thoughtfulI 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?
March 11 2013, 23:14:59 UTC 4 years ago
You're a professional giving away work in your field for free. IMO, you shouldn't feel shy about asking those readers who can afford it to chip in something, whether that takes the form of telling the next installation when the storyteller's bowl has enough coins in it, or shaking the tip jar when you've told a story.
March 12 2013, 14:57:16 UTC 4 years ago
Yeah, this. And I think it's a potentially very cool business model-- not that it makes lots of money, but it's a cool model, especially for getting across stories readers may want to read that you want to tell that may not really be otherwise "sellable."