It is 8:53 am on a sunny Saturday morning. My sister is still curled up beside me and I have a blanket over my legs. Outside, I can hear a sparrow calling, and the voices of women down in the street. My mother has already started with the chores. She asked me a few minutes ago what I was working on so early in the day; I only shook my head, unable to answer.

Since last evening I have tried to write this post at least half a dozen times. Every time I made some headway, my fingers stiffened, my mind froze. Fears I didn't know I had about my writing awoke and prevented me from going further, because for the first time I am talking about a very taboo topic, something we all work for but no one wants to explicitly acknowledge, especially us artists: money.

Over the years, I've faced and overcome, repeatedly, the fears that plague all writers: what if my writing is bad? What if no one ever reads what I write? What if my work never gets published? What if I get bad reviews? And so on. Some of these fears I fight to this day, because they attack afresh every time I start writing something---including this article.

Yet there was one fear that always existed beneath the surface, one which I refused to even acknowledge, which somehow made it stronger---the fear of asking for financial support.

I feared that if I did so, I would lose all goodwill that readers of my blog have shown me over the last eight years. Yet another sellout, they would think. Yet another writer monetizing their work. Can’t people make things just for the sake of it? Why does everything have to be monetized these days?

An artist setting up a Ko-Fi or an essayist enabling paid subscriptions for their newsletter isn't always necessarily at rock bottom. They might be, but I would also like to be one of the people who is asking for support not (only) because things are extremely difficult (which they are, currently), but also because they have finally started believing that their work matters and that they deserve to be paid for it.

It is not an act of desperation to invite patronage, but a huge step in believing in one's work. I am finding it empowering, to experience this feeling of having faith in myself and my work.

I am not selling myself out; I am asking for voluntary support for all the writing I've done so far and for all the writing I intend to do here on Kadambari. I'm not building a personal brand; I'm not pushing myself into people's feeds with ads and algorithm-pandering. I'm not selling their data and I'm not asking them to buy stuff they don't need. I'm sharing what I know, and doing so freely. And there is no shame in any of this.

I have several drafts on my laptop in which I go in great detail talking about the importance of art and the need for artists to be able to earn from their work, but the conversation is a common one in our times, so I am not going to present those same arguments here.

More importantly, I am not going to write thousands of words to justify this decision, because that would mean giving in to shame. It would mean that unless I can convince you, dear reader, that money is important, I have no business asking you to consider being a patron.

And I will not do that. I am fearless in talking about money today because I have realized that when we continue avoiding talking about money, artists will always struggle to survive. We are too scared to put the words “artist/writer” and “money” and “survival” in the same sentence.

But I am tired of being scared, just like I am tired of financial insecurity, a constant worry that my family and I have been trying to deal with for years. I have spent the last eight years writing and blogging out of love, but now I need this skill to help me in other ways. I'm giving my all to this project, and I hope you will support me if you can. If you can't, that's totally fine! It's why I'm not putting up any paywalls in the first place.

About Kadambari

As I wrote before, somewhere on this blog, I like kindness as a business model. I'm naïve enough to believe that if you're kind to the people you randomly encounter on the internet, they'll remember you and maybe they'll decide to support your work.

Manuel Moreale, On side projects, money, motivations and human connections

Here's the thing: I am writing a "book," one blog post at a time: essays and how-to’s on everything I’ve learned about the art, craft, and business of writing over the last eight years. There will be no ads, no paywalls. Just your support at $1 a month (or more if you choose to).

I will write 200 posts in all over the next 12 months, which I hope will be enough to reach my goal of $10,300–all the debts me and my family have been trying to pay off for years. Once I’m there, I will end this project and delete my Ko-Fi, the book completed. There’s more to my financial situation than that, but I am choosing not to share the details.

In his essential speech, “Make Good Art,” Neil Gaiman says, “I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn’t get the money, then you didn’t have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.”

This whole endeavour might be a huge failure, but the essays and how-to’s I’m going to share during this project are pieces I would have written anyway. I might not make any money, but “at least I’d have the work,” which means that whatever happens next, this will end in a good place. I hope you will join me as we get there.

Special thanks to Manuel Moreale and Veronique, whose writing helped me take this big step.