Not counting Monday, I would say it’s been a good week. And it was really only Monday morning that was bad. I don’t believe I’ve had this good of a week for quite some time. Possibly since December. So Yay.

I haven’t necessarily gotten a lot of words done this week. Some. And I need to work on one short story this morning, as well as write a second one. (It’s short. Flash. Maybe 1200 words at most.)

I will not make my word count for the month. Not even close. I’m okay with that. I knew going in that I was unlikely to make my word count in March. April may or may not be the same way – we’ll see what happens at the mystery workshop, how much I end up writing there.

But in May, I hope to make up for a lot of it. We’re doing a writing marathon in May. Six days, 10K words per day, plus 10K steps per day. That should help a lot with my monthly average.

Then, as long as I don’t have a long sickness or something, I should be able to make my general goal each month. Don’t have anything else planned to derail that. At least not this year.

Anyone who knows Blaze and I, knows that we spend a lot (A LOT) of time talking publishing together. As well as marketing, craft, genre, etc. I am extremely lucky to have found him.

Last night we spent the evening talking about Patreon. For those who don’t know, Patreon is a way for “patrons” to support an artist financially.

Blaze and I are both on the production model in terms of publishing. We publish something once a month, him on the 10th, me on the 21st. We’ve been doing this for a few years now. Because we publish so often, Amazon does some of our marketing for us, by sending out regular emails to everyone who follows us. (You do know how to follow your favorite author on Amazon, right? So that you’ll see the emails that Amazon sends out? And you are following yourself if you’re an author, right?)

So if I’m already publishing something once per month, I don’t necessarily want to give those things away on Patreon. I’m already making money – often good money – from what I publish in any given month. If I give that product away on Patreon, I’m cannibalizing my sales elsewhere. Which is a problem, because that means that all the platforms penalize me in their algorithms because I’m not selling as much.

We think we’ve come up with a solution for this, what we can give away on Patreon that fans will enjoy and that won’t be far too much work for us.

I doubt that either of us will ever get rich from our Patreon accounts. That isn’t the point. It’s just another revenue stream. Possibly only drips, maybe a trickle.

However, all that adds up, when you add together all the other revenue streams we have. Just like we don’t make a living from a single book, but from the sales of all the books. This is why the theory behind 20BooksTo50K works. The devil is in the details and how you implement it for your books and your career.

As we (and others) have said before – you are responsible for your own career. You make those choices.

Anyway – once we get the Patreon accounts up and running, we’ll give you more details, as Blaze and I will be doing things a bit differently.

Hope you’ve had a marvelous weekend!