Squirrels

This entry is titled squirrels.

When I came home to Corning, New York in 2009, I find myself out of work, unemployed, no vehicle, and with a lot of time on my hands.

During the Summer of 2010 I found work only occasionally. With some of the money I had on hand I would go buy large bags of peanuts and then walk down to Denison park, one of the local city parks here in town.

And I started to feed the squirrels.

It didn't take too long to gather around a group of squirrels. I was after all giving away free food.

It was interesting to see them "adjust" their normal foraging behavior to the new behavior I was presenting, which included handouts of free peanuts.

It started innocently enough but as more squirrels came around, and I started tossing more here and there I began to notice a change in behavior.

There were squirrels that would fight off the other squirrels. As if staking their claim to this free food.

It happened over and over again.

It made me think about social situations with human beings. Here in the United State have a similar system of giving away sustenance. It is called the unemployment system, and for those apparently unable to help themselves at all we have a system called Welfare.

I am not going to enter into a discussion on whether or not it is right to have such systems. It is beyond my knowledge and teaching to know positively what the correct thing to do is.

My point for this entry is I am giving away my science fiction story online for free.

And now, just today, have decided to publish the blog pages as a Kindle eBook.

It takes me back to an all important question, how do you make money on something you are giving away for free?

The question applies to my old website, videofeedback dot com, where I used to post videos for free. At one point in time I discussed it with my college professor of Radio and Television, and his reply was how do you monetize it? How do you make money from it?

What I am leading to is that converting my online story to an electronic eBook for sale is probably not going to work out. At least it isn't going to provide a decent income at this point in time.

People will not pay for what they have become accustom to getting for free. Not until they become very hungry for it. And since my book is not food, the need for it is not very great.

My story is presently receiving about 1000 hits per month. What I have noticed is readership drops off quickly if I don't post another entry soon after the last one. What this implies is that my story doesn't hold a great deal of interest for my net readers, and thus when I go to convert it to an eBook, I suspect readership will drop off entirely.

What I can hope for, is that somehow something else besides a modicum of interest will manifest itself in same unknown fashion I have yet to see, or understand.

I will let you know.

-CRB