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Alan Smith's avatar

Just a thought on the "paid/not paid" question. Obviously, I don't know your situation, and I haven't read much on the topic from other writers - this is just my own, uninformed, opinion.

For Psyvacy, I have a kind-of loose policy in place for this. If I have less than 100 subscribers, then no paid option - less than that and it's just not worth the effort to set up. I don't know what kind of rate of paid/free subscribers is "normal", but it seems plausible to me that the privacy "community" is going to, on average, be less willing to pay, due to the inevitable issues with identity etc involved. Crypto *can* mitigate these, but that's another step involved, and we know that even minor obstacles can have big differences on people's actual engagement in behaviour. So I'm completely arbitrarily estimating that I would expect about 1% of readers to be willing to pay (if this was within 1 order of magnitude of correct I'd be shocked).

In addition, if there's paid subscribers there's a greater expectation to publish something at least somewhat regularly. My schedule is starting to free up, so maybe I could manage that, but for at least the last few months I've struggled to put something out on anything even remotely on a regular basis. This would go from being essentially a hobby to something closer to a job. Which even if you can mange a pace, would necessitate a change in your relationship with the writing. Not a bad change, necessarily, but different - payment implies obligation.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts. Be interested in yours.

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