Being a writer is strange. You have to be full of yourself to believe that others will want to read these things you’ve written, but you also need to be insecure enough to spend endless hours obsessively revising and improving those same things.
Gone are the days when a moderately successful writer could live out of a Parisian hotel. Now, you’re lucky if you don’t have to be your own marketing department and shell out thousands up front for an editor, while still holding down a day job.
Money and writing often feel like a Venn diagram that’s just two separate circles. The writerly split self-image is necessary here too. You’ve got to simultaneously think that someone might actually want to pay you, and continue working hard even when nobody does.
This is all a very roundabout way of explaining that I’ve added a new page to the menu where you can support me by buying things on Bookshop.org, signing up for Libro.fm, or directly sending me a dollar. I don’t expect that anyone is clamoring to give me their money just because I run this little blog, but now the option is there, just in case.
Monetization Options
That begs the question, what would I need to do to be “worthy” of a random dollar here or there from passing internet pedestrians?
In the modern futuristic gig economy, the cool thing to do would be to set up some kind of crowd-funding or techno-patronage system like a Kickstarter or a Patreon. I’d be interested in doing something like that some day, but it would require having a plan, a good sales pitch, and an exciting product or service provided on a deadline.
In the writing and fiction space, there are a few successful examples of this in print magazines and web zines. It varies from just another magazine subscription system to added bonus content or physical editions, to just regularly begging for donations. I also occasionally see individual authors monetizing, which usually involves either a Substack/Medium blog subscription, or a little storefront for selling self-published work.
The paid blog route really requires a time and effort investment in blogging or newsletters. That’s something I know I could do, because I’ve written fairly consistently and frequently for this blog in the past. However, it would make this feel more like a job—without any guaranteed paycheck. I enjoy blogging and the meta aspect of discussing everything writing-related, but I see it as a fun side project to my fiction. Monetizing the side project would force it to be the main project, and I don’t want fiction to be a side gig to the blog.
For the Patreon route, I’d want to send out fiction as a reward. I’d be hesitant to commit to something like a new story each month, but building up a set of 12 stories in advance sounds feasible. Heck, it could be a good way to give new life to stories that have already been published, without the hassle of trying to sell reprints to magazines or anthologies.
I could also see doing something with Razor Mountain, if I ever get around to properly revising it. A novel might be more appealing for some readers than a collection of short stories, and I could add in some of the material I documented about the process of writing a novel, which was the main appeal (at least to me) of that whole project.
Finding an Audience
Crowd funding doesn’t do any good without a crowd. The real challenge is getting any project like this in front of people who might be legitimately interested in it.
I’ve blogged long enough to know that it’s not easy to build an audience. Having work published and blogging with focus and consistency are probably the two best ways to build that, but there’s also a strong element of luck. Even with all three, it can take years or decades to find people, and it’s easy to lose them by shifting focus or just taking time off.
I have been hesitant to put any monetization on the blog because my audience just isn’t very big. On the other hand, it’s not clear when the right time is to start monetizing. My current thinking is that as long as it’s unobtrusive, it’s unlikely to turn people off, and I can start small and figure things out as I go.
What’s Next?
As usual, I’ll treat this as an experiment and try to be open about it in case the information is useful to others. I don’t have any specific plans and I don’t expect to add more monetization soon.
I’m interested to hear from any other bloggers/authors who are doing any kind monetization. What have you tried? What works or doesn’t work for you? Let me know in the comments.
Words Deferred 