It’s getting near the end of the month, time for me to write about the new Voluntary Payment system. The blog is free, but to those who can afford it, I’ve started this payment system to pay me for my work – my time, words, photography. The blog is not free to me, it is expensive to maintain, and I am betting it can eventually make up the revenues I lost in advances and royalties after the Great Recession.
This is, I think, the new life of the new writer, one of the ways in which we must get paid in order to survive and do our work. I guess I’m a groundbreaker of sorts, and so are you.The voluntary payment program is…well, voluntary. The blog will remain free to those who cannot afford to contribute to it’s creation or don’t wish to.
Many of you have stood with me these past few years, and I will not abandon you.
There are three ways you can contribute, if you are so inclined: you can pay annually – $75 a year. You can pay monthly, either $5 a month or $10 a month. I want to offer everyone a comfortable way to support the blog, including reading it for free. If you do contribute, you can cancel at any time and will be reminded a month before renewal that the due date is coming, so you can cancel then if you wish. It is simple.
(Security note: I have no access to your accounts, I can’t start them or stop them, only you can do that, and it’s quite simple. No financial information of any kind is stored on my server or website. Two security companies monitor all traffic into the site.)
For five or six years, I refused to consider offering any kind of subscription or payment program, but that was hubris, I think, and false modesty and denial of reality. I need to get paid for my work, if it’s possible, as do the people reading this. This is the future, and I embrace it.
The blog has raised more than $110,000 for good causes – a farrier in need of surgery, a farmer being unjustly persecuted by animal rights activists, the New York Carriage Horses, a small town cafe seeking a home. It also raised more than $3,000 last month to support an expansion of my photography.
The blog is expensive to maintain. It requires regular maintenance fees, graphic design, updates and repairs. There are about 350,000 unique visitors to the blogs, about four million visits a year from all over America and some of the world. The blog is a miracle to me. I thank you all.
I started the blog in 2007, when I sensed the great changes coming in publishing, and I had no idea just how many changes there would be. I am still writing books, but it is a different world. The blog has become a central element in my earnings now, it is a primary source of revenue. About 1-2 per cent of the people who read it contribute, so I have room to grow.
The blog is my permanent and full-time writing job, is where the bulk of my work appears and how I pay my bills. It pays for the photography and also helps to support the animals – vet bills, hay, fencing, shearing, trimming.
This is the future of writing, I believe and of creativity. Those of us who wish to be professional writers are finding new ways to sell their work, and the blog is central to my creativity now, I love it and what it means to me and has done for me. A few years ago, the idea of getting paid for work online was a heresy, it is increasingly accepted. Without it, there will soon be no professional writers or artists.
So if you can and choose to support this work, you can do so here. If not, you are very welcome to just read the blog, or subscribe to it by e-mail or read it on Facebook. I don’t keep any lists of who is paying and who isn’t. I’m up to 46,000 likes, and that ought to mean something, although I’m not sure what. And thanks for considering this.
