Blog Funding Days, Day Two

THE DAILY BLOG WILL BE BENEATH THIS POST!

Yesterday I had a really strange interaction with a friend: he pinged me and said he saw I was doing a blog fundraiser and did I think he should do one too?

I scratched my head because, well, you see, his blog is paid. I pointed out that in my opinion it was in poor taste to fundraise on a subscription blog because you’re already getting paid. Unless, of course, there is a major emergency. Then it came out he didn’t realize this blog wasn’t paid.

No, I’m not a hundred percent sure how this blog would be paid? But then when I started writing it, back in pre-history, it was sort of supposed to pay for itself.

So, it was to be a cute blog, about my cats and my daily life, and my writing, and what I liked to do, and it would drive mad sales to my books and–

Does this work for any writer, ever?

I don’t know, I know that in the early oughts editors and agents were convinced it was the ticket to the big money for unknown mid-list writers. You just had to start a blog and automagically you’d be a best seller. In fact when submitting to a new house, while they were considering and negotiating, they often asked if you had a blog, and/or how many followers you had in whatever media. (This of course drove the purchase of chinese bots, and that– anyway. I don’t actually know if publishing houses have become aware of this, yet, or if they’re still buying people based one “two million followers on twitter.”)

One of the things we found, at any rate, is that a twitter/facebook/blog following correlates poorly with fiction sales.

However, before all that, I’d gone off the reservation in the strangest manner possible. It was the perfect storm, in a way. I had to write a blog every day, or at least a few times a week, because that was the formula. But I had no idea what to write about. I didn’t want to write about my then elementary and middle school kids, because…. well…. I didn’t want them to be prey. (And the one time I did it created a firestorm at their school.) I didn’t want to write nothing but cats (though of course, cats are always fun) and writing about my writing process is weird most of the time.

“Write about something you think about all the time” they said. I guess they would think it would be sex? (Though how that would sell my books, which aren’t really sexy I don’t know.) But it turns out I have problems based on when and where I grew up, so what I think about all the time is politics. You see, I feel about Marxists the way people in seismically unstable regions think about the ocean. You don’t turn your back on the ocean when a sudden Mare Viva (Live tide, in Portuguese) can flood the beach and drag you out to sea, and you don’t turn your back on Marxists when they’ve infiltrated a culture and are running in possession of weaponized envy. Because they could suddenly destroy everything that makes life possible.

And so this blog became more and more veiledly — and finally nakedly — political over time. Which is fine. I mean, I hate the filthy stuff, but in this place, at this time we do need to keep our eyes and mind on it, because we have no redundancy left and we can’t afford many more Marxist shenanigans.

The problem with that is that while this blog has its own fans and its own community, it’s only so so at selling fiction.

Mind you, it still does sell some. It’s the closest thing I have to publicity. I mean, no one has figured out what works for book publicity yet. This …. um…. there’s maybe a 25% cross over to buying my fiction.

The problem is this: it’s not so much it takes all my time (only about half of it) but that it’s notoriously hard to take time off, or run off and do something else, or–

Pretty much every morning I wake up and do a blog, unless I did it the night before, before posting at a instapundit. And then during the day I keep an eye on the comments, because we all remember the eruptions when I didn’t, right?

So, I do on average 30 hours a week on the blog? (I work weekends, too.) Sometimes more, sometimes less, but around there.

And the problem is that my family gets very testy about my doing that unpaid. For years they kept telling me everyone else ran a blog fundraiser, why didn’t I?

The real reason I didn’t is that I thought I’d get 20 dollars and a pack of gum, so why bother.

Not only family, but friends, like Jerry Pournelle kept telling me the work I did here I should be paid.

Well, last year, after the massive rescue fund raising, I decided to actually do it, and sons says it should be over the fourth of July, so…. And it worked. Even though because I had to do it on paypal, the incentives and lists were…. anyway. MP3 soon, and collection soon, and then I’ll give critiques pending. The rest? I’ll kill you at my leisure. And if you send me your snailmail, I’ll mail you books, probably next month. (We’re going to be without the ability to drive for about a week. Long story.) But it still worked, by and large.

Now, I can’t go back and do fundraising for the ten or so years I worked for free. I do feel guilty about that because it would mean the boys would have no student loans. But it is what it is. At least I can get paid now.

Because, well, I like this community too. And the give and take in comments about my posts has often changed my ideas or sparked new ones. Which I think is important, particularly as I age.

BUT if I’m getting no compensation it becomes hard to explain to husband why I can’t just go off on a trip somewhere and forget the blog for a couple of weeks or why it’s midnight and I’m finishing tomorrow’s post, or why–

And it becomes even harder to convince myself I shouldn’t JUST be writing.

Anyway, because I’m a florid disaster at keeping track of pledges and due stuff, (VERY easy with Gofundme, because they kept track of stuff for you, but not so with anything else I’ve found. And I’m not using Gofundme for the same reason I’m not using Paypal) this year I revamped into a practically self-fulfilling format.

The first way to support this blog is Give Send Go: Link Here.

Because of Give Send Go policies I CAN’T offer incentives. If you donate there, be aware you helped me get paid for this blog (and the ten unpaid years) and kept me going for a year. Yes, that amount looks outrageous, because it’s what I hope for out of the whole campaign. I just wanted the total somewhere. Also because I’m not closing the campaign, at the end of fundraising days (7/19), but just putting a link on the side of the blog, so anyone wishing to impulse-donate can do so.

The second way to support the blog…. Well, you see, I used to do serialized novels on the blog. That fell by the way side, partly because the world went nuts (and my life too) and partly because there were other things I wanted to talk about on that day, and also the hits on the stories were always lower. I’ve been meditating for some time on how to do this in substack and get paid. So… I’ve created Chapter House. It’s seeded with two beginnings of novels. I’ll be adding 2 chapters to Witch’s Daughter on Wednesdays, and 2 to Winter Prince on Fridays. If you subscribe (Paid Subscriber, I mean), you’ll get each chapter hot off the press, and be able discuss it as it unfolds and yell at me if you think I should go another way, and download each book in various formats, as I finish them. If you just take a free subscription… You get to see the beginning of each chapter? And you will get, if I can, a short story or so a month.

Oh, and if you subscribe, you also get to know you’re supporting the writer. This might or might not give you the warm fuzzies, but it MIGHT. Anyway, to subscribe to Chapter House, the link is: Here.

And if you don’t want to do givesendgo and — I guess some people do? — have a patreon account and that’s how you’re used to donating, I’ve created a patreon. This will only get a post a week (probably Wednesdays, because it’s my I do all the blogs day.) and it will be what the blog would originally have been: You will get stories about my cats, or bits I started writing that didn’t go anywhere, or deleted scenes from the current book, or… stories about my cats. Because my cats are cute.

So, fully aware of the problems of patreon (Which is why not putting original to be published work there), I’ll do something exclusive there once a week. If you want to sign up for supporting me on Patreon: Go here.

And that’s it. Mostly I just want to get paid for my work. Which also relieves the pressure some on the other work, because I can pay for fiction editors and for someone to keep me on track. (And yes, someone to revamp this blog and my writer website. I have someone. I just need to coordinate it.)

And I kind of like that.