(no subject)
It's coming up on four. I haven't been asleep yet tonight. I think it's safe to say that I'm well and truly in the midst of an insomniac episode right now. I'm alert and awake, so at least it seems to be the "good" kind for now. Zombification will probably come later.
When I got up, I thought about sitting down and hammering out some writing but I'm finding my mind is turning to money matters instead.
There's always some guesswork involved in figuring out a particular fundraising drive goes over well or poorly. Invariably, the people who are most willing to share with me the reasons they're not contributing to the current fundraiser seem to have used a different name/email address combination for their comments and correspondence than they used for their past contributions... that makes it hard to judge the actual impact.
I don't really blame anyone for not kicking anything into the can right now. The timing is all kinds of awkward, and I've been awkward about it. But I'm up against the familiar brick wall of "need money to live" here... I think I've got a pretty fair system. I don't go around asking people for money when I'm not working. Ideally I'd be sitting a little more securely in the saddle before I started asking this time, but there's that brickwall.
I'm hoping that as I turn out more consistent updates (even if I end up sleeping eight hours during the day I'll still be on track for one today) people will pitch in some more. If not, it might be time to switch up the incentives because the voice tracks don't seem to be appealing to people like I thought they would.
I think in the future going forward I'm going to focus more on the basics: I write, I get paid. I get paid, I write. The quarterly fundraiser will still exist, but as more of a booster than a substitute for fundraising in the months in-between. The big exciting competitive things like the Roommate Derby are big and exciting and competitive, but they're also draining and tend to steal my focus towards running the vote even as they're lighting a fire on me. Maybe the voting/competition thing would work best as an annual/semi-annual thing.
Also, I frequently bite off more than I can easily chew when it comes to trying to add incentives on top of the basic "I am providing entertainment and also I need money to live." thing. The problem with coming up with a list of a dozen or so particular bonus stories is that I'm coming up with a list of a dozen stories I'm excited about right at that moment, but I'm not able to write them right at that moment and I have no idea what the next three months are going to look like for me, in terms of real life impacting my writing time, in terms of creative energy, in terms of other ideas coming along and exciting me...
These are the things that are going to influence my future fundraising. For my past fundraising, I'm still going to work my way through the stories that I piled up during them. I have a specific notion about how to handle things in the future, but I'm going to give my habit-rebuilding efforts a little more time before I talk about that.
Edit To Add: Right after I submitted this, it occurred to me that I need a new mental/emotional approach to the people whose names I can't match to past donations but who have such definite thought about my business model, and that's this: the fact that I ask for money for my stories is the price people pay for reading them. Note that the price isn't that anyone has to pay me anything, it's that they have to put up with me asking.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/304626.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.
When I got up, I thought about sitting down and hammering out some writing but I'm finding my mind is turning to money matters instead.
There's always some guesswork involved in figuring out a particular fundraising drive goes over well or poorly. Invariably, the people who are most willing to share with me the reasons they're not contributing to the current fundraiser seem to have used a different name/email address combination for their comments and correspondence than they used for their past contributions... that makes it hard to judge the actual impact.
I don't really blame anyone for not kicking anything into the can right now. The timing is all kinds of awkward, and I've been awkward about it. But I'm up against the familiar brick wall of "need money to live" here... I think I've got a pretty fair system. I don't go around asking people for money when I'm not working. Ideally I'd be sitting a little more securely in the saddle before I started asking this time, but there's that brickwall.
I'm hoping that as I turn out more consistent updates (even if I end up sleeping eight hours during the day I'll still be on track for one today) people will pitch in some more. If not, it might be time to switch up the incentives because the voice tracks don't seem to be appealing to people like I thought they would.
I think in the future going forward I'm going to focus more on the basics: I write, I get paid. I get paid, I write. The quarterly fundraiser will still exist, but as more of a booster than a substitute for fundraising in the months in-between. The big exciting competitive things like the Roommate Derby are big and exciting and competitive, but they're also draining and tend to steal my focus towards running the vote even as they're lighting a fire on me. Maybe the voting/competition thing would work best as an annual/semi-annual thing.
Also, I frequently bite off more than I can easily chew when it comes to trying to add incentives on top of the basic "I am providing entertainment and also I need money to live." thing. The problem with coming up with a list of a dozen or so particular bonus stories is that I'm coming up with a list of a dozen stories I'm excited about right at that moment, but I'm not able to write them right at that moment and I have no idea what the next three months are going to look like for me, in terms of real life impacting my writing time, in terms of creative energy, in terms of other ideas coming along and exciting me...
These are the things that are going to influence my future fundraising. For my past fundraising, I'm still going to work my way through the stories that I piled up during them. I have a specific notion about how to handle things in the future, but I'm going to give my habit-rebuilding efforts a little more time before I talk about that.
Edit To Add: Right after I submitted this, it occurred to me that I need a new mental/emotional approach to the people whose names I can't match to past donations but who have such definite thought about my business model, and that's this: the fact that I ask for money for my stories is the price people pay for reading them. Note that the price isn't that anyone has to pay me anything, it's that they have to put up with me asking.
This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/304626.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.