So, it's obvious my old methods of earning a living are completely broken

[james_davis_nicoll]

But I am so stressed out I can't feel my fingertips and I can't see a way out of the corner I am boxed into:

A: Work has dramatically slowed down in the last year.

B: For reasons I am going assume for the moment are not due to deliberate choice on the part of the companies I freelance for, none of checks I've expected this month have materialized (if I am not stress-confused, I think at this point the most recent invoice that has been paid is about 2 months old); when companies were actually issuing checks they were irregular and unpredictable. This isn't specific to one company: nobody is paying me. Nobody. And even if all the money I am owed showed up today, I'd just be treading water.

UPDATE IN MID POST: in fact I just got email assuring me at least one check will definitely not be showing up for at least a week thanks to the new system (another company told me privately my checks might be cut in a week and then sent out a public email telling freelancers to expect the delay to be a month). I'd walk away from book reviewing at this point if there was anywhere to walk to.

Actually, the above is not quite true: while Romantic Times pays very, very little they have never promised to pay any more than that and they do pay on time. So kudos to them; they are the one bright spot.

[I spend a lot of my time telling myself that this is not a repeat of what Guardians of Order did to me, even though a lot of the same notes are in this tune]

C: There are bills I have been deferring for as long as I can and expenses I have cut to the bone as far as I can but I'm pretty sure all the plates I have in the air are about to come crashing down.

D: Can't afford to create the Millennium Reviews book and frankly I don't understand a lot of what people are telling me how to create it.

(That said, editing all the reviews and adding new commentary for all 35 essays would take me two weeks to a month)

E: Review site ditto: I know how to create content for it but I can't see how to create it and the advice I am seeing doesn't mean anything to me.

Open to suggestions here.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And how much per review do I put on the patreon site?

thinking out loud

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

ETA: I am not at all an expert in Patreon, so I second the recommendation to consult somebody who's done it before. That said, here's what makes sense to me.

If you do it by review, and charge $1 per, that's $2/week per subscriber, or $8/month (assuming this covers both your current review series). That's about in line with a monthly Spotify subscription, for instance (which is $10/month). If you get 100 subscribers, that's about $800/month. Price point is always tricky with these things; you want to make it low enough that lots of people are tempted, but high enough that it actually adds up to something.

Does Patreon support optional one-time donations? If so, that's how you could field review requests. Otherwise you could do it directly through Paypal.

If you do it by month, the tiers could be something like :

$3 - you get to read one set of reviews.
$5 - you get to read both.
$10 - extra content or the ability to nominate and vote on books to review, choose one.
$15 - extra content and the ability to nominate and vote on books to review.

I realize the second option depends on several unsolved technical issues. Maybe start with per-review, see how it goes, and then switch to the other?

ETA2: or you could just set a minimum, say $2/month, and promise little or nothing.

Re: thinking out loud

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

$3 - you get to read one set of reviews.
$5 - you get to read both.


Do I have to learn how to make the site visible to specific people, then.

Re: thinking out loud

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

It would probably require that. Reading other people's advice about Patreon here, I think now that it makes more sense to use as few tiers as possible, and nothing that requires more effort or technology on your part. As someone said, people tend to give the amount of money they feel comfortable giving regardless of tiers.

As someone else said, Ursula Vernon asks for $1/month minimum, and that's it. Probably the most reasonable, strategic thing would be to start with $1 or $2 (I don't see why not to start with $2), with no rewards, and then add tiers later if you feel like it. But you've already got a number of people willing to pay individually for reviews, so just having a PayPal button on your site could let you do that, rather than making it a Patreon tier.

I remember at an earlier point, you said that separate streams for each review series would allow you to track how many people prefer which. It seems like there might be another, less technological way to do that, like occasional polls here.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you're using Wordpress, you can password-protect entries individually, and then just email the password to those who qualify for it, then edit the entry later on and make it public.