way.
1- Importing Content That’s Not Mine
When I wrote my last post about Authory, the auto-importer was still working to put my portfolio together.
But as soon as it had it finished, I immediately spotted my first problem.
Authory had imported a bunch of Vietnamese language articles which I definitely didn’t write – tôi không nói tiếng việt.
It seems like Natural8 – a popular online poker client all across Asia – has taken many of my English-language Poker School blog posts and translated them for different markets. Because they’ve left my name on the article, my portfolio is now full of weird articles that I don’t want the credit for.
Now, in fairness, to Authory, this isn’t a technical fault on their side. The software is designed to scan the site and import anything with your byline. It’s done that.
The Natural8 team has obviously decided to give me the credit since I wrote the original. I can’t fault that decision, nor can I fault Authory for not understanding this situation. However, it’s still a problem for me as the end user, so I have to deal with it.
Luckily, you can at least manually remove them all. But damned if I can be bothered individually deleting every single one – there are several dozen of them in Vietnamese and I even found a few in Chinese.
Perhaps they could add some kind of language filter when importing, to prevent this type of thing?
2- Image Importing
When an article has finished importing, the portfolio features a headline, snippet, date and thumbnail image.
However, for some reason, not all of my articles have the image. That gives everything an ugly, lop-sided appearance. What’s more, people don’t want to see walls of text without things like pictures to break it up.
Missing those colourful images doesn’t display my portfolio in its full glory.
This only appears to have affected my SlotJava.com slot reviews, so perhaps it’s something technical on their side, rather than the fault of Authory.
But, like the last problem, I don’t really care. This is meant to make the user’s life easier, but so far, I’m just seeing problems.
3- Incorrect Dates
If you look at the last image, you’ll notice something else. The Banana Town slot review is listed with a publication date of November 16th. That’s incorrect, as I stopped writing for that site several months ago.
When you auto-import, you have to provide Authory with an initial link to start the process. For my SlotJava.com reviews, I used the Banana Town piece. So I think what’s happened is, it’s used the date on which I told it to start importing, but only for that article. Every other slot review that I wrote displays correctly.
This is replicated across every section that I set up – PokerScout, CardPlayer, Natural8, Techopedia – everything. The first article always has the wrong date.
Now, this is hardly the end of the world. But it still looks like a bug and it’s annoying to people like me who are sticklers for detail. If it turns out to be user error on my part, then the auto-import process obviously isn’t intuitive enough.
Features
Okay, the negatives are out of the way. What about the features that I hadn’t been able to try until now?
Social Media Stats
Authory displays statistics regarding how often your work has been shared to the major social media platform. It also details engagement, including the number of shares and reactions.
Honestly, I don’t care about this. I get paid by the client whether my content performs well or not (though I’m reliably informed it does well!)
In addition, as far as I know anyway, hardly any of my clients share their content on social media anyway. So, even if I cared, I have no use for this.
It would be interesting to track how many people actually read the article directly. But I don’t see how that’s even possible to implement such a feature in the future. And for me personally, these would simply be vanity metrics.
Newsletter Creation and Reporting
This feels like a very useful tool that might make the subscription fee worth it, but I don’t have a newsletter myself.
I do compile a weekly LinkedIn post featuring job opportunities, so perhaps I could turn that into a newsletter. However, I’m not really interested in trying to monetise it.
Like a lot of my Linkedin content, it’s just aimed at giving people the type of advice and assistance I didn’t have when I started as a new iGaming writer. Ultimately, I don’t really care how many people it reaches or how much engagement it gets.
Still, I can definitely see the value in this for a lot of people.
New Publication Notifications
I’ve read that Authory will notify you when a client publishes one of your articles. However, I’ve not experienced this yet.
I did have a nosey around the settings to try and see if it was something I had to switch on manually, but I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing in the FAQs either.
It’s pretty likely that none of my clients published anything in the past week. That’s fairly common, where a bunch of articles are edited and published all at the same time. I write for a lot of gambling affiliates that involve big organisations with lots of moving parts. Sometimes, things don’t get published for weeks after I submit.
Still, I’m not sure how much use I’d get from this particular tool anyway.
Final Thoughts – Is Authory Worth Paying For?
Not for me, Clive.
Look, I don’t hate it, and I really like the idea. There are people out there complaining about their existing portfolio situation.
However, I’ve seen nothing in my free trial period that enables me to justify spending $144 a year on this product.
Pros and Cons
Here are my key takeaways from the free Authory trial.
- Automatic updates. Manually replacing content in my WordPress portfolio is a pain in the arse, and this removes a lot of that problem. However, I have also spent plenty of time messing around in Authory, reordering articles and manually removing content that’s not even mine. Swings and roundabouts.
- Aesthetics. Authory definitely looks prettier than my crappy blog, if you’re willing to overlook the broken and inconsistent thumbnails, that is. But I could easily pay a designer to fix my blog. Anyway, as I’ve said before, nobody actually cares about an ugly portfolio anyway. I’m a gambling writer. I’m not being hired as a graphic designer.
- Newsletter. This looks like a genuinely good idea and will undoubtedly be a really useful tool for someone. However, I don’t have a newsletter and I don’t plan to start one. I can’t offer any insight into how well Authory compares to similar management tools, as I’ve no experience at all.