Jul. 1st, 2016

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…my total earnings on Patreon, between my personal Patreon and the Tales of MU one, simultaneously exists in all four categories of “things which are not too shabby”, “the most money I’ve ever made specifically on Patreon by a wide margin”, “a good start”, and “not enough in the long run”.

One of the reasons it was up in the air is that the MU one is pledges per chapter, but patrons quite sensibly have the option of capping their monthly commitment so that it doesn’t overrun their allotted budget. Patreon’s dashboard doesn’t show what an individuals limits are, and it doesn’t show how much money is pledged per entry until the end of the month when they process. So it’s only today that I’ve learned that while I have upwards of a dozen MU patrons pledging a total of about 50 per chapter, for the last several chapters of month I was making only $15 from five of them.

I’m going to have to work on bringing that number up.

Now, to be breathtakingly clear, I would much rather have people use the caps to pledge what money they can than think things like, “If I’m not supporting every chapter, it’s not worth it.” or “If I’m not paying for the whole month, I’m not a real patron.” Nope! You do what you can, because you must. I’d rather have a thousand people paying a dollar a month than one person paying a thousand dollars. There’s a lot more security the first way.

I’ve just been on tenterhooks about this because I couldn’t do much financial planning until I saw how things shook out. And how they did shake out: not as well as I’d hoped in my wildest dreams, but about what I expected? I mean, I cleared around $240 from Tales of MU patrons this month, and $200 was my most conservative estimate for what it would be.

So, definitely in the range.

As big as the growth has been, I’d be in bad shape if my current Patreon money was my only source of income, but while it’s my largest stream, it’s not my only one. Even ignoring the GoFundMe money that’s either been spent or is earmarked for specific things and the emergency grocery money, I had a good month. My ebook revenues always nosedive in the summer, but since those payout on a slow schedule I am currently reaping the benefits of a fat spring bolstered by Hugo news, and hopefully my patronage will continue to grow through the summer and fall to avoid the shock.

Now, while this has been a good month, I do have some hefty one-time expenses to pay for, so a good chunk of it is already gone this morning. But still, I’m going to start this month with more money in my account after bills are paid than any previous month for longer than I can remember.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

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Okay, so, one of the things I’ve been saying since I revitalized my writing career is that when my Patreon reaches $400 a month, I’ll start buying and publishing other people’s works on a budget of $25 a month, increasing $25 for every full $100 I’m getting above that. Call it a combination of sharing the wealth, networking with other creators, and continuing my experiments in blurring the line between self-publishing and traditional publishing.

Well, my personal Patreon is not at $400 yet, but I’ve had enough growth in that sector that last night I started thinking about my plans, and I realized it would be hard for a one or two person operation to be fielding submissions and putting together a publication every month in the first place, and with that in mind I could start putting my plan into effect on a more limited scale, like a one shot, or irregular, or quarterly publication.

So I thought about it some more, and decided to aim for quarterly, and if it doesn’t quite work out, it doesn’t quite work out. This is an experiment, so the potential failure is part of the process of creating. Anyway, if I put out one issue I’ll still have succeeded in my goals of shining a spotlight on some other creators and adding another item to my DIY resume.

One of the things that I argue against in my artist advocacy is what I call the STOP syndrome: Special Type Of Person, as in “it takes a Special Type Of Person to…” make a comic, write a novel, edit a zine, etc. Now! I do not mean to suggest that it does not take skill or effort or experience to do these things, because it does! It most certainly does! The STOP syndrome is when someone who has the talent stops short of doing some of the work (publishing, promoting, or even creating in the first place) because in their head there is some objective or external signifier that they lack.

I loved poetry as a teenager, but at some point in my early twenties I decided I “realized” I wasn’t a poet and I stopped. For more than a decade, I didn’t write any verse that wasn’t part of a story, and didn’t think that counted as real poetry. As soon as I got over that, I became a published poet and now I’ve placed in an SFPA poetry contest and been nominated for two Rhyslings.

The world is not divided into normal people and special types of people. There aren’t writers, poets, editors, and publishers on one hand and muggles and squibs on the other. There are simply people who do the work of writing, do the work of creating poetry, do the work of editing, and do the work of publishing.

My single big experience with editing and publishing so far taught me many things, including how hard this work is and how rewarding it is. I daresay it will be a bit easier for having had that experience. Not easy, but not a nightmare. Certainly something I can do. The real practical barriers to being a publisher—access to the means of production—are a lot easier to circumvent in the digital age.

So it’s my goal to help show this, and to provide one more venue where people can sell their fiction and poetry in order to hopefully help more people see themselves as poets and authors. I’m not saying that I’ll have a restriction for new talent, but I’ll certainly be looking for it.

A lot of details are still pending since I just committed to this at 2 in the morning last night on Twitter, but here’s the (tentative) skinny:

  • The name of the venue will be Ligature Works. The title will make sense when I come out with my first issue of my personal patron zine later this month. The domain ligatureworks.com has been reserved, thought here’s nothing there yet. I almost went with Ligature Quarterly but decided against committing to a name that has an implicit schedule.
  • The focus will be on material with a speculative or fantastical element, but it need not be any particular degree of “hard” SF or “high” fantasy; I’m fully open to magical realism, impossible hypotheticals (like Rachel Swirsky’s fantastic Hugo-nominated short “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love“), and poems that reference mythic elements, such as my own “Falling: A Part“.
  • I’m a lot less prescriptivist about things like the structure of a story than many editors. I don’t look for an act structure. I don’t think a story needs to have conflict. I am dubious that it needs a beginning or a middle and I’m quite sure it doesn’t strictly require an end. It does need to have a point, and conflict/resolution models are certainly a reliable means of arriving at one. But I’m very fond of vignettes, slices of life, and enigmas. In terms of standards, mine mostly run towards readability. I’ll care much more if I can’t tell who is speaking or if there are great big walls of text for eyes to slide off of than I’ll care if the gun on the mantel ever did go off.
  • Make your story as long as it needs to be. Figuring that out is part of the craft of writing. I think most short stories need to be around 3,000 words, but there are plenty that need to be around 6,000 or 9,000 or even 12,000. If you cut something, cut it because it doesn’t add anything, not because it makes the story longer.
  • Because it’s me doing the judging, I expect there might be a slant in the material chosen towards the humorous, the clever, and the witty. Your work need not be funny to apply, but if you have something you love and you’re concerned it might be a bit silly for other venues, this would be a good place to apply.
  • Ligature Works will have open submissions for poetry and fiction, and maybe occasionally solicited non-fiction pieces. It will be a paying venue. Initial rates will likely be $25 for short fiction and $5 for poetry. I will hope to improve on that as I go. For now, my criteria is the bare minimum I myself would accept (and have accepted) for work of which I am proud and willing to sell. But this is an experiment; if I can’t attract enough short fiction submissions at below the SFWA-approved professional rates, I may simply refocus on poetry until I can afford to offer more.
  • Previously published material not accepted; previously shared with a personal subscriber list does not count as publication for this purpose. Exact details on the rights purchased will be hammered out exactly before I open for submissions officially. Everyone will know in advance what they’re getting into.
  • All submissions will be accepted as email attachments with no identifying information in the document and the attachments forward to me separately, so I can make my decisions impartially. Any relevant information insufficient to identify the individual submitter may be included in the document (e.g., if you are writing about a character who shares your disability).
  • While I don’t think anyone should settle for being paid in exposure, it can be nice if you know how to leverage it. Accordingly, I will also offer all featured authors and poets a brief consultation on how to best capitalize on the appearance of their work and promote their other endeavors around it, so that everybody involved gets the absolute most out of it.

Now!

The sensible thing to do here would be to take some time to get things in place, figure out what I’m doing, and plan an issue for the end of Q4 2016, if not some time in 2017. However, I follow the Moist von Lipwig school of thought in these things: no time to learn how to walk, must run, must fly! and move quickly, you never know what’s catching you up.

So! Submissions will officially open shortly after I return to Maryland (the week after next), with a window until September 1st, for publication at the end of September. If it is even a marginal success, we’ll repeat and improve upon the experiment for the fourth quarter.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

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The Daily Report

I’ve already blogged twice today and haven’t done my status post, but it’s not a normal day and it’s not going to be a normal workday, either. It’s the last day before we leave in the very early morning for a flight back to Nebraska for 4th of July and family time.

I’ve been looking at how my MU pledges for June shook out, and honestly, if I just take next week off, the impact is only going to be something in the neighborhood of $30. I am still going to keep to the schedule, because it’s the start of only the second month of it, but if things stand similarly in August I’m not going to sweat missing a couple of updates around WorldCon.

Things are still pretty much happening for me here. My modestly viral Medium piece has crossed 20,000 hits and over 100 recommendations by Medium users (to say nothing of shares on Twitter, Facebook, etc.) It’s popping up on forums and mailing lists, too. It’s definitely slowed down, but it’s got more momentum 5 days out than I would have expected, and while it’s hard to convert that into long-term income, it has garnered a few new patrons, a few notable tips, and some interesting nods from unexpected people. I’m not going to mention anyone by name, but I am going to write it down, because my work is an experiment and that’s the only difference between science and screwing around.

I also got a lovely and unexpected notice from the restaurant supply company I linked to the other week, thanking me for my blog post informing people how to best use their services. That was an unexpected lift.

Author, blogger, journalist, comic book writer, and just general all around Renaissance woman Mikki Kendall gave the parody post a big boost early on in the Twitternets, and she also gave a push to my short story for June, “Women Making Bees In Public“. That was really a great experience, because she was a big influence in my current Patreon model.

It’s actually pretty much down to a combination of her and fellow Twitter luminary and novelist, Saladin Ahmed, talking about their own plans. Saladin recently launched his Patreon as a “story of the month” model after a long struggle with a word drought. Mikki was talking about something like a story of the week model, which… okay. I’m ambitious. But I can’t do that and Tales of MU, and anyway, my interests are too scatterd for the same thing every week. But them both talking about the fact that they could do this and ways to make it pay is what both convinced me to focus my Patreon efforts a little better and helped me hit on the model I ended up on, which has a short story a month as one of its features.

That’s a digression. The point is, “Bees” is showing early signs of catching on fire. I think it’s well-positioned as a follow-up to “Infidelity”, given the underlying social dynamics it’s exploring. I think the next short story, “The Numbers Game”, will likewise slot nicely in. It is admittedly a bit more of a traditionally structured story than “Bees” is, to the point that I considered shopping it around and writing a different story for July, since I have the whole month, but it’s enough in the same vein as my recent big pictures that I feel like there’s a “Strike while the iron is hot.” kind of situation. I’d rather have “The Numbers Game” come out next week when people are looking for my next thing then months from now when eyes have moved on.

So stuff’s happening.

Financial Status

 

Pretty good right now? I need to keep growing things through July, but in good shape for the moment.

The State of the Me

Can’t complain. I acquired a stubborn splinter in my foot late yesterday and I was a little concern that it would resist removal and I’d be traveling on it, but a little strategic soaking and I was able to tease it out.

Plans For Today

I have a chapter of Tales of MU to post and two to write. I might be nervous about this, except I started writing yesterday at 3:30 and had 6,600 words by 7:00. I also don’t have to finish both chapters tonight, as I’ll have parts of the overnight and the travel day.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

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I was recently reminded of an old criticism I’ve heard of crowdfunding, old enough that it dates back to before the word “crowdfund” was coined. It takes different forms but usually goes something like, “If you have to ask people to fund you, it’s not a job, it’s a hobby.”

Well! This is an interesting notion to me. It strikes me first and foremost that it’s a bit backwards. If you can do something and not ask anyone to pay you for it, then what you have is in fact a hobby or avocation… something that demands little enough of you and/or gives you enough in return that it’s worth your time and energy regardless of whether you can make a living at it.

There are a lot of people who write as a hobby. They write in a journal for their own edification, or post it on a fanfic site or personal blog with no monetization elements. They never attempt to make a living at it. And that’s fine. I’m a great defender of those who doodle and scribble and sketch and color and paint because it pleases them to do so, of those who sing and dance and act with no thought as to how to make a career out of it, and those who write to please themselves. I think the world could do with more hobbyists, with more people who do things because they can do them, at whatever level they can do them.

On the other hand, there are people who write for a living. Some of them seek jobs with publications or studios, saying, “If you fund me on an ongoing basis, I will use my talents to write what you want.” Is that a hobby? No, it’s a career. Some of them write things and then shop them around to publishers and periodicals, saying, “If you fund my continued writing and retroactively fund the time I spent writing this, I will let you publish and sell this.” Is that a hobby? No, it’s a career. Some people (myself included, for many things I write) take their work and put it up for sale so that people who want to read it can buy it; this is asking them to fund its creation. Is that a hobby? Not necessarily.

I mean, there are people who are self-publishing on Amazon who are doing it at a level that would be more readily recognized as a hobby than a job, but there are levels and levels to all of these things, and there are people who do pursue traditional routes of publication at what we might call the hobby level, deliberately. They have a career or calling and don’t see any need to make a a career out of writing, but it’s nice to have the recognition?

So now we come to crowdfunding, whether it’s the Patreon style pledge in advance or the slightly older busker model of “I made a thing, if it pleases you, throw a little something in the tip jar.” Is there any reason this is necessarily more of a hobby and less of a job or career than the other models? No, none whatsoever. In its current form—that is, the form involving electronic money and globe-straddling information networks—it seems unfamiliar and new, but attracting the patronage of private individuals or collecting payment by pleasing the crowd are old and storied conventions for professional artists.

Was William Shakespeare a hobbyist, I suppose? He could not have written his plays while living on the coins the groundlings might one day throw at him for writing them, if he could only somehow stage them. He had to ask for funding from powerful and influential individuals who could pay for (and smooth over the sociopolitical complexities involving) his productions.

Or how about that well-known dilettante and all-around duffer, Michelangelo? Oh, he couldn’t hack it chiseling sculptures on spec, so he had to go ask the Pope for funding! Meanwhile, Leonardo was sniffing around the de’Medici tables, begging for scraps!

But that’s ancient history! Let’s talk about the lazy layabouts clogging up Broadway and Hollywood. Listen, if this Hamilton thing was so great, why couldn’t Lin-Manuel Miranda just start selling tickets and then use that money to put on the show? Why’d he need to find backers and investors?

Or those authors who get advances.

Now, I already know what the rebuttal to this line of inquiry would be: it’s different. It’s different to go to a Florentine noble or a venture capitalist or a Hollywood producer or the Vicar of Christ and get money from them. It’s not at all the same as going to members of the general public, to your audience directly, and try to do the same thing in a distributed fashion. Just like it’s different to put a price tag and a bar code on a product and put it on a store shelf vs. putting it up on the internet with a button that says “pay what you want”.

Except it’s really not that different.

There are all kinds of different models of commerce. There are all kinds of different models of transactions. Some of them are more familiar to us and thus, to some of us, more respectable. But at the end of the day, it’s all about this: if you produce something that has value, you are entitled to receive value in exchange for that. And there’s no wrong way to do that, so long as everybody involved is willing and their rights are being respected. You have to find what works for you.

Most writers I know are working another job, or living with a spouse or partner who is and who pays most of the bills. You ask the biggest name writers you can think of what their advice for writers is, and the common thread is going to be: find another way to pay the bills. Get married. Don’t quit your day job. Inherit money. Live in a country with an adequate social safety net. Stephen King. Tom Clancy. J.K. Rowling. The people who have absolutely won at writing will tell you that you never have a chance of getting to that point unless you’re willing and able to find some other way to pay the bills during the long years that you’re not there.

Now, listen. I’m not about to take potshots at other writers because the market is what it is and it’s tough, but if you see a crowdfunded author scrabbling and you think, “They should have done it the right way. This isn’t a job, it’s a hobby,” you have to be prepared to say that about the vast majority of authors and artists.

I know authors who have cracked the bestseller lists and won international awards who would “hobbyists” in the sense that they can’t yet make a reliable living writing. I know authors who are ahead of me in their career by every measure you can think of except one: my meager income is still more than they pull in a month from their writing.

It’s not just authors and artists who struggle. Think about the vast majority of entrepreneurs and small business owners and sole proprietors, when they’re first starting out.

I don’t know if this is still true, the market has changed so much, but when I was a kid it was common wisdom in the TV industry that a show only really became profitable after 100 episodes, which is about 5 seasons, because that’s when the syndication rights became worth something. Just think about that. For four seasons, Roseanne was somebody’s hobby. Four four seasons, Married With Children was the college drop-out living in its parents’ basement. For four seasons, M*A*S*H* was somebody’s overfunded vanity project.

The bottom line is that we all—those people I mentioned and everybody else who works for a living—are “asking for someone to fund us”, in one fashion or another. Doesn’t matter if you’re an author starting out or a highly paid professional businessperson in a highly paid professional business. You’re still “asking for funding” in every negotiation you make, and in every such negotiation, your ability to get it depends in large part on what you’re offering.

That’s why value for value is my watchword as a writer. I have value. You have value. We can exchange units of value and both come out ahead. I keep telling people, if you like what I write and you’re able, pledge me a dollar. It costs you nothing until the end of the month, and I’ll bet you by the time that comes around, you’ll think it’s worth it.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

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