By Joel Thurtell
A friend told me that I shouldn’t promote my books on JOTR.
Using this space for commercial purposes would be kind of, well, tacky.
I’ve been thinking about it.
First, we removed the amazon ads more than a year ago. Not only were they cluttering my site, but they never brought in a nickel of revenue.
Easy: Bye-bye, amazon ads.
Then, there was the public appeal. For a short time, I ran a “donations” button above my stories, sort of like National Public Radio stations asking listeners for financial support. The button accidentally vanished when we changed Internet servers a year ago.
My feelings about the donations button were always ambivalent. On one hand, it seemed fair to ask readers for support; on the other hand, because the donations were deposited into my paypal account, I knew who my financial backers were.
All three of them. A bit over a hundred bucks total.
Nothing wrong with that, in theory, except that I found myself wondering how so-and-so, who’d donated fifteen or twenty bucks to JOTR, might construe my latest writing.
Intellectual clutter at best and subtle self-censorship at worst.
I let the donations button go.
With those two minor exceptions, joelontheroad is as financially independent today as when I set it up a couple years ago.
Financial independence is the bedrock upon which my blog’s intellectual independence is based.
By “financially independent,” I mean that I pay the bills to maintain the site as well as any out-of-pocket reporting expenses.
Like gas for my car to drive to, say, a Detroit park in search of a boat launch. Or the price of a digital camera and various computer paraphenelia.
Or gas for my motorboat to take someone up the Rouge River.
Overhead for JOTR is not a killer, though my time is uncompensated.
But I’m learning that financial independence is only the first stone in the foundation of true independence. I don’t have advertisers who might try to influence me. I don’t have editors or publishers who might spike my work.
Who is left to censor me?
Me!
Self-censorship is the biggest bogey of all. It’s a revelation, and for me a truth I didn’t fathom until I began to realize the limits of independence.
I’ll be writing more about the self-censoring phenomenon, but back to the subject at hand: Promoting my books on JOTR.
Tacky or not, I’m going to post columns from time to time that advertise my books.
Wayne State University Press published my first book. Co-authored with Patricia Beck. Up the Rouge! enjoys publicity efforts from Wayne State’s very fine publishing arm.
But my other books, Plug Nickel and Seydou’s Christmas Tree, are productions of a small company called Hardalee Press.
So is the audio book version of Up the Rouge!
“Financially independent” is not a term I’d apply to Hardalee Press, which has no ad budget and no staff of publicity promoters.
What Hardalee has, though, is access to the publisher of joelontheroad. You might say Hardalee and JOTR are joined at the brain.
So brace yourselves, loyal JOTR readers. Now and then I’ll be posting BLATANTLY COMMERCIAL COLUMNS on this site.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
Looking for a Christmas gift for less than twenty bucks that sends a poignant message of brotherly and sisterly lovee?
Please consider my new book, Seydou’s Christmas Tree:
IT PROMISED TO BE A LONELY CHRISTMAS.
They were a pair of Peace Corps volunteers living and working in the sub-Sahara.
Thousands of miles from friends and family, they wondered how they might celebrate Christmas.
Their young friend, Seydou, a Muslim kid with a knack for getting things done, took them on a trip that changed how they looked at the world.
First, they had each other.
But they also had their friends in Africa.
Muslim, Christian, animist — it didn’t matter.
Seydou’s Christmas Tree is the true story of how a Muslim youth in Togo, West Africa led two American friends through what they thought was a barren wasteland, and taught them that ugliness and beauty are mere words.
They learned that Christmas is wherever you are.
