I figured people might want to read a brief insight into the financial side of poetry on itch.io.
At present I make about £30 a month, or £360 a year from itch.io. That's net, after itch and the pipes that move the money to my bank account have taken their shares.
£360 per year isn't an income, or even the ghost of an income. But it's more than a hobby paying for itself: it's a hobby paying a month's council tax and a few meals out on top.
I don't have meals out on the money. I put it toward essentials. But someone could be having one or two nice meals out on that. It's certainly more than I expected to make.
I make this money because itch lets you keep a much (much!) higher proportion of each sale than (say) Amazon. I don't think itch is a perfect storefront, not by any means. Accounts circulate of users frozen out of their earnings, and of unwise moderation. I do, though, like the high proportion kept by the author.
My work suits the sort of audience that browses itch.io. That's one reason why it's there in the first place, after all. Some types of poetry would do less well; others probably better.
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Kin-Bright and Spearhand Faring have two different sales models:
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Kin-Bright is free, with the option to pay more for a copy with a marginal commentary, and the need for an audio equivalent covered by the archived Twitch streams when it premiered.
- Spearhand Faring requires money, comes with commentary built in as endnotes, and includes an (amateurish!) audiobook version.
Which one earns more?
The two poems are not exact equivalents: one is shorter than the other, they have different tones, et cetera. Plus, it's not very reliable to compare two things, rather than two groups of, say, 100,000 things each.
Bearing those warnings in mind… Kin-Bright brings in much more money than Spearhand, even though it's double the price.
A free release with a paid upgrade might offer a better model for poetry on itch than a priced release.
I've never aspired to be a professional poet. Most of the poets I most admire worked in other fields, and wrote as amateurs. Poet's Corner exists because they buried Chaucer there, not the other way around—and they buried Chaucer there for his long administrative service.
The concept of the professional poet arose recently. I've know examples, all good people writing good work. Even among them, though, vanishingly few ever make a primary income off book sales: teaching jobs, fellowships, and residences seem to be the name of the game. In that context, I'm slightly proud of my thirty quid a month.
(Thanks for reading! You too can contribute by buying my work on itch. Money spent on me supports human writing produced by a real, flesh-and-blood person using obsolete craft techniques.)