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
...go 4 levels up... Expand

mneme

March 12 2013, 16:37:12 UTC 4 years ago

Ok. I was trying to explicitly frame this as pocket kickstarter, not as -any- form of steerage (that is, you choosing to random a specific project rather than sponsored work in general).

seanan_mcguire

March 12 2013, 16:58:31 UTC 4 years ago

And I explicitly don't want to be a pocket Kickstarter, I want to be a tip jar. People expect "extras" from Kickstarters, and I have neither the funding nor the bandwidth.

mneme

March 12 2013, 17:09:38 UTC 4 years ago

Not what I meant to imply (clearly, I'm still mired in last decade's "ransom model" rather than the new cost+ thing), but best to let it lie here.

Is there a way to frame a tip jar such that there isn't a risk of an over-promise? The models that immediately come to mind are the vague-but-effective "as long as people contribute enough to the tip jar to make it worthwhile for me, I'll keep putting free stuff up occasionally" and the slightly less vague, but still very much under your control "every once in a while, when I've got bandwith, I'll empty the tip jar; after it fills to a minimum level I'll put something up" concept.