12 April 2004

How To Make Something Out Of More Than Nothing

This happens every time I talk to Anna.

For the uninitiated, Anna is a very dear friend of mine. She’s young and intelligent, with a quick wit and a quicker mind, and she has lots of ideas. She also has a great deal of energy and spends a lot of it on encouraging me to believe that as long as I keep working at it the day will come when I never have to work a normal job again. I live and work in anticipation of this day and plan to celebrate when it comes.

Naturally, Anna always has something to say about my work. This time we were talking about Rude Awakening, the latest Tamara Tomson story, and Anna was telling me how she was almost late to work because she couldn’t stop reading it, she wanted to see who did it. This is the kind of feedback that every author wants to hear, and I’m especially fortunate that I can get it on a reasonably regular basis.

Some time later the conversation drifted onto the subject of finding ways to make the Keep earn me some money.

Of course, there is some logic behind this idea. For starters, even though Angelfire has been very good to me the simple fact is that the conditions of my account force me to host ads, and the reality of those ads is that every time somebody clicks on them someone else who isn’t me makes some money. As long as I maintain my current account status I will have to host these ads. I can get rid of the ads by paying Angelfire money, but they will only take credit cards as methods of payment, and I don’t have one. Not at the moment, anyway.

Eventually I intend to move The Keep to its own domain, but again, that costs money. Ideally I would love to be in a position, when I do this, of being able to use revenues from The Keep to pay for the costs of the web hosting, and maybe some promotional stuff to draw some people to the site.

Thus I now find myself considering not only ways to use The Keep to make me some money, but also whether or not people are actually willing to pay me to do what I do. Of course Anna, being the devout fan that she is, insists that I am more than good enough to be able to get away with charging people to read what I write, and every time I mention my second concern she is quick to point this out. Great for the morale, believe me, but it doesn’t really help me solve my problem.

I have a small readership of less than thirty people. Leastwise, these are the people who subscribe to The Keep. If I am really going to make any of this work then the first thing I have to do is start drawing people in to The Keep and, if you will excuse the pun, keeping them there. Naturally the first thing that I did was submit The Keep to a number of search engines. This has had a positive result. If you go to Google, for example, and enter tkskeep as your search string you will find a link to The Keep. If you go to Yahoo and enter as your search string The Keep of the Tarnished Knight you will find a link to The Keep. If you enter my full name, Michael J A Tyzuk, as your search string in either of these search engines you will find links to just about every page at The Keep.

This is a good start in that it promotes awareness of the site. People now know that it’s out there. All they have to do is enter some kind of sentence or phrase that appears on the site and they will find me. But it doesn’t bring anyone in, and once they are in I have no real way of enticing them to give me money.

I have a PayPal account, so I could always pull a Jerry Pournelle and post links to my account with encouragements to send me money, but there is no guarantee that will work. Besides which, unless you have a credit card to verify your account with PayPal imposes a spending and income cap on your account. If you earn more than that cap then your account is put on hold until you verify it with a credit card.

Credit card issues notwithstanding, there are several reasons why Jerry’s approach probably wouldn’t work for me. For starters, Jerry has been in the business for a lot of years. He’s got a large and dedicated readership who are more than happy to give him money if it keeps him writing. Besides which, his web site isn’t his only source of income. In addition to making money off of the books he’s written, Jerry also writes columns for at least two major computer magazines. Between those two streams and what he makes off of his investments, I would imagine that Jerry is living quite comfortably. I wouldn’t call him rich, but I would call him comfortable.

Besides which, there simply is no guarantee that people would respond even if I did put up the subscription icons. Bewildering Stories has had such icons up for months now because they want to earn some money to be able to pay their authors. To my knowledge they’ve not made a single red cent. Certainly I’ve not received anything from them, and I’m not about to ask any of the other authors for the simple reason that it just isn't any of my business.

My other alternative is advertising, and this notion almost scares it out of me. This is both good and bad. As an author I understand that I am essentially self employed in the business of promoting my writings so that people will buy them. This business takes up a certain amount of my time, energy, and patience every day. It causes me to spend money on such essentials as postage and office supplies so that I can send stories to publishers. Because it is a business hen it is not unreasonable to expect that the time will come when people will pay me for what I do, but in order for that to happen people have to not only know that I am there but have a reason to come and check me out. Advertising would provide that kind of hook, but the potential costs are horrendous.

I have a tab in Netscape open to the Google AdWords site, which is a service that targets advertisements to specific keywords. The nice thing about this service is that you don’t pay unless your ads get clicked, and you can specify the minimum and maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay. For the keywords associated with The Keep I am looking at a potential advertising budget, with Google AdWords, of about $340/day. Of course, that’s in Canadian Dollars, but that’s still a lot of money, more money that I have to put towards something like this.

My other option would be to host banner ads. The difference between these ads and the ads that Angelfire saddles me with would be subtle; every time someone clicked on one of my ads I would be the one making money, not Angelfire. Several companies provide this kind of service, but the most prominent one is a place called Commission Junction. The nice thing about these guys is that they don’t charge you anything to take part in their service. The downside is that in order to make any money off of any of these ads people have to not only click on the banners, but also complete the transactions associated with them before my account would be credited, and I would not get a check unless my ads earned a minimum amount of money. If my ads failed to earn money three months in a row then Commission Junction would simply terminate my account, and I can’t really say that I blame them.

I don’t want to host banner ads. I don’t want to host ads at all. Whether I’m making money on them or not the simple fact of the matter is that they’re ugly as all hell, and they get in the way of my presentation. The only reason I put up with the Angelfire ads is because I don’t have a choice.

Of course, I could solve the ad problem right now by moving The Keep to Primus, now that I have an account with them, but there’s a lot of work involved in that. First I would need to know if they support FrontPage or if I would be forced to rely on traditional FTP. Then I would have to resubmit The Keep to all the search engines out there, and that’s an adventure in itself. I won’t even go into the mechanics of the actual migration of the site.

Of course what all this boils down to is that there are milestones I need to achieve before I can get The Keep into a position where I can earn an income from it. I have to get some work published professionally, and I have to draw people into The Keep and encourage them to subscribe. All this takes time and energy and patience, heavy on the patience.

What it means is that for the time being making money off of The Keep is nothing more than a pipe dream. Have I ever mentioned how much pipe dreams are a pain in my ass?