A state of the blog address, of sorts.
Blogs have a shelf life. Some
are abandoned along the way. The last post remains there, a mute testimony to
someone's hopeful writing. Others change in various ways. Writing is a seasonal
thing, and writers have less control over their writing than some people think.
You follow what is inside and write about it. Live, listen, and follow your gut.
As you change so does your writing.
So this is my blog. Real Live Preacher, as I
named it back in December of 2002. It has survived a number of significant
changes along the way. I think of my blog as having stages, like a child.
The early stage I think of as the wild days of
the salon blogging community. I was anonymous and free, and very few Christians
came to read. Mostly pagans and people of our world. I loved them, and many came
to love me. I shot from the hip, wrote like hell, and sprinkled F-bombs around
just because I liked the way they sounded. This stage lasted until perhaps the
middle of 2003.
Then the Christians found me. I really hated
that. Suddenly Christian people were all over the comments, starting arguments
and carrying on theological discussions. I got a lot of email challenging me to
defend myself, my theology, and my views of the Bible. I took up the challenge
often enough. Sometimes I was too tired. Many who came were wounded Christians
who were also tired and disgusted with church politics, fighting, etc. I think I
gave them a voice. Who knows? But the pagans and people of our world slowly
disappeared from the comments. It broke my heart, truly. I was deeply sorrowful,
but you cannot control the comments. They have a life of their own. So be it.
This period was from the middle of 2003 until May of 2004.
The next big change was losing my anonymity.
People found out who I was, some of them in my church. A book was coming out,
and I decided that I wanted my name to be on it. And I was tired of hiding.
Anonymity is hard work. I came out of the closet, so to speak, in May of 2004
with
this post. Things changed. I lost a significant
chunk of freedom, but writing is always defined by a set of filters and
boundaries. I just had to adjust mine a bit and get used to it.
The next stage began when I started to unravel.
My church is small and pays about half a salary. I was holding down two jobs –
pastoring a church and running a web design and hosting business. And I was
trying to be a husband and father of three daughters. Somewhere in that mix I
was making time to write about 20 hours a week. Some of my essays take 10 hours
of work. Some less, some even more.
I began to be emotionally unwell. I didn’t
recognize the signs of it, though my family noticed that I had disappeared into
a world of writing and isolation. I met with a dear friend from my faith
community to talk about things. We agreed that I could do two things and be
healthy, but not three.
Pastor, web designer, or serious writer (say 20
hours a week). One of the three had to go.
I decided that I would try to transition away
from web design and hosting and into writing as a second vocation. This was a
big change because I could no longer write for free. I had to find some kind of
income from writing, though I was determined to keep the blog going.
But it’s much harder to make money writing than
I imagined. I picked up a couple of regular gigs, but it was slow going.
At this time, around the summer of 2005, two
angels appeared. I kid you not. Two people came to me and said, “We’ll pay you
to write at Real Live Preacher. Well send you a check every month for a period
of time while you try to figure out how to make some kind of a living as a
writer. We think your writing is important and a good thing in this world.”
It’s a very humbling thing to accept an offer
like that. For one thing, taking money from people can make you dependant. But
more importantly, I had to admit that I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone.
In truth, I would have done just about anything to keep writing. I wanted
this…badly. So I said yes.
I will never be allowed to reveal their names,
but truly Real Live Preacher exists today because they helped me with the
transition. I dropped the web design business immediately. It was something of a
leap of faith, because the interim money had a definite ending. But it “felt
right,” as they say, so Jeanene and I decided to go for it.
Then began another stage of Real Live Preacher.
I left salon.com in July of 2005 and began blogging with custom Drupal software
at my own domain – RealLivePreacher.com. At the time I was hopeful that this
blog might generate enough income to combine with my regular writing at the
Christian Century and The High Calling and justify the time I was spending
writing. It seemed like a little community had developed at Real Live Preacher,
and I thought I would try to nurture it a bit. So I put in a chat room and
created users with an internal messaging system. And I made it possible for
people to “subscribe” to this blog. Just voluntarily send money if they wanted
to help with the expenses.
A good number of people did. You can see their
blogs over to the right. Most are signed up for $5 a month. Some for $10. I’m
grateful to them, because that helps. But truly, not many people are going to
subscribe to a blog. That’s not how this culture is developing. Subscriptions
peaked at about the level of a nice car payment. A few drop each month and a
couple join. It stays about the same.
Now it’s been two years at RealLivePreacher.com.
I think I have a good idea of the kind of money you can generate with a blog.
Not much. Advertising doesn’t do much for you unless you turn your site into a
freakin billboard. I love Real Live Preacher too much for that. I’ve had a
couple of modest ads along the way, but I’ve avoided making the site look
commercial. I don’t have any paying advertisers now. Anything you see on the
menu is there by my choice.
I had a grand plan to publish my own Christmas
series. Seven stories in seven books. I got the first two done, but I lost about
$1000 starting my own publishing company to get them in print. I can’t afford to
spend any writing time on that project right now. It’s on hold. I might shop it
around to a publisher someday, but that publisher is going to want me to write
all the stories at once. I like writing one every year or so. More than that is
too much Christmas for me.
The crazy thing is, I get a ton of traffic now.
Somewhere between (sit down) 4000 and 8000 unique visits a day. That estimate is
based on two different programs analyzing my server log files. One is
conservative and the other less so. That traffic has opened some doors to a new
kind of relationship with The Christian Century and The High Calling. When I
write for them I send them traffic, and that’s a nice bargaining chip for a
writer.
I’ve had some people say, “You just need to get
a publicist, get your name out there, do some interviews, blah blah BLAH,
blah blah BLABBITY blah.”
Yeah, maybe. Maybe that kind of thing gets you
writing opportunities that pay. Maybe. Still, I think you either write or you
spend your time figuring out how to “get your name out there.” I don’t have time
to even think about getting my name out there. It feels good to let go of that
and not think about it.
I’m going to write. That’s all I ever wanted to
do. Because I want to write seriously (meaning with a significant amount of my
energy and time), I’m willing to do various things and make some sacrifices
for that privilege. I don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore money. I’ll
need to take advantages of opportunities that come my way. But I think I’ll just
take them if and when they come to me.
So I’m entering a new stage here at Real Live
Preacher. This one is marked by my letting go of a dream that a blog like this
can make enough money by itself to justify the time it requires. I need to
upgrade Drupal (my blog software) because I’m getting KILLED with comment spam.
A lot of my earlier essays have terrible spam in the comments now. A Drupal
upgrade will allow me to take advantage of its new spam tools. BUT, that means
I’m going to lose the chatroom. It was kind of a custom thing and keeping it
tied to users is hard. And I’ll probably just get rid of the user accounts
except for the subscribers. Why log-in? That’s kind of a pain. You’ll be able to
leave your name when you comment or be anonymous, just the way it is at most
blogs.
The subscription possibility will stay, and I
hope some people will do that. That “car payment” helps a lot. It would be nice
if that would at least hold at its present level.
I’ve got my eyes open for new opportunities to
make a living as a writer/blogger. Just write and keep your eyes open. That’s
what it’s all about anyway, right?
rlp
