Matthew Wayne Selznick

… I was in a 7-11 in San Clemente with Theresa, at night. We were broken up, her boyfriend was a long way away, and we hung out with each other out of familiarity and comfort. It was painful and strange but I did it anyway because I still loved her.

We were in the 7-11 to play Earthshaker, our favorite pinball game. Back then, convenience stores had arcade games, you see. It was her turn, and I looked over at the Los Angeles Times and saw this:

I remember Theresa and I were dismayed and offended by what was going on in China. I also remember looking at that picture of one desperate man holding off the storm, however temporarily, and thinking, “I get that.”

There’ll be no more advertising on this web site unless it’s for my products and services and the products and services of people I know and personally endorse. Same goes for Twitter.

(Insert cheers and hosannahs and cries of “It’s about time” here.)

Why the Change?

What can I say? I’m always experimenting, always trying things out… and I always try to listen to my audience when they’re kind enough to offer their opinion.

The ads I served on this site were from a site called Project Wonderful — an neat concept and very DIY / creator friendly. I checked out every single site of every single ad I allowed to appear, and believe me, I rejected many more. My intention with Project Wonderful was to accumulate enough income from those ads to turn around and serve some of my own. It took about eight months to earn $10.00. I burned through that in a weekend of “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” advertising. That’s hardly worth it. So, no more banner ads on the right sidebar or on the footer of the page.

The ads I served in the RSS feed of my blog were from good old Google Adsense. I’ve been enrolled in the AdSense program for many years and I’ve activated ads on various sites in various ways off and on now and then. I’ve earned just over $6.00 total in all that time. Let’s face it, no site I’ve ever run has been the kind of mega-ultra-SEO’ed traffic magnet you have to have to make any money from AdSense. So that’s done, no more, probably forever.

Then there were the ads in my Twitter stream. These were from a UK company called Magpie, and as with Project Wonderful, I personally checked out and vetting every single potential ad before they appeared. I rejected about three times as many ads as I approved, and the ads I approved only showed up in my Twitter stream (clearly marked with the #advert tag) once every twenty tweets. Even though the majority of you guys said, “hey, go for it” when I asked if I should try Magpie, great googley moogley did some of you complain and raise your indignant fists when those ads actually appeared! Ultimately, the infrequency of ads I felt comfortable running meant I barely made any money on them. I’ve canceled my Magpie account and didn’t make enough to cash out, so that’s done, too.

Honestly, as much as I value your opinion and I respect the folks who spit and hissed about my monetization efforts, the ultimate reason I’ve decided to eliminate unrelated, non-endorsed advertising as a source of income in this time when I really, really need sources of income is a simple one: ads aren’t worth the screen real estate they take up or the social capital they erode.

Other Models

As I intimated above, I am open to accepting advertising from people I know and respect whose products and services I can personally endorse. I don’t have any rates worked out or anything like that… every month, this site averages about 4,000 page views from 2,000 or so unique visitors who spend about two minutes here. If we know each other and get along and you’ve got something to advertise, tell me what that’s worth to you and we’ll figure something out.

Also, I’ve got a number of affiliate arrangements with companies and individuals I personally use or find worthwhile. I’ve moved all that stuff over to the Mall page — if you’re going to shop for books, movies, independent music, media downloads, writing software and pretty much everything else under the sun, please consider bookmarking this page and using the links that are there. I’ll get a little kickback — from four to fifty percent, depending on the service you use — every time you spend money from there. Don’t underestimate how much that could help me out while not taking anything away from you.

The primary monetization model I’m adopting is the one that matters most to me: neo-patronage. I make stuff, I do stuff… you pay me for the things I make and do… or you pay me to keep making and doing things in a general sense. In the coming weeks, I’ll be making some changes and additions on this site that will reflect my renewed commitment to that approach.

What Is Neo-Patronage?

The definition of neo-patronage found at my colleague Kristopher Young’s site, Another Sky Press is so clear, it’s Google’s number one search result for the term. You should check that out, and you should buy books from Another Sky Press.

I’m going to lift mightily from what Kris and company have already said, with my own take mixed in:

Neo-patronage is the practice of compensating an artist for works they’ve created and works they’ve yet to create. Through direct and easily executed payment methods made possible by PayPal and other systems, it’s simple and affordable for many individuals to contribute small amounts to the support of an artist’s creative endeavors. Unlike the classic one-to-one patronage of the Renaissance, under the neo-patronage many-to-one model patrons do not have control of an artist’s creative direction or the automatic right to ownership of everything the artist creates.

I’ve played with this in the past, but soon I’ll be rolling some things out on this site to emphasize this approach. While I haven’t worked it all out just yet, I’m planning a number of different ways and different levels folks can become patrons if they would like to do so.

For those who don’t want to support me through neo-patronage, the opportunity to hire my services or purchase my books, music and other creative products will still exist.

Stay Tuned

Watch the blog, Twitter and Facebook for announcements and new features as I work all this stuff out. As always, your ideas, comments and criticisms are not only welcome, they’re necessary to my process. Thanks, in advance, for your thoughtful engagement.

…since I posted here! What’s been going on?

Well, the first of what will hopefully be many temporary and short-term gigs with the United States Department of Commerce Census Bureau ended on May 9th. I spent the next week getting my unemployed legs back and diving into client work that had taken an unfortunate but necessary back seat while I enjoyed gainful employment with Uncle Sam.

One of the first things I did was try to re-instate my unemployment insurance. No, I’m not a moocher, thank you very much. I’ve been paying unemployment insurance with every paycheck since 1985. You pay insurance so that it’s there when you need it. I need it.

Except… whoops! If your last job was as a government employee — and I was one for six weeks — you have to go through a whole different set of paperwork, and you can’t do it on-line. You have to print it out and (gasp!) fax or mail it in! I don’t know about you, but I can fill out a form on a website and click “submit” with great faith and confidence, but ask me to put something in an envelope and give it to the postman and I get very nervous. And our fax machine? About twenty years old. Plus, can’t you just imagine the fax machine on the other end? They must get reams of faxes!

I decided to fax the forms and mail them, just to cover my ass. Much to my surprise, I received my new claim form not four days later. Faith in System: Revived. Next check should arrive next week.

Of course, the dole doesn’t bring our household income up to the level to which we are accustomed, and by that, I mean “the level we need in order to stay out of the poorhouse.” So I invoiced my clients, something I had put off while I was making a regular paycheck those six weeks. I bet it made some of them happy… and it brought me a nice bit of padding. Now, I’m invoicing every two weeks so my bank doesn’t empty out and my clients’ banks don’t get broken. Should work out better for all concerned.

One other thing has been instrumental in helping my wife and I survive financially this month: “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights.” Membership subscriptions to the site, my new ongoing episodic serial fiction webzine that launched on May 1st (where have you been?), took care of about half our mortgage payment for the month. This is why I’m asking folks to pay for the fiction I put on that site. No joke: when you give me money in exchange for the words I write, it helps keep the roof over the heads of me, my wife, our two dogs, four cats, and turtle. I’m not running around buying video games and porn with that cash, believe me. Besides, you can get porn for free on the Internet… as I understand it, anyway.

Most of the last ten days, weekends included, have consisted of trying to balance the varying needs of four different clients while making time to write installments of “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights.” I’m trying to get two months ahead of schedule on “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” so that I can also work on some other writing stuff… still trying..! I also just did my second-ever for-pay voice work, and some pro bono narration and voice acting for various podcasts has been done and needs to be done. Deadlines loom.

There are no less than four books I have read with the understanding that I will review them on this blog. I need to write those reviews. And post them, too — I bet the authors expect me to post them.

It hasn’t all be nose-to-grindstone, just mostly. I’ve allowed myself some relaxation time, mostly in the form of pulling my hair out over the NBA semi-finals games, but also by exercising (not enough), socializing briefly with a couple of friends, and spending at least a couple of hours straight with my wife every day.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Right now it’s after eleven at night, I know exactly what I have to do tomorrow (lots) and I don’t have much energy left to expend on tonight. So I’m writing this; saying hello to all of you.

Hello!

Postscript: a few days ago I got an idea for another blog. Stop me. Don’t let me do it. Or, subscribe to “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” so that I can afford to pursue every creative whim that comes into my skull. There are two thousand of you that swing by this blog every month… that’d about do it for me if every one of you subscribed for a year. What say you?

Post-postscript: Yeah, I do pimp the shit out of “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights,” and it probably grates on some of you because I’m asking you to exchange coin for content. Bear with me. I’m the busker under the bridge, guitar case wide open at my feet, ready to play you a song. It’s a good one, I promise.

For a little while, I’ve been dropping hints in the social web, often including cutesy references to the weather, that I had something big to announce on the first of May. The day is here!

I’m very excited to reveal “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights,” my new ongoing serial fiction webzine featuring, as it says on the site, “ordinary lives in an extraordinary time.”

“Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” tells the story of a group of friends, lovers, rivals and rockers living in Southern California. We begin in 1984, when most of the characters are in their late teens, and we’ll follow them into adulthood and the edge of the 21st century.

Like my book “Brave Men Run,” “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” is set in the Sovereign Era, where the appearance of several thousand individuals with remarkable abilities changed the course of human destiny in the last decades of the twentieth century. While set in an alternate history / science fiction universe, the stories of “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” are not dependent upon genre conventions. These are character-focused stories about everyday people.

Given the time and place that those people live, there will be some crossover with some of the more fantastical events of the Sovereign Era. In fact, people who had supporting roles in “Brave Men Run,” like Lina Porter and Carson Meunetti, take center stage in “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights.” This means eventually we’ll see the events of that novel through their points of view!

That’s a bit down the line, though. “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” opens with “How It All Got Started,” a story arc that sets the groundwork for the friendships and loves these characters will experience over the next twenty years of their lives. New installments in the serial post twenty five times a year.

Fiction by Subscription

“Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” is a subscription based membership site. Yes, I’m flying in the face of the conventional wisdom and asking people to pay for fiction on the Internet. I never liked being conventional, you see.

Access to the fiction and other member areas of the site is as inexpensive as $0.04 a day if you subscribe at the yearly rate of $14.99. Monthly ($1.99) and six-month ($9.99) subscriptions are also available, as is a one-day / one-time free trial. Become a member of the “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” website at the free trial level, or dip your feet in at the monthly rate and see what you think after you’ve read a few installments. You can always upgrade you subscription.

Subscribers also get to participate in community aspects of the site, get discounts on collected e-book and print editions of each story arc, and have access to special content and other goodies.

A Gamble

I’m betting people will pony up the price of a DVD for a year’s worth of engaging, character-driven stories. In fact, if I reach my goal of 1,000 paying subscribers in the first six months, writing “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” will effectively become my day job, and I will be able to focus exclusively on creating not just fiction for that site, but all my other planned books as well.

“Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” stands a chance at proving that independent creative endeavors can be self-sustaining — subscribe today and help change the way the world looks at online fiction!

Giving Back

The idea to create a new serial fiction website came to me in the months since I was laid off from my full time job back in October of 2008. I’ve dealt first-hand with the stress and uncertainty that comes with not having a steady, reliable income. In fact, I’m still dealing with it as I write this!

I know how important it is to relieve the stress of unemployment with entertainment that takes your mind off of the troubles of everyday life for a little while. Therefore, from May 1 through December 31 2009, I’m offering three free months of membership access to anyone who can show they’ve been laid off and are out of work as a result of the global economic downturn. It’s a small thing to do, but it’s something I can do… so I’m doing it.

Read about free access to “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” for the unemployed and out of work on the “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights” blog.

I hope you check out “Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights,” and I hope you love it! See you there!

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow linked to a blog post about Ethan Zuckerman’s encounter in Western Massachusetts with an enumerator doing address canvassing for the 2010 United States census. Zuckerman interviewed the census worker about the Harris HTC, the handheld device used to confirm addresses and map locations in preparation for the 2010 census.

I’m doing that exact same job (for another week and a half, anyway) with the exact same machine! Check me out, I have a direct connection to something written about someone on a blog that was linked by Boing Boing. That’s no less than one level teaspoon of sweet sweet Internet cred added to my gallon jug of super-stardom — make no mistake, people!

Cheerful sarcasm aside, check out the post for a review of the Harris HTC and a little background on just how such a device ended up in the hands of half a million temporary government employees.

Minor quibble with Zuckerman’s post: the device only requires a finger swipe, tapping to agree to the user agreement, and answering one security question, not three, every time you turn it on…

Fun side note: the enumerator interviewed did a big no-no: we’re not supposed to show anyone the screens of our HTCs unless they too are employees of the Census sworn to uphold Title 13.