January 01, 2004

How do you pay for it? @ Radio Free Blogistan
by Liza Sabater

How do you pay for it? @ Radio Free Blogistan

Christopher Filkins, aka filchyboy, is contending with the cost of blogging.

Looking out at the new year I can see myself spending a good $2,000 on the infrastructure for my "hobby". I'm thinking about running a fund raising drive to help defray the growing costs of moving 100gb per month. Needless to say it is a daunting prospect to think I may be priced out of doing what I love.

People have been raving about Google Ads, about they've been making money out of them. I want to know their secret because, if it is true that I get a decent amount of traffick throughout my blogs, the click through rate sucks. I cannot see Google Ads paying for my sites unless I launch a concerted click-through campaign and guilt my family and friends into participating. And, to tell you all, that may be what I have to do. I need to get back to work and that is a problem given that I am a homeschooling mom. So I am starting to take web work this year : will be putting up 'hire me' ads up on my sites. This is really the only way that I can see these 'hobbies' paying off : to use them as portfolios or showcases of our abilities.

An example of this is POTATOLAND. We spend about $2k/yr on that site ALONE. Big gobs of bandwidth and what not. But this is mark's studio. It comes out cheaper than having an actual brick and mortar space and on a slow day it gets more traffic (2k hits) than most art galleries will get on a month. How does it pay off? In fame if not fortune and I am not just saying a cliché. If it had not been for his site, he would not be considered today one of the pioneers of net art. He has gotten grants, comissions and has sold software art thanks to that site. Has it paid off after labor? Let me put it this way: a starving artist he is but POTATOLAND is now considered an important part of art history.

So the question might be not how or how much are you paying for this but WHY? Why are we doing this?

My brick and mortar inspirations happen to be a Puerto Rican writer that was a huge influence in my life, not as a writer but as my friend's mom. Her name is Loreina Santos Silva.

Loreina is one of the most respected women poets in Puerto Rico and a prolific writer. I was a fellow Catholic school girl of her youngest daughter, Chloe and I would spend evenings, sometimes days at their place, a beatiful hacienda house on top of Cerro de las Mesas in Mayagüez. I met them around 1976, when Loreina stormed into our 6th grade class with lanky Chloe in tow. To this day I remember that scene, Loreina with her dashiki-style gown walking purposefully and Chloe, almost 6 feet tall and wearing wooden clogs. Chloe spoke mostly English and I was but one of two bilingual kids in class --and being almost 6 feet tall as well, we conmiserated at the back of the classroom. Tall girls that became instantaneaous friends.

Loreina was to me a sort of oddity :: all the moms I knew had no education beyond high school, they were all housewives and most had no employment at all. She was divorced from Chloe's father at the time and she had to work but she did not have a job, she had a profession. She was at the time a Spanish Lit. professor at the Mayag¨ez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. She even had been chair of her department and was on the board of several professional associations. She definitely worked at what she did because she had ambition and determination. Her work was and has always been her vocation.

What I found most intriguing about her was her passion for writing. She did not write because she had to for her job. She wrote because she had to for her life. Sometimes Loreina would wake up in the dead of the night reciting bits of poetry, yet unwritten. She always had a pen and notebook by her bed. Sometimes she would dream her poems and wake herself up to write them. I've always been a midnight pee'er, and on my way to the bathroom I'd see her figure coming out of the light like in a Greco, writing away the sonnets that she would publish on her next book.

And I mean, that SHE would publish.

Loreina was the first person I ever met who would actually pay for the privilege of publishing her own books. I have a vague recollection of her complaints about publishers eating away at her royalties or what not. But Loreina, for one reason or another, felt like she had to do this herself. She would actually shlep with books in the trunk of her car and finagle bookstores into carrying them. Somehow her books have made their way into the syllabi of Latin American Women's Lit programs and I am sure that she had something to do with it. I know for sure that she was being read in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Mexico. She travelled extensively, with a sack of her books over her shoulders and a few essays in hand. Loreina was EVERYWHERE with what some saw as her 'hobby' but what her daughters and those close to her knew was her life's work.

Loreina self-published her books of poetry, journals, novels, even an autobiography way before anybody ever heard of blogs. I thought that this was her quirk but as I met more writers and intellectuals in Puerto Rico, I came to realize that almost everybody self-published either all or most of their books. So did Ana Lydia Vega and even Luis Rafael Sanchez, two of the most celebrated Puerto Rican writers of the last century.

All of these three writers books are translated into other languages and reprinted by big publishing companies like Gallimard or Del Norte. I am sure of the answer if you'd ask them, was it worth it to you to self-publish all those books. It would be a rotund, yes.

If you need to write but do not need to share it with the world, then buy a nice looking sketch pad (no lines for journaling, please) and write away. If you still want to do so on a computer, fine, type away. But if you want people to read yoour work, what better way to write no matter what AND publish.

My blogs are Loreina's digital version of her sack of books. I write because it is my life.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Media
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Found inJanuary 1, 2004 03:16 PM

Say it loud, say it proud!