Ko-fi Isn't Just for Closers

Buy Me Some Ko-fi!

Wednesday I talked about using Payhip to sell books myself, which was OK except for PayPal taking far too big of a cut.  Before that I had another money-making scheme that I tried.  The same newsletter that mentioned Payhip had months earlier mentioned a site called Ko-fi.  It's basically like I thought Patreon was supposed to be.  

There are two main aspects to it.  One is basically "cyberbegging" where people can give you donations.  As the site is called "Ko-fi" it's framed as they're buying you a coffee.  Which no one has done for me yet.

The other thing is you can set up a commissions page.  That's like what I thought you were supposed to be able to do on Patreon but then it turned out Patreon at this point is all about memberships and I don't really have the time to try to churn out stuff for that.

Anyway, I decided to offer commissions.  I set up two-tiers:  short stories and novels.  A short story of up to 50,000 words is $50.  A novel of 50,000-80,000 words is $100.  I announced it on my newsletter and stuff and of course got no takers right away.  Maybe I turned people off when I said it couldn't be anything illegal like rape, bestiality, and incest.  I mean, there's no point getting paid if I get thrown in jail.

One Saturday afternoon I was in the park writing when I checked my phone and saw a message from PayPal saying I had received a deposit.  I thought at first I had sold something on eBay, but it turned out I had a commission!  Hooray, my first ever client!

I had left things pretty open because I figured the client would dictate what they wanted and when they wanted it and stuff like that.  Plus I hadn't done this before so I didn't really know what I was doing.  I don't think my client had really done this either because he really didn't give me much to go on.

So I realized I had to make up some questions and do sort of an interview to get to what he wanted me to do for him.  I worked up a list of questions and emailed them.  Some of the things I asked about were what kind of story he wanted and if he wanted specific names or locations or anything like that.  I mean if you're paying for the story you should get what you want, right?

I got some terse answers back.  Then I had to ask a few follow-up questions.  I was a little disappointed he wanted a feminization story instead of a gender swap story.  I had written five of those at the end of last year/start of this year but I hadn't done a lot of them.  But whatever, I started working up an idea.

At one point I tried using the "AI" in Bing just to see what it would come up with but it was pretty lame.  Of course it has some "Moral" objection to writing erotica or virtually anything.  I wanted to come up with a whole outline but I don't do that much anymore so it wasn't going great.  Fortunately the tight-lipped client didn't really want one.  He preferred being surprised.  OK by me.

It started to come together when I just started pantsing it.  It took me about 3 weeks to write a 53,000-word story.  We don't have an NDA or anything but I won't disclose specifics of the story.  The gist is it's about a former soldier who accidentally gets hypnotized into thinking he's a woman.  A Fun Fact is an old episode of The Simpsons helped me come up with the method.  In one episode Lisa has Homer get some subliminal weight loss tapes only the warehouse is out and gives him vocabulary tapes instead.  Only in this case a therapist is supposed to give the guy a meditation CD but it's actually some kind of female empowerment disc that convinces him he's a girl.

Anyway, I did some basic edits and then submitted it to the client in PDF format--that was one of the questions I had to ask at some point.  I basically got back a terse, "Thanks."  And then...nothing.  I mean, the dude could have asked for revisions or rewrites.  I wouldn't have wanted to do that endlessly but you're entitled to at least one round of them to get the story you want.  But nope, nothing.  He didn't even tell me if he liked it or not.  Just fucking ghosted me.

It's good I got the money up front or he probably would have just stiffed me on it.  Overall, though, it wasn't a terrible experience.  It was an interesting challenge for me.

The real problem was I didn't really have anything to release for the end of April and most of May because I was working on this story.  So while I got the $100 up front, it kinda fucked me over for May, which screwed me when Amazon paid it in July.  It would have been better if I had had something already in the pipeline to release while I was working on the side project.

Anyway, that's another avenue that authors can try if they want.  Maybe if you're more mainstream you'd have more success.  I don't really know.  And if you want to give me some money for "coffee," go right ahead.