08: A penny for the author

Hello again

It's Friday and this week I want to point you towards a website called Patreon.

Patreon is like Kickstarter in the sense that as a creative type, you can ask 'fans' to give you money via various and differently priced packages. But it's not quite the same because, as far as I can tell, you're asking people not to fund a specific project, but you as a person.

It's a patronage scheme, essentially. If people like your work and what you do, then Patreon provides a simple way for them to pay you for it. The key detail here is choice. You can still publish your work to everyone for free.

In this week's episode of the Write for Your Life podcast, I talked about this at length. Could I ask my readers to pay $1 every time I wrote and posted a short story to my website? Would it be wrong to then try and get those short stories published as an actual book?

My dear visitors to The Broome Cupboard, what do you think of all of this? Would you be happy for your readers or viewers to fund your creative endeavours in this way? Would you support your favourite writers through a patronage scheme?

Please get in touch and let me know. You can reply to this email or, of course, send me a message via Twitter.

It's bank holiday weekend here in the UK, so have a smasher if that's where you are. The rest of you, don't forget to go to work on Monday morning.

With great affection,

Iain