The Daily Report
I’m setting myself three major “accomplishment” goals for this week.
- Get back on track, re: having Tales of MU updates done and posted for MU Patreon subscribers a day in advance of their general publishing. It’s not going to happen for Tuesday’s chapter, but I want to be ahead of the game before Friday.
- Have a major update for RealmLike available on Wednesday.
- Open Ligature Works for a ~6-week submission window, starting on Friday the 15th.
Smaller goals:
- Write fiction/poetry every day for a minimum of one hour, preferably two or more. Note: This is actual “hands on keyboard” time. Actual time directly spent in the entire creative process is about double that.
- Write a status post every day. It’s just a good habit and helps keep me on track.
- Post more often to my author Patreon, so people have a better idea what I’m doing. A lot of times I’ll do something small or incidental and throw it up on Twitter or Tumblr, and not link to it there. Bad habit, no biscuit.
Financial Status
Pulling back the curtain a little bit here –
One reason I’m getting fired up about writing MU in advance is that I’d really like to attract more patrons there. If I were in fact earning the $66 per chapter that is listed on the page, I’d be in really good shape right now. I mean, I’d still want to build on that. But that’s a livable rate for the work involved.
The problem is that it doesn’t reflect the per-month cap that a lot of patrons have on their contributions. And to be very clear: the problem isn’t that people have such caps. If you’ve got X dollars a month you can spend on Tales of MU, I’d rather you do so than feel bad that you don’t have X+Y dollars. I cannot stress this enough. I don’t care if someone caps their contribution at $1 a month. If everybody reading MU who were able to do that, did that, I’d be overwhelmed. No amount of patronage is ever insulting or inconvenient. None.
But Patreon’s reported payout-per-chapter is based on all pledges, before caps, which makes it hard for me to do financial planning and maybe gives people an inflated notion of how much money I’m making. When I hit all my chapters for the month, it’s honestly more like $20 or $30 per chapter, averaged out over the month. I’m getting $60 some for the first chapter, more like $15 for the last one. Which, again, I appreciate. But it does a lot less for my motivation to know that each chapter I post in a given month is worth slightly less than the previous one.
I try to think of it in terms of yes, but it’s still more money overall. Because, yes, it’s still more money overall. And it’s always going to be true that each chapter brings diminishing returns, because caps. But ultimately, I think it’ll be easier to keep writing as the returns fall if the overall payouts are increasing, even if a lot of the new patrons are capping their pledges at $1, $3, or $5 a month.
And even with these complications, I do still think the “per chapter” model is better for Tales of MU than the “per month” model, in terms of fairness to readers and motivation/accountability for me. Crowdfunding a specific work of art works best when the funds are tied to the production thereof, in my opinion and experience.
All of this is to say that if you enjoy Tales of MU, you can do a lot for it and for me by pledging a dollar or more per chapter, with or without a cap on charges in a given month. If we get to the point where I actually am making $50, $60, $70 a chapter on average, that’s going to do a lot to keep the show on the road, so to speak.
The State of the Me
Very slow start to today. I had trouble sleeping most of the weekend, and then got my flu shot on Sunday. I am in an elevated risk group and I have close family members who have even more risk factors, so I always get my shot as soon as I can and I always get the quadrivalent shot when it’s available. Historically, I tend to get joint aches, muscle soreness, and heightened fatigue after a flu shot, and this time was no different.
Plans For Today
I’ve already done some blogging and tweeting, and made and posted a custom D&D monster. I’m about to start my hour of writing.