Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: thoughtful
  • Music: Glee, "Express Yourself."

I am considering doing a thing.

So here's the thing:

I am writing a lot of stories set in the history of the Price-Healy family, slowly pushing my way toward the modern day. There are also stories set in the present day, such as the Antimony-centric novella, "Bad Dream Girl," which is going to appear in the anthology Glitter and Mayhem. A lot of these get given away for free on my website, in a variety of formats, with covers and everything. I like keeping the canon centralized.

That said, unless an anthology is commissioning something, it can be hard to carve out the time for what is essentially unpaid work. I need to prioritize my time according to what I'm getting paid for (which is why, for example, the rate of "Velveteen vs." stories went up so sharply when I got a print contract). So...

How would people feel if I opened a "tip jar," with the understanding that for every X amount of dollars, I would add a story in one of my universes to the master list of Paid For Things? Those stories would still have to fit around everything else, but it would make them easier to schedule, and would also make my lights easier to keep on. The stories themselves would remain free on my website, so if you didn't want to donate, you could just stand back and wait for nature to take its course.

Thoughts?
Tags: contemplation, requesting things
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  • 279 comments

dulcimeoww

March 12 2013, 05:11:51 UTC 4 years ago

Works for me. Making the additional stories conditional will probably piss off a few people who don't want to donate and don't want to wait either, but otherwise it seems a very reasonable approach. Also, gifts to you personally expressly for the purpose of paying your living expenses... yeah, that's not taxable income, provided no single payment is in excess of $10,000.

As an alternative, if you wanted to do a series of stories, Kickstarter or IndieGoGo isn't a bad way to do the same thing without the tip jar connotations. It would probably be more measurable from a publisher's perspective, too, though I'm not sure if that's particularly relevant for you.

seanan_mcguire

March 12 2013, 05:30:51 UTC 4 years ago

They're already conditional. Right now, they're conditional on my having holes in my schedule that aren't filled by paying work, something that's currently not the case for the next six months or so. By turning them into paying work, sort of, I can actually move them forward.

Kickstarter has issues, including the need to commit to firm delivery dates, and the fact that people want "extras." This isn't my primary source of writing income; it's just to carve out more space in the schedule. If I have to say "you get one story every two months AND six Field Guide entries AND a phone call," or whatever, I can't afford to do it without increasing the cost per story well beyond what I think is fair.

dulcimeoww

March 13 2013, 00:49:37 UTC 4 years ago

I totally get that, it's just that some people won't. As I've mentioned in some previous discussions, my husband and I have been making comics with a donations model for about eight years now, and it has overall been an incredibly positive experience, but it has also included a few "fan letters" which amounted to people calling us names for it. I guess I thought that saying to expect that might mean it would have less impact when it happens, sortof a solidarity in advance thing.

Yeah, Kickstarter does indeed have the issue of backer levels. Sometimes they're easy to do (buy this print comic and get a free PDF version and the like), sometimes not. The crowd-funding is really more for single projects, rather than being geared towards ongoing projects. It was just a thought.