Of Money and Writing

The present author - one who is, as of this current date, unpublished (unless you count this blog) - has made several attempts over the years at getting short stories and flash fiction published in literary journals or contests, to largely (read as: entirely) failed results. However, in doing so, the present author has a growing collection of short stories sitting in one Google Drive. It came to the attention of the present author that, perhaps, after a sizeable collection of stories is completed, they could be grouped together as a sort of collected work, and self-published on the hulking behemoth that is Amazon.

One thing that all who make art are told, repeatedly, is that you should never do your work for free. However, given that the present author is under no life situation in which money could become scarce, or food and shelter could be hard to come by, the present author has concluded that, ultimately, any self-published collection will be instituted at the very low price of "free." This is because, given that the amount of money one could expect to make from charging for what would appear to be, to the consumer, a totally unheard of and random collection of stories from a nobody, is just a few dollars, and given that free self-publications on Amazon are downloaded approximately 400% more than paid ones, the present author has made a value based judgment that getting out there is more important than a few dollars. The extremely fortuitous life situation for the present author in which money is a factor but not a factor of survival also plays a large role.

To wit; the present author has made every attempt to avoid monetization of any work - be it videos, blogs, or writings, - in a vain attempt to make some sort of generalized statement about how money corrupts art. At the same time, the present author would love to be able to make a living solely on writing, but alas, given that doing so is, quite literally, statistically, more difficult than being an NBA player, such delusions will remain as such. We are left with, then, a piddling attempt at notoriety, by way of a soon to be self-published collection of mediocre, at very, very best (and likely much worse) short stories, that will be cast into the void of the millions of works on Amazon, forever lost to the seemingly infinitely expanding content taking place on the web.