Some Reasons Not to Take Out a Paid Subscription to Sixty Odd Poems...

...being a consideration of the benefits and disadvantages of writing for money

Excuse me Mister… Have you paid for that book?

“No Man but a blockhead writes for nothing,” goes that famous Dr Johnson quote that makes hobbyist writers such as myself feel somehow amateurish, unvalidated, or to put it bluntly, crap. If I was any good, wouldn’t Hodder and Stoughton have come knocking at my door years ago - with a handsome advance which would have enabled me to give up the day job, yet live in comfort, writing fantastic, witty literature that would have people queueing up outside Waterstones every publication day?

Well, no - It doesn’t exactly work like that.

But that phantom Johnson is breathing down my neck, berating me for not at least making the effort, Whispering “Blockhead” every time I press send on another article such as this.

Apparently Boswell, Doctor Johnson’s sidekick, was a bit put out by what the great man said. “Numerous instances to refute this,” he noted “will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.” Jonathan Swift - of Gulliver’s Travels fame went a bit further, suggesting that much of Johnson’s output was of low quality because it was only written when he was desperate for money, and was therefore hurried and shoddy. Swift and Jonson were always having a go at each other though, so you cant read too much into that sort of thing. Johnson probably wrote a lot of things for little or no money, including much of the work that went into his dictionary. Boswell probably felt ruffled because he wasn’t actually earning much from trotting around after Johnson, writing the great man’s biography as well as his own diary.

I am no businessman. I am like my dad in that, although my dad did actually end up running a business, repairing watches and clocks in his own shop. A shop where, if anyone went in for something simple doing - adding a link or adjusting a strap, he would probably have done it for nothing. He reckoned that they would be more likely to come back when they wanted something else doing, but I doubt that they very often did. He just denied himself the couple of quid that he could have easily charged and they would happily have paid. I think that, like me, he had a fear of becoming a stereotypical mean and grasping businessman, valuing money over people and looking at others as potential sources of income rather than as fellow human beings.

Every week Substack pleads to me seductively, “you can make a living out of this”, it says. “and no one will value your work unless you put a price on it”

“No one will read my work if I put a price on it” I reply “And I want to be read more than I want to be paid.

And then there is Judy, my beautiful wife, who complains that I sit up here in front of my computer all day, bashing those keys with nothing to show for it at the end. And she won’t let me fully retire until I’m 67 (for crying out loud, thats in summer 2028!) unless I can pull in a good proportion of my income from the three days a week that I still have to spend teaching, which is after all, a young person’s occupation, and one that I would willingly leave to the younger and keener colleagues who carry me more and more as I retreat into confused decrepitude.

So I shall light up the subscriber button, and strongly advise you to read on before you click it…

…Reasons Not to Take out a Paid Subscription

1. You won’t get anything extra. I refuse to offer any incentives at all. There will be no bonus pages, extra articles, extra access to archives, free gifts, signed photographs, certificates of membership or anything else. You will receive exactly the same as someone who doesn’t pay for their subscription. 

2. I am not exactly starving in a garret. I live in a decent house with the mortgage paid off. I am running a car. I can afford to pay the bills and eat well. 

3. There are many other people who could make better use of your money than I could. The homeless, and the hungry, organisations who help the sick, who help animals, those who help those in terrible situations in places like Palestine, Ukraine and Afghanistan. 

4. Throughout my life, I have used technology to steal other people’s art at every opportunity with barely a second thought. From tape recording tracks off the John Peel Show in the 1970s, to making copies of albums on cassettes and CDs through to downloading whole box sets of music, film and television and anything else that I fancy today. I even have a dodgy firestick for the football and various browser extensions that allow me to bypass paywalls and starve creators of much needed income by blocking the adverts on their sites. 

5. I can't guarantee that my output will continue even at the mediocre standard that I put it out at today. I would like to think that I am fairly reliable after keeping Sixty Odd Poems and Sixty Odd Poets running for over a year, but the words that you are reading now are not even pretending to be a poem and this is the part of the page where a poem really ought to be. And you never know - I could get bored or de-motivated, I might become ill or even die. If you don’t get around to unsubscribing pretty sharpish, then you will be paying for something that you are not getting. 

6. I probably won't even say thank you - beyond the cursory email that gets sent out to welcome paid subscribers. If I meet you in person, there is a good chance that I will be be too shy to even mention it. There may well be an awkward atmosphere between us, caused by my feeling that I am somehow beholden to you and imagining that you feel that I am ripping you off in some way. 

7. I am sure that you could find a way to treat yourself with the money you would save by not subscribing. Think of all those all those coffees, chocolate bars and ice creams. Maybe even the odd spliff or something? A tattoo? You know the sort of thing you like. I would hate anyone to be reading an article that I had written and that they had paid for whilst thinking "I would rather have had the money"  

8. If you really wanted to help out, there are other ways to do it. 

(i) You can buy my books and the ones that I publish for other people on Amazon. 

(ii) You can tell other people about my writing, link to it, link to the books, and maybe buy them as gifts for others.

(iii) You can send me free copies of your books and publications - not in the expectation that I will review, or even read them, but in the knowledge that I will at least do you the honour of reading through the first twenty or so pages.

(iv) You can subscribe me to your own substack for free, the option is there in settings, under payments, discounts, gift paid subscriptions. There are lots of sites on here that I really like, but I just can't afford to pay for them all - and those paywall smashing browser extensions don't work with substack.  

(v) You could offer me some sort of a gig - I am happy to do poetry readings, talks about poetry, writing, the use of the internet in the creative process, publishing, self publishing, or in fact anything that I have ever discussed in sixty odd poems. I am also available for podcast interviews and other media (but not on itv - I have a thing about itv, sorry)

(vi) you can just engage with me - either in the comments sections or by emailing me. Every response that I get helps me to realise that I am not bellowing into the void, and, as long as it is generally positive, is actually more heartwarming than cold hard cash.

(vii) but if you really want to send cold hard cash, you can send a one-off something through one of those 'buy me a coffee sites'. I managed to work out how to add a "donate" button at the bottom of the page - you can even subscribe there for £2 a month (£20 a year) which is even cheaper than the lowest subscription plan on Substack (£3.50/£35).

Whatever you decide - remember that any financial commitment that you do make is only a temporary measure until such a time as Hodder and Stoughton come hammering on my door with that advance. Once that happens I shall be happy to come to some arrangement with you regarding refunds.