Why I don't have a tip jar

[julesjones]

Someone at Redemption asked me why I don't have a tip jar on my website, as it would be a way for people who liked my writing and wanted to show their appreciation to give me some money. The unspoken message here was "if I download a pirate copy of one of your books and like it, I want to be able to pay you for it". From my perspective, that's a good reason for me to *not* put a tip jar on my website, and Charlie Stross explains why in his blog post today:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder_why_theres_no_tipjar.html

My situation isn't absolutely the same (I get paid monthly royalties and no advance), but here's some food for thought: I put a short story and a novelette from the Lord and Master series on my website as free downloads. The number of downloads of those stories from my website is less than a tenth of the number of copies of the two novels sold by Loose Id. *That's* the sort of difference having a competent publisher makes, even in small press. A good publishing house is doing something that is of value to the reader. It's mostly invisible to a reader -- until you go looking through the archives of free stories on the net that have had no editing and no selection for quality.

Comments

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

But of course people (like me) who can't stand to read fiction on a screen and who (unlike me) have some spare cash might like to contribute. Although I suppose what we should really do is hound your publisher.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[julesjones]

But if someone doesn't like reading fiction on a screen, they're probably not going to be downloading pirate copies of my books in the first place. And I'm very much with Charlie in that my blog is for both socialising and advertising. There's also an element of paying forward in the posts about craft.

As for hounding my publisher to do treeware editions -- my usual response to readers who say they'd like print editions because they find those easier to read is in fact to tell them to pester^W write to my publisher. :-) However, my publisher has had her revenge for this, because I had a little flurry of emails from readers who'd got part way through a series when it went out of print, asking me if I could put it on Lulu so they could buy the books they'd missed, and one of them mentioned writing to my publisher to ask about buying the oop books and being told to ask me if I'd publish a new edition...