I’ll be honest. Before Medium’s new payment system was introduced, if I made $30 in a month I was pretty pleased with myself. Now I’ll be struggling to equal my $5 membership fee. My delusional dream that I was slowly building up a readership so that one day I’d be able to live off my earnings as a writer has been smashed.
The humble dollars my poems and stories have contributed to our household budget have turned into cents.
I decided to believe that everything happens for a reason and try to forge something positive out of this disappointment. The silver lining is that it finally motivated me to deal with all the formatting headaches and complicated decision-making involved with self-publishing a collection of my poetry.
As a not-particularly young or techie person with a five-year-old laptop, this involved three long, interminably frustrating days, but I’m proud to say I toiled through to come out the other side with a paperback and a kindle version available in several countries.
Reading through the poems, arranging them in the logical sequence to reach the result I wanted was incredibly gratifying in the end.
All I need now are some (preferably good) reviews. Also, sales would be nice. Only joking, I made a sale. A million thanks to that unknown customer. You made me disproportionately happy.
So, dear reader, as you’ve probably deduced, this is a desperate attempt to generate interest in my book. The link is in my profile. It contains poetry intended to inspire you to act to protect our wonderful world.
If that doesn’t work, it serves the double purpose of keeping you reading for a tiny bit longer than one of my poems, so that maybe I can at least cover my membership fee this month.
Update: This story has made 13 cents so far and helped pushed my earnings just over the $5 threshold with almost a week left in this month. It’s nice not to be going backwards. Also, three other people have bought my book, although I’m still waiting for a review. These are tense times as I wrack my brain for other ways to promote my work without spending money.
