My Buymeacoffee Page

If you like my writings and you would like to see more, you can help fund my activity with a modest donation or two to my new Buymeacoffee Donations Page. Not expecting to gain much from this but every penny counts with my research taking me all round the UK now. https://buymeacoffee.com/arthurchappell  I would recommend this site to other writers and creatives too.

It feels like begging just setting up such a site, but it is becoming an industry standard now. Many internet influencers, reviewers, writers, artists, and promoters have BMAC and/or Patreon pages. I don't expect to make a fortune. The point of BMAC is that it gives creatives occasional treats, not sales and major income boosts.

My Pub Signs Book 2024

I actually don't profit from my writing at present. It's a hobby that often costs me more than I earn/gain from it. Some of my work generates zero income. I have work in charity publications and fanzines. Other publications offer writers only complimentary copies of the book/journal we are in, if that. To some publishers, being in an anthology should be a reward in itself.

Even where work is sold it can be just a single payment on publication, or a slow royalty deal, with money sent once per annum, and dwindling as sales slow down. Only best selling novelists really profit as writers. Most poets, short story scribes and even authors of full books, don't earn much at all, and rarely get to give up their day jobs.

My costliest writings are my pub sign books as to get photos for them I have to travel round the country, by bus or train, and sometimes stay overnight or longer in modest guest houses AirB&B's or hotels too.

It is worth writers joining the Author's Licensing And Collecting Society (.ALCS), which pursues internationally accumulated royalties on behalf of writers and published photographers. Many publishers, especially of anthologies, find that the royalties to send to each of say, 30 contributors to one collection, gives each writer very little, and the cost of sending the money out is a big overhead, so they simply leave it in their own accounts. The ALCS is able to pressure them to release such dust-gathering money and they send it to the authors annually (every six months with some membership plans). The ALCS doesn't charge for membership, but does take a modest finders fee from whatever you earn on their first annual sweep on your behalf, but never again -- your membership is for life.

Link - The ALCS https://www.alcs.co.uk/

Photo taken by me

Arthur Chappell