October 12, 2015

Don't focus on money, focus on writing

"Hi Ksenia! I am enjoying reading through your website. I need to reorganize mine. I am a relatively new author. I put Parenting . . . A Work in Progress on Amazon, KDP, Smashwords, Ingram Spark, and use a local printer. The next book, The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon is with the formatter and is awaiting illustrations. I am considering doing what you have done for the Charlie eBooks. I believe you have hit upon an excellent method and would like to try it. Do you use both Mobi and ePub files? Do you send something to explain to folks how to upload the file to their devices? Are you finding that most people send funds close to what you may have gained otherwise? Many thanks, Ellen."

Thank you, Ellen! I'm thrilled you enjoy my blog. You got me thinking here, with your questions. What follows will be part cautionary tale part answers to your questions, something I wish someone told me three years ago when I started writing, something that would've helped me sleep and not worry to death. So, here is the thing.

DON'T FOCUS ON MONEY, FOCUS ON WRITING.

May 29, 2015

Setting up a donation option

by Ksenia Anske

Raymond Bolton asked: "Nicholas Rossis says you set up a virtual tip jar to receive donations. Would you care to share how to do it? Since you had sales while you were giving away copies of your books, I assume you kept copies on Amazon selling for a price and gave the free copies away through your website? Am I correct? If not, would you care to share how you did it?"

Sure. There is no big secret.

To set up a donate button was my readers' idea. When I self-published my first trilogy and gave it away for free (ebooks, not paperbacks), many people on social media and in person told me that they would love to somehow contribute to my writing, and someone suggested I put up a Donate button on my site, which I did: through PayPal, through Squarespace (the platform my website is sitting on), and through Patreon (a subscription-type a la Kickstarter site where patrons can support you on an ongoing basis as opposed to a single project).

November 30, 2014

THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATIONS TO HELP MY DAUGHTER

by Ksenia Anske

I feel so much right now, my heart is bursting. You lovely loving human beings, you have donated a total of $1183.45 to help my daughter recover the things she had lost to a burglary. She told me that all those shoes that were taken, she won't be replacing, but instead will buy a new laptop, since her old one is dying, to she can make more art and more beautiful covers for me. She asked me to give you this message (and she drew the picture you're seeing above):

November 29, 2014

My daughter's apartment got broken into, ART SUPPLIES GONE

by Ksenia Anske

You, my amazing readers, asked me to throw this post together, so we can help my daughter, who makes all my book covers and is a graphic design student in California, recover what was stolen while she was in Seattle, visiting me and her dad. She just called me, curiously very composed, and informed me that their apartment (she shares it with several roommates) had been broken into, turned upside down, and many things are gone. Whoever did this, took my daughter's art supplies, ALL OF HER SHOES, clothes, her Xbox, her roommates' 2 TVs, and, worst of all, both of her passports, American and Russian.

July 23, 2014

Crowdfunding for writers

by Ksenia Anske

And the big day is coming. The big day when I finally run out of money completely and have to do my first fundraising project and see if I survive or die. Or maybe I will have a choice of death, like I will stand in the streets and tell people I'm a writer who ran out of money so do they think I should hang myself or impale myself on a spear or fustigate myself with a club or...but I'm getting carried away. I do hope I survive. I do also hope that my painstakingly collected research will help you decide on a platform in case you wanted to raise money too. I mean, in case you're a writer and you want to crowdfund your books. Cause maybe you're a kangaroo. I'm sure there are crowdfunding places for that as well.

HERE ARE A BUNCH OF CROWDFUNDING PLACES.

Kickstarter.

Well, we all heard about this one. I don't know if they are actually the first ones who offered this fundraising thingy and I'm being lazy and I haven't done research to see if they are, because for our purposes it doesn't matter. What matters is the following: