The Bedlam Farm animals went into full rebellion this morning – none of them would cross over into the pasture. The sheep looked at the donkeys and the donkeys looked at the sheep and Lulu brayed and they all came to a dead stop. Maria and I stood on the other side with cookies, and nobody budged. Red couldn’t push the sheep across and Fanny and Simon just brayed at us. We laughed, withdrew. Vince is coming on Friday with his tube and rocks.
Last week I announced an important step in the life of this blog, a voluntary but paid subscription program. There are now four ways to subscribe to the blog. Through Paypal, you can subscribe for $60 a year, or for $5 a month, the payments automatically deduced by Paypal (and they can be cancelled any time). Beyond that, people can contribute one-time amounts of any amount they choose, and of course the blog remains free to those who can’t afford contributions or payments.
A number of people – scores, if not hundreds – reported problems subscribing on Paypal. After some investigating by the good people at Mannix Marketing, there seems to have been an error in the code on the Paypal side that affected some people but not others. I am happy to report it seems to be working now for everyone, and I am grateful to the very good people who kept at it and contacted me about it. Facebook is useful in that regard also.
More than anything, people seem comfortable, even happy, to find a coherent and inexpensive way to pay for the blog. I have come far on this issue, as on others, and I am comfortable, proud and happy to be getting paid for the blog. It makes me work all the harder at it and take it all the more seriously, (Maria says this is not possible). I love the blog and of course it is right to be paid for the work that goes into it. I often wrestle with the demands of new technology, but it is important to be reminded that it also connects me to many good people who support my work. There are several hundred subscriptions so far, I haven’t counted them all yet.
Perhaps more surprising is learning that so many people prefer to pay for it, it perhaps increases its own value to them. Most people say “it’s about time. What were you thinking?” And I think it is the right thing to do on both ends. I am not a noble cause or charity, I am a writer and photographer and blogger and I need to be paid for my work – more and more this blog is becoming my work – just as anyone reading this does. People get that, long before I did. The subscriptions and contributions support the blog – the photography, podcasts, ideas, Web maintenance fees and time. My blog is becoming my great work, my living memoir. I think for sometime I thought I was too important to move towards subscriptions – I am a New York Times Bestseller, I had a hard time imagining John Updike asking for subscriptions for a blog. This is, of course, hubris on my part and I am learning that part of authenticity is acknowledging your own worth and accepting payment and recognition for it. There is no virtue in false humility.
Some people write and say they can’t afford any contributions of any kind, and I take them at their word. I appreciate the small contributions as well as the large ones. And $60 a year or $5 a month is hopefully a small enough amount so that people can afford it. I got a contribution last week for $3 from a 10-year-old girl and I appreciate that very much. They all keep the blog strong and evolving.
I am grateful to the many responsible people out there who recognize that even though the free things on the Internet are precious and wonderful, there will be no writers and artists and creative people to read and appreciate if they don’t find ways to get paid for their time and good work. Paypal makes it easy to do this, I see. So for those of you who could not subscribe earlier, it is possible now, and I thank you. I won’t get wealthy on blog subscriptions, but they may soon contribute as much as royalties used to, and it does offer a new and important way for me continue to be a new writer in the brave new world, something I love, and something hopefully that you will love also. I believe this is the direction good blogs are going in.
Thanks. You can read about the subscriptions here.
Managing technology has become a growing challenge in my work and personal life, a problem shared by many people I know but which has become especially complex and challenging to me, as it has become a primary means of creating, promoting and supporting my work. As the publishing industry has changed and contracted, my role has also changed. Publishers don’t do much marketing, publicity or communicating with readers any longer, the Internet has changed their ability and willingness to do that. Writers are supposed to do it themselves.
So writers, artists, creative people and self-employed people like myself are doing more and while so many of these tools are wonderful, they create a lot of work and cost and new challenges. Managing technology is something that takes hours almost every day. The lessons in living with this are important and we have to figure it out ourselves, there is no tech support number to call for dealing with a tidal wave of technological changes and offerings. Our society is built in part on creating things we don’t need and convincing us that we do and getting us to pay for them. We seem helpless to respond thoughtfully.
I put up a Paypal subscription program, it works for most people, not for others, that needs to be figured out. Everyone says this is somebody else’s problem, but it is really mine. I got a digital voice recorder and an internal microphone, but neither is simple to program and I’ve spent a good chunk of the weekend making tech support calls on how to use the microphone. The seller doesn’t know, the company isn’t open on weekends or available in the morning. My photo program is crashing again, my computer seems to be slowing down. Small wonder when I see what is on it.
I have Apple computers and photo programs and video editing programs now, but each of them raises technical issues almost every week. Apple is good about being available but it has become a rare day or week that I don’t have to call them up and sort something out.
Then there is social media. Every day somebody tells me about a new media outlet I need to be on – Tumblir, Pinterest, Instagram, StumbleUpon, Google Plus. Each of these generates notifications, messages, options, needs to update and restore and upgrade. That doesn’t include e-mail. I can no longer read all of these messages or reply to them. The core of my technological work is the blog, which also requires upgrading and maintenance and my photography, which requires the sorting and storing of tens of thousands of photographs. And the publishing of my e-books, which asks me to do much of the marketing and promotion work formerly done by publishers.
Is this voluntary? Yes and no. I love the blog the photography and the sharing power of social media. But it is not really a choice, if I mean to remain a viable writer, it is something I have to do and better do. I don’t want to lose the creative focus of my life, either – I am a writer and photographer, the foundation of my work is good writing, good thinking. You need some head space for that. There are no cool new programs for that and if you are replying to Facebook messages and on the phone with tech support too often, that detracts from and drains my creative work. I am getting more wary of signing up for new things. Because something is cool doesn’t mean it will work for me. There are no boundaries around the number of things one can join, provide passwords for and try and monitor. There are also lots of angry and obsessive people out there and social media is a venue for them to get even angrier and I see that many people seem to be online all of the time, day and night. Is that healthy? I suspect not. I don’t really need to be talking to angry people.
And I don’t want to send messages to people that aren’t messages. What, I wonder, is the point of that, other to make Facebook stockholders wealthy? When people e-mail me because they are looking for a dog, or asking for weather reports and travel advice, or the settings of each photograph I take, are having trouble with Paypal, or are upset because Ibooks doesn’t have my new book up yet, I wonder just where I am drifting? Especially because many of the concerns are legitimate, even if I can’t possibly respond to them all.
It isn’t clear how many of these things actually work, will actually sell books, rather that simply invite more discussion and maintenance. I like technology, it is the new writer’s friend. But it is also his or her enemy in many ways, and this duality makes it complex to manage. Someone wrote the other day that because I am a public person, I better prepare myself for advice, challenge and growing personal interactions. I think this thinking is promoted by social media, which advances the idea of personal connection through impersonal messaging. When I read my favorite novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it never occurs to me that he wants my advice, will be my friend, or have personal connections. Or that by writing about his life, he is losing control over it.
As E.B. White wrote long before the Internet, there are thousands of you, only one of me. That didn’t help either.
I get hundreds, if not thousands, of messages and notifications a day now. Most are not really even communications, they are “likes” and “shares” and “alerts.” Actual messages are often lost, people no longer have to pause for even a second or think about what they are saying. People are raising their expectations about these messages – they expect them to be read and responded to, I guess they often are. But what is the boundary between communication and addiction? Mary Shelley warned us about the unthinking embrace of technology. We have to think about it, talk about it, consider what it does. But we aren’t really, we are just plunging into it. This is America, and there is nothing between us and corporate greed.
I want to be relevant as a writer, I don’t intend to vanish into the cloudy mists of publishing history. Neither do I wish to spend so significant a part of my life managing difficult things that are supposed to make life easier. I am a creative person, not a technical person. This is a big issue, an important one, and I am only beginning to figure it out and recognize the trap here as well as the opportunity, the depth of the problem, as well as the opportunities. A complicated issue. In our corporate nation, no one seems to be promoting much intelligent thought about technology, everyone is either rushing to sell it or struggling to figure out how to use it.
There is this growing idea that because something is neat, it is good. An artist friend told me proudly that she now has 7,000 followers on Twitter. Great, I said, how many pieces of art have you sold this year? None, she said. Maria does a smart job of managing her technology. She focuses on her blog and a few other things, and also on her work. She has no followers on Twitter and sells almost everything she makes quickly. I have 150,000 regular followers on my blog alone each month, but it is not clear how many of them actually read my e-books or paper books.
The duality of it strikes me again and again. It works, it is important, there is much about it that I like. Sooner or later, I have this fear it will simply overwhelm me, and so I am working now to balance it. Tai Chi. Meditation. Farm chores. Reading books. Turning away from it at different times of the day. (If I am online much of the night, it gets into my head, affects my sleep, I don’t do it.) Walking dogs. Protecting writing time – being disciplined about the “no technology zones” in my life. I feel I need new technology and I want to use it. I feel I need to constantly step back and ask myself if it is really important, if it really works, if it threatens to devour the very thing it is supposed to preserve. I’ll write about it as I work through it, of course. Best balance of all.
This morning, I will give up my writing time – the early morning and morning – to call Paypal, figure out my microphone, ask Apple why my photo program is crashing, try fix the convoluted replies on Facebook, try and turn off some of the notifications clogging my e-mail and Iphone. That assumes everything else is working. And yes, I will need to blog and take some photos. That is non-negotiable for me.
