Update: 27th July

[k_a_webb]

It’s just over a week until rent day. James has his ultrasound on Wednesday, but we won’t get the results from that straight away, so it’s going to be at least another week, maybe a little longer, before we know whether it shows anything or not. There’s a chance the antibiotics might be making him ill now and I just wish there was some magical way of making him better. Unfortunately we’re just going to have to keep waiting and hoping, but if the ultrasound doesn’t show anything then he’s definitely going to have more time off work, as the specialist wants him to have other tests and he’s still in too much pain to go back to such a physical job.

As rent day is so close I’m once again thinking about money. The plan was to have time to be able to build up my audience, because James was working and we don’t have as many outgoings as we would if we were renting a flat, but once again the unexpected has happened and I’m feeling useless as I can’t help him with the money side of things as much as I’d like. I can pay for the groceries for the next three months, but I can’t give him anything towards the rent. Even though I know what I need to be able to be earning each month I’m not certain how to make it happen. I’d love to sell more bundles, adoptions, and rentals, but so far I haven’t had much interest in them. Personally I love writing adoption and setting stories, because they give me a chance to explore characters and places I might not have done otherwise, for one reason or another.

I’ve been thinking about raising my prices, so I’ve been researching semi-professional and professional rates. Professional rates are something I don’t think I’d ever feel comfortable charging. Semi-professional aren’t quite as daunting, but my aim is to make British minimum wage for the writing I do, so I’m looking at around £6.50 for 1000 words, which will give me around 1 cent a word. Maybe I’m selling myself short, but I want to be comfortable with the prices I’m charging and I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable with charging more than that. The thing I feel I have to keep in mind is converting between dollars and pounds, especially as most of my current readers are in America.

Right now my aim is to bring in at least £100 by rent day. I have a prompt session coming up and my last stories for my rentals and adoptions are going out at the end of this month, so it would be great to have a couple more. If you have no money signal boost, because every little helps right now.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Pricing is always a challenge.

With poetry, I charge what's considered semi-pro rate for most stuff (under $50/poem) except some epics cross into pro rates. But I can make quite a good hourly rate on the days I'm writing poetry, better than I have doing anything else.

Fiction, not so much; I'm lucky to get a penny a word there. Sometimes I get $.03/word, which is the old pro rate; I think the current one is $.05/word. But it takes me a lot longer to write fiction than poetry.

As a donor, I'm more likely to support projects with a low donation threshold, because I rarely have more than a few dollars to spend at a time. I love non-cash support methods, but I know that doesn't pay the rent.