I haven’t done one of these for a while, but I was inspired after a mini Twitter Kerfuffle yesterday. Also, I know that not many people read this blog now, so it’s a good place to posit this particular dilemma.

Scenario – You’re an author, you do ok, but nothing amazing. You have some hardcore fans who buy everything you write, but it’s not massive. You also work a full time job to keep a roof over your head and to feed your two children. Your ex left you, and he doesn’t pay you any child support, and none of your family have the means to help out. You struggle along anyway, and the money from your full time job and your writing endeavours is just enough to keep you afloat. You pride yourself on being a decent human being, you’ve always done things by the book, and as far as you’re concerned, you will continue to always try to do the right thing.

You then get laid off from your job, and all of a sudden the only income you have coming in is the money from the books you sell, and it’s literally peanuts. Your youngest child becomes ill, and you don’t have health insurance. The bills are mounting up, you can’t find a job, your rent/mortgage is due, your benefits aren’t enough to pay your bills, your rent, or the medical bills that are currently piling up. What do you do?

I’ll give you two options. Just these two options.

The first option is reaching out to your online community and other strangers on the internet, laying yourself bare to them, explaining your situation and asking them for money. You do this and set up a Go-Fund Me for people to donate. This is the honest option. The option where you forget your pride, because nothing is more important than feeding your kids. Some would say that this is the more selfless option.

The second option is that as a Kindle Unlimited author, you get paid by the number of pages that are flicked through. You’ve worked out that by adding additional material at the end of your books, you can make more money. You can ask your readers to make sure they read your books until the end so that you’ll get the maximum amount of money. This option is sketchy, because you know that anything you make means that other authors will lose out, due to how the KU system works. Authors who may be in a similar situation to you.  Some would say that this the more selfish option, how dare you do this to your fellow authors? How dare you ‘steal’ from them by taking advantage of a system that’s supposed to benefit everybody equally? At the end of the day though, nobody is more important than your family, certainly not a bunch of authors who you may or may not know. Also, there’s no way you’d ever beg for money from strangers on the internet, fuck that noise.

What would you do?

Sidebar, I’m not really interested in what you’d do, that’s between you and your God, but I thought it was at least a different way of looking at things. And now I’m really done, because I have way more important things to be dealing with.