To all appearances, the channel and its host should be doing well. However, as a recent video he put up states in the title, Being A YouTuber Bankrupted Me.
And this is something I wanted to talk about today. Not just to try and push a little support toward a creator and video essayist whose work I enjoy and admire (though seriously, help out if you can even if that's just subscribing to his channel and watching some videos in his archive), but to try to drive home something to everyone out there.
None of us are doing well. Even if it looks like we are, we are literally 1-2 months away from everything crashing down without meaningful support from people like you.
Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!
We Can Never Have Too Much Support
There is a common misconception among the general public that creators are either wealthy, or we're making ends meet without too much difficulty. And part of this is likely because when you think of the richest people out there, chances are artists of one stripe or another come to mind first. Whether it's YouTube creators like Mr. Beast, authors like Stephen King, movie stars, pop sensations, and so on, the assumption is that if a few of us are rich beyond an average person's wildest dreams, then surely the rest of us are doing all right? In addition to that there are fictional portrayals of creators such as on the TV show Castle where the successful novelist has a level of wealth that can solve an episode's entire plot, or even on shows like Two and a Half Men where a washed up songwriter wrote a single jingle years ago whose royalties can pay for an obscenely indulgent lifestyle.
However, I've met a lot of authors in my life. I've also met my share of podcasters, YouTubers, RPG designers, as well as a handful of marginally well-known singers and musicians... and do you know what all of them had in common? No matter how much money you thought they were making, I could guarantee that you weren't even remotely in the ballpark. Nearly all of us are broke. Period.
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| Seriously... it's depressing how broke we are. |
And why are we so broke? Well, there's the fact that a lot of our rates for stories haven't actually gone up since the early 1900s for a lot of publications. There's the fact that platform decay across social media has made it nearly impossible for us to reach an audience like we could even a decade or so ago. There's the fact that if someone buys a $15 book that only $1-$3 of that makes it into our pockets, so we have to move tens of thousands of books a year just to keep our heads above water. There's the fact that Covid killed a lot of conventions (and seriously harmed those that survived), where a lot of us could make sales in-person. There's the fact that creators are given bare crumbs by platforms like YouTube, Spotify, etc., so that we need to rack up literal millions of views/listens in order to get even a $100 check at the end of the month...
But that's mostly the modern problems we're dealing with as creators. The truth is that being a professional creative has basically never paid well except for a handful of us that get plucked up by the zeitgeist, who make smart business decisions, or who are supremely lucky.
I cannot count the number of times I've met someone who I consider a more successful author, game creator, etc., and they always ask me the question, "So what do you do?" not because they're being dismissive of my work, but because it never occurs to them that this is my full-time job... because even at their level, their creative work isn't enough to cover their needs. Most other creators I know, even the really successful ones, typically have a retirement (quite common among the hard sci-fi crowd who had a military career before they started writing), they have a well-paying day job (I can think of one union welder and one regional sales manager I've shared con space with over the years), their spouse is actually the house breadwinner (which you wouldn't think was the case for someone who designed one of the major games in the World of Darkness, and who has a bestselling fantasy series under his belt), or in some cases they have an inheritance or trust fund that just lets them write without worrying about keeping the bills paid.
If you remove all of those folks from the general pool of creators out there, and only count those of us who are doing this full-time to support ourselves, there aren't a lot of us out there. And a majority of us (myself included) live in poverty, dependent on the whims and support of our readers to help us keep the lights on and the words coming.
And I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean real-life, qualifies for Medicaid, uses food pantries, barely-makes-enough-to-pay-taxes poverty.
To Be Clear, "Support" Comes in Many Forms
When most people hear the word support they immediately close themselves off because it's become synonymous with money. However, while beoming a Patreon patron or throwing a tip into my digital jar (via my Patreon page or my Ko-Fi respectively) is always nice, I completely get that's not something a lot of folks can do. However, as I've pointed out several times in this blog, as well as in other places, support comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. In addition to giving creators money directly, or buying our books and other merch, support also looks like:
- Following our social media pages (bigger subscriber counts makes the algorithm friendly)
- Interacting with our posts (comments, upvotes, shares, etc. all make a difference)
- Consuming our content (watching videos, reading articles, etc., as that can get us paid)
- Sharing things we make to reach a wider audience (we literally can't do this on our own)
Even if you cannot personally pay a creator's bills by handing us money, you can do your part to boost our signal, and get our view counts up... the hard part is that we need a lot of people all working toward the same goal. And like I said a while back in episode 16 of Tabletop Mercenary, Audience Support is a Reverse Iceberg, we're lucky if 10% of our audience actually participates at all. And of that 10%, less than 10% of that number actively supports us by upvoting posts, sharing on social media, watching/reading any time something new comes out, talking us up to their friends, etc.
I want to end this off on a note of real talk for anyone who got this far. This isn't just unique to me, as a creator. This is a situation all of us are facing. We aren't just out here shaking a tip jar because we want a little extra money from you... we are literally funded by what you choose to do or not do as members of our audience.
So if there are creators out there that you like (whether it's me, or someone else), please, actively support them in any way you can. If you have money, support their crowdfunding endeavors, or buy some of their merch to show there are people out there who want more of it (hell, a single tee shirt gives them more revenue than an entire month of streaming a podcast on your mobile device). Leave ratings and reviews to help them get noticed more, follow their socials, tell your friends and family... and if you really want to make a creator's day, leave them some nice comments.
Seriously, we get so much hate on a daily basis. Sometimes it really helps us stop the candle from going out for someone to just tell us they really liked a story we wrote, and they can't wait for the next installment.
Support The Literary Mercenary
If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!
- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)
- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)
And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!
Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!
Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!
That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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