An important announcement regarding RUINS and money
An important announcement regarding RUINS and money
Hello everyone! If you’ve hung around Substack long enough, you will notice that many bloggers are using the site’s payment management features to generate financial support from their readers. This is fine, and a wonderful way to do business, but that isn’t the way RUINS is going to operate. I want to state categorically that RUINS will always remain 100% free. I will never put anything behind a paywall or offer exclusive content for paid-tier subscribers.
Even more than that: I won’t ever give my readers an option to pay even if they want to. I know this goes against the prevailing ethos of the Patreon / content creator economy, but that’s how I want it. I consider RUINS my gift to you, and the time you, my readers, spend reading it is more support to me than you can imagine. I value and respect the time you spend reading my attempts to come to terms with the collected outpourings of our artistic culture, and how they intersect with Christianity. I value and respect you so much that I don’t want mere finances to come between us, despite some thinkers, such as Resident Contrarian, publicly stating that to not let readers give monetary support is a form of insulting them.
However, perhaps you do feel like you need to support RUINS in some more tangible way than mere reading. To that end, I’ve compiled a list of books which I would love to read, and which I feel will be of value to my ongoing studies in matters of art and faith. If there is anything I need, here at RUINS, it is more wisdom in my intellectual life, and these books could provide that. So if you feel compelled to buy any of these books and send them to me, you have that opportunity.
And if you don’t feel a desire to do so, that’s fine. Another way to support RUINS would be to recommend it to your social circle, which you can do with the link below.
And if you aren’t yet subscribed to RUINS and would like to get subsequent issues in your inbox . . . well, there’s a button for that too!
Again, thanks to all of you for taking time out of your schedule to read what is on my mind. Coming up in RUINS, I have a three-part series planned on some aspects of art criticism and how they interact with Makato Fujimura’s idea of Culture Care; before that, though, I’m going to publish my thoughts on a splendidly irreverent and insightful little work of art criticism, published almost fifty years ago by this guy (if you know, you know). So stay tuned!
“I tell people to enable completely optional paid subscriptions without pay-gating content, and to do this almost from the beginning – say, from the point where they’ve proved to themselves that they can crank out material on a relatively regular basis. Most people don’t do this, and in a weird way I think the reason most people choose not to do this is (unintentionally) a mild insult to their readers.” —from this interview.