But the problem with platforms such as these is they’re tricky to monetize. Not everyone can afford $5.00 a month for your blog. A major news organization like the New York Times is actually half that. For a variety of reasons, many of them humanitarian, I’ve chosen not to paywall my articles. I offer them to free to anyone who wants to read. And I’m fortunate enough to have friends and fans who have the means to contribute if they want to. Thanks to superb bloggers like Elle Griffin, whose Substack, the Novellist, I’m a huge fan of, I might decide in the near future to serialize some of my fiction and put it behind a paywall. But it could be a long time, if ever, before I can pay my bills with the proceeds. In other words, Cappuccino is a labor of love, not a bucket of cash.
If you've not already, you might look into Samuel R. Delany's essays. While he is a science fiction author, his discussions of the issues facing genre writers carry over. Joanna Russ, a truly brilliant author (my phrase: the Iris Murdoch of science fiction), yet she never once made enough money on her writing to survive. Genre writing will casually outsell the lead titles on the NYT's "best seller" list, and yet they won't receive a glance, much less a mention, because they are not "serious."
By the bye, I actually made something like $60.00 -- $63.00 on my first scholarly book, which is pretty unheard of in academic circles. And the second academic work was a true collaborative effort. While each of us was the lead author on most individual chapters, we combed through every one of those chapters one word, one punctuation mark at a time. (And chapter 9 we've hardly any idea who wrote what: we were literally composing sentences together on the fly.)
If you've not already, you might look into Samuel R. Delany's essays. While he is a science fiction author, his discussions of the issues facing genre writers carry over. Joanna Russ, a truly brilliant author (my phrase: the Iris Murdoch of science fiction), yet she never once made enough money on her writing to survive. Genre writing will casually outsell the lead titles on the NYT's "best seller" list, and yet they won't receive a glance, much less a mention, because they are not "serious."
By the bye, I actually made something like $60.00 -- $63.00 on my first scholarly book, which is pretty unheard of in academic circles. And the second academic work was a true collaborative effort. While each of us was the lead author on most individual chapters, we combed through every one of those chapters one word, one punctuation mark at a time. (And chapter 9 we've hardly any idea who wrote what: we were literally composing sentences together on the fly.)