holy carp!

I awakened this morning to discover the short story commission has reached its minimum goal! On Friday, August 7th, I will send out “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” to all of my patrons, who will be the only people to see it until I find a market elsewhere for it or even possibly until I have enough stories for an Old Races anthology. If you were waiting to see if the story was going to be a go before becoming a patron, perhaps this is the time to act.

I’m trying to figure out if it would be…fair, for lack of a better word, to let people become patrons via direct payment to me instead of through fundable, which requires a $10 minimum. I think I’d probably still have to set it at $5 or something, because I would not want people who went through fundable to feel ripped off, but I’m kind of afraid that offering a buy-in option after the base goal is met is…well, not fair. If people, particularly those who’ve become patrons, would like to weigh in on this, I would be very interested to hear your opinions.

My friend /Bryant (who suggested this experiment) refers to this as a potential sustainable funding model. One of the peculiar things about being a writer is that there is no steady paycheck, and there’s not a great deal of direct-market paying work done on individual levels (tons of fan fiction, yes, and plenty of freebies, but less in the way of finding a market than, say, many musicians or visual artists seem to have managed). Mostly we sell books or short stories which are provided to the reader via a publisher, so this is an interesting, exciting, and somewhat terrifying thing for me to try. I would *love* to be able to do this quarterly, presumably with stories of differing lengths and therefore differing minimum commission goals.

Thank you all very, *very* much for making this work for me. You have no idea how excited I am, or how much I’m looking forward to writing this story. I’ve known since the beginning that there was some kind of story about Janx and Daisani and the Great Chicago Fire, and now I get to find out what it is!

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2 thoughts on “holy carp!

  1. Have you seen what Sharon Lee and Steve Miller did with their books “Fledgling” and “Saltation”, the first for sure published by baen? They posted chapters to the Web, one per week, after receiving $300 in donations per chapter. All their rules, quibbles and stipulations are here.

    http://www.korval.com/saltation/

    I thought it was a very good idea and went to the website every week, like clockwork, to get my fix of the story! *GRIN* It seems like a way to regulate and supplement a writer’s income, too, which is all for the good, given the pulses of payment you receive. I am certain that you have a fanbase that could keep that same level of a chapter per week funded!!! Hope this is useful for you! :)

    1. I at least knew they’d done this, though I hadn’t seen the site they put up. I’d *love* to do something like this at some point…intarwebs ftw!

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