The Monetisation Thing & Postmodern Intentions

In which Evie (partially) successfully conceals her nervous nature

I thought I should give some indication as to justifying this monetisation thing, as well as how I intend to proceed from now on.

Given that a paid subscription costs more than a book, I decided that what I’ll do is give all of my paid subscribers a free copy of Rejected Messages, for starters. Given that’s an ebook at the moment, that would mean a coupon or something. And I’m sure there’ll be more incentives down the line.

Furthermore, with regards to intentions, I’ll be posting the Katrina series in instalments, maybe of around 2,000 words each time (or longer if it’s a long scene). I’ll do the first few for free, though. Just to hook you. Likewise, some of the more self-referential of Katrina’s journal will also have to be paid-for stuff – spoilers and such like, you know.

At the moment, there is around 75k words, which is essentially Book One Part One (or Act One, even), and only requires a final edit, really. So at 2 or 3 instalments each week that should keep things going for a good three months or so. And in the meantime, well, it will have to be continued. Aside from anything else, Katrina is getting understandably irritated about not talking too much about her misadventures because of the spoiler issue. We’ll have to go for the postmodern thing, then. She will, though, while away a lot of her meantime in talking about her homeworld, which kind of avoids the spoiler thing.

In this regard, do take note of the date-stamps for her journal entries. Once there is more of the series available and she no longer has to worry too much about spoilers (although any there are should be enticing) she’ll be able to post the journal entries she wrote at the time (but which I held back on posting), thus filling in some gaps.

I will also endeavour to post some extracurricular stuff. Amongst other things she wants to make movies. So this could include screenplays, or at least full length synopses. Likewise lyrics (unfortunately I don’t have the means to make demos; besides, my voice sounds nothing like hers). We’ll see.

This is one of the aspects of monetisation I know I’m going to adore. It should be the same for any deeper storytelling. It encourages writing around the main narrative, making for a more immersive experience. Besides, I would imagine a lot of good writers have a whole load of extracurricular notes about their characters and their back stories and all the rest of it. Katrina, after all, does not only exist in the central narrative. She has a life of her own. In an infinite multiverse, logic dictates she does exist somewhere. That means she is a real person with real feelings. She is not just a character. Whilst some might call it postmodernism, and I do like this word (you may have noticed), others might disagree with my use of it. That’s fair enough, of course. So, advance knowledge aside, I shall endeavour to design all this extra material to complement, rather than upset the central narrative. At the present time (early January 2022 in story terms) she has spent some 7 weeks in this world and already had a series of misadventures constituting a significant number of words, so there is a lot of catching up to do. This bit of the story (let’s call it the origin story) does have a clear ending to it, knowing the essentials of which before reading how it got there shouldn’t spoil anything. From a certain point of view it wouldn’t be much of a series if it didn’t end up that way (then again it would be intriguing to do some alternative timeline – I think I’ll hold that thought…). It’s a kind of necessity that she ends up where she is now, and at least thinking she’s got what she wants. Still, we’ll see how this works out in due course.

For the free stuff, aside from the regular journal, and the first few instalments of the series, I am now minded to publish (also in instalments) the first, standalone version of the ‘Katrina shows up in this world’ story (‘What to do about Katrina’). This is called ‘D-Zero Meson Oscillation’, and is around 22k words or so. You should find this interesting for comparison. Plus it provides some ‘privilege gap’ stuff, which will, I assure you, not detract from the main series, but should add something to it.

There is also a second version, which is called ‘What to do about Catriona’, which moves the whole thing closer to the third, and final version. This second version hasn’t been written yet, although I do have a very long treatment/outline of around 10k words. Hopefully I’ll be able to write that at some point, in which case that’ll be a paid-for thing. Each of these earlier versions essentially tell a different origin story, before I finally settled on the third one. It’s more (psychologically) realistic, aside from anything else.

With regards to the first version, this story will be appearing in my next collection of speculative fiction short stories, ‘Immigration Control’, which hopefully I’ll be (self-)publishing later this month (obviously I will let you know). Paid subscribers will get a discount, at least. So posting this whole story for free serves as a nice little enticement.

Anyhow, those were my thoughts. It makes sense to me. Let me know in the comments (at any time) whether you agree with this intention, or if you have other suggestions. I do, after all, want to make sure the paid-for stuff is really worth it. Being somewhat poor, and knowing that others are, I do get quite sensitive about these things…