For writers who aren’t “good” enough for mainstream publication, there’s always the online market.

What I love most about e-books is that they’re often written by people who always dreamed of becoming a writer, but never had the talent or career opportunities to do so. Many e-book authors are single moms who want to find a job they can do from home while caring for their children, or retired professionals who want to work on their own terms. No wonder so much online writing is a mixed bag, often missing the impeccable grammar or punctuation of traditional publications.

The more you understand about who exactly is writing the content you read online, the wiser you'll become about taking any “online authority’s” advice.

Many of the free articles you read are written by “e-lancers,” the online equivalent of freelancers.

Probably the biggest clearinghouse for e-lancers is Elance.com, where you can get anything written about anything. All you do is post your project, and writers (or graphic designers or web programmers or voice talent or whatever it is you require) will bid for the privilege of working for you. You can ask them to write a 6-part mini-course on how to tune a piano, or an 80-page e-book on dating for seniors, or ten 500-word articles about guitar playing. Somewhere out there, there will be some writer claiming to be an expert in your topic.

There’s only one tiny problem: they may not be telling the truth.

This observation is made from years of experience, not a judgment passed on Elance.com, which provides an excellent service. The simple fact is that an e-lancer is often (though not always, of course) a writer who can’t make it in the more competitive freelance market. If a writer is skilled at what they do, they won’t accept a pittance for their hard work. E-lancers tend to accept fees that are well below the standard for freelance writers.

It's unfortunate that many e-lancers will claim to be an expert in a topic they know nothing about. Then they’ll go online to do their research, and, more often than not, snippets of their research will appear verbatim in their writing. Before my experience with e-lanced material, I’d thought that no writer worth the name could even think about violating copyright. Now I know that everyone does it, and they do it because only a small percentage of them ever get caught.

Even worse, some good e-lancers who’ve made their name writing solid material will get so much work that they can’t cope with it all, so they’ll subcontract to writers from less developed countries, such as India. Indians, for all their merits as hard workers, are not known for their impeccable mastery of the written English language. It’s quite obvious when a project comes back that has been written by someone for whom English is not their first language.

If you use a service like Elance.com, you can always send the work back and ask that it be rewritten, or refuse to accept the work due to its unacceptable quality. The problem is, once you do this once, twice, three times, then so many times you’ve lost count, you start to get the picture: you get what you pay for. If you want to get a piece of writing done on the cheap, you can’t expect it to match normal publishing standards.

But here’s the bright side: most of the online entrepreneurs monetizing the net are whiz kids at technology but below average when it comes to communication. They can program the most complex code, but they can’t tell the difference between a good piece of writing and a bad one. So, for them, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they have new content to put up on their site, and that it’s keyword-dense so that Google will pay attention.

So if you’re an average reader who thinks Dan Brown and Stephen King are awesome, then Elance might just be the place for you. If, on the other hand, you consider yourself a bit of a word snob, you may find e-lanced articles so offensive that you write to the webmaster. It really depends on you.

Personally, I’m a bit of a word snob.  Bad writing sounds like fingernails scraping across a chalkboard … which is why I never made it past the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code (I almost quit at the first paragraph). Everyone is entitled to their opinion, right?

What you need to remember is that, regardless of what you write or how you write it, there's a market for your work.  You may end up writing for free on a blog, or you may end up getting paid per article.  The joy is in being read, not reimbursed.

Love it for what it is, and don't expect anything more.