I was thinking about it and I legit think I would pay low-mid 5 figures to see WYLB get fully finished.
Probably somewhere in the 4 figure range for HP and the BWL to get finished.
Shame both have been abandoned for so long.

 

If anyone wants to pay me mid five figures I'll write anything they damn well like tbh.

 

I thought this as few times, I bet a few authors could crowd fund a pretty big chunk of change to finish stories.

Not sure what I would pay, but there are maybe 3 stories I would pay money towards getting finished.

 

If you can maintain the exact quality or convince Newcomb to finish it somehow, dm me, we could work something out.
Being 100% serious, that’s the one story I would pay $$$$ for in a heartbeat

 

Exact quality guaranteed but it's cash up front.

 

Lmao. If anyones serious DMs are open

 

I think there's a big difference in quality when someone's doing something because they love it, and doing it because they're getting paid for it.

If an author's stopped writing, there's likely a reason for it. Muse gone, lost the joy of it, and paying them aint necessarily gonna bring that back.

So I likely wouldn't, unless I had a good understanding of the context the author was operating in, and a reasonable belief that money was the only lacking factor. This goes for pretty much any creative endeavour, not just FF btw.

 

Maybe thats true to an extent but I think if offered enough money, an author is gonna perform to the same standards or maybe even better.

 

Speaking as someone who is a Patron for some authors, it depends on their output and the quality of their story. Consistency is key here: if they don't have a schedule that they keep to, where you can expect a chapter every so often, then I'm not going to send money their way. I've been burned a number of times, with authors and creators starting a Patreon and then just pumping out the bare minimum every so often. Like, individually each update is okay, but when you step back and compare the amount of progress they make over a year versus the amount you've spent on them, you realize that their focus isn't on finishing the project, just keeping the cash flow running for as long as possible.

Yes, there's no quid-quo-pro going on, where you are guaranteed a certain amount of chapters for the amount of money you put in. The same way that buying a book from an author does not create a contract where the author is required to write a sequel. But if you are putting money that you've worked hard for towards a project, you want to feel like you're getting an equivalent return. The general rule I follow is, "If I get $X for each hour I work, and I spend $X each month on supporting this project, do I feel like I have gotten sufficient enjoyment out of the project for having to spend an (extra) hour working at my job?" Which is basic economics, really. Something about opportunity costs, I think.

For more concrete examples, I'm typically willing to spend between $1 and $8 dollars per month on a story, averaging around $5. The more and more often that they write, the higher the amount goes. If they're an author who has multiple stories going on and I'm only interested in some of them, then that amount likewise goes down. Most recently, I had been supporting HonorRae over on RoyalRoad. He had two stories going on, one a deckbuilding LitRPG involving dragon riders called All the Skills and then another one later on called Totem, which is a cultivation isekai where the main character's spirit animal is a firebreathing Canadian Goose. I was really enjoying All the Skills, and the $5/month I was spending gave me a bonus fifteen chapters to read. When Totem started up, it fell under the same subscription. But later HonorRae moved it under its own tier, supposedly so that people who weren't interested in it wouldn't get notifications, but getting both tiers would require increasing my payout to $10/month, which didn't feel worth it to me.



But all of that is just paying for something that someone is already writing. What the OP is talking about is more like commissioning a story, which I have also seen. More for someone asking an author to write a specific story rather than pick up an old one, but still. In that case, I'd be paying significantly more. I'd absolutely refuse doing a lump sum payment: It is way too easy for an author to take the money and run or underdeliver, and I don't know if there's any contract you could sign for this sort of thing that would be enforceable. A monthly payment model or more preferably a per-chapter model (where if the author wants the money, they have to put out product) would be the way to go. You'd have to hash out some sort of informal contract guaranteeing some sort of word count minimum, though.

The amount I'd pay would be dependent on the word count and how often they are churning out chapters. Without the economy of scale, the amount an individual would pay would be significantly higher than just buying a finished book off the shelf. Something like $200 per 10-25k words? I don't really have a concrete figure here. That's assuming that you are doing this through Patreon, where the author can get additional revenue from regular subscribers. But I'd definitely try to get several other interested parties to cut down on each person's costs and give more incentive for the author to continue writing.



TL;DR: Average of $5 per 10k words via a monthly subscription service. Increase to $200 if I'm commissioning a specific story, but it better be damn good. See the bolded sentence above.

 

Isn't extra bit of money earned from a hobby a pretty big motivator?
I would compare it to the weekly serialized authors who right exclusive chapters for Patreons of give them an early version of chapters


Edit: that being said, I would pay a significant amount to see the Denarian Lord finished. I would also pay our very own Enembee, to right another full length story in the HP verse. He is genuinely hands down, my favorite fanfic of all time

 

Someone once compared Patreon to the idea of Patrons in ye olde times. I am unsure if the origin of pattern is linked to that and cba googling whilst writing this, however.

I would contribute towards a story, I think creative endeavours are important and some of my favourite series easily outpace JK's original work.

Like above I would want to see a schedule but I understand life happens, and if there were regular monthly updates (chapter size dependent off) I could see myself committing money to a crowd funder.

 

Some guy voted a story I posted (not mine) 1/5 because the author locks the latest chapters behind a paywall on Patreon! So clearly there is some contentious feelings on this - though majority opinion appears to be, if it's legal IDK.

Some people clearly a willing a pay relatively a lot - even similar amounts to a Netflix subscription lol.

Tbh, I've daydreamt about bribing my favourite fic authors to update.

LeadVonE has mentioned on his discord that he stayed away from monetising his story DPaSW, (in that roundabout way) 7-8 years ago when he began, but Patreon for HPfanfiction and others I assume, has legitimately popped off in recent years. You can make a pretty penny from Patreon if people like your writing.

 

it would be similar to a publisher handing an author an advance to finish a story

 

If I were rich I'd honestly pay the Santi money to never touch HPBWL again, because newbies wandering in begging for updates never stops being funny.

 

I can't remember the last time that happened. Better to pay him to write one more chapter to reel them back in, then go completely silent.

 

The first one that comes to mind is @Todeswind endless pantheon. But he has stated that he had no interest in financial benefits from his stories. I probably can't afford @Taure s rates.

There are a lot of fics that I would buy, if they were ever available as books/ebooks, but then I own a couple of dozen black Library books. So my taste is definitely in question

 

That's what I figured would happen with Circular Reasoning, so I didn't bother picking it back up again. If you stop for a few years, you're done. I know this as a writer; I've wanted to stop projects myself, but I knew I would never get back to them.
The answer to the opening question is jack shit. Part of why I started writing was because I didn't see what I really wanted out there. I generally don't start reading stories that are unfinished and out of the stories that are unfinished, I generally don't read them if they're not regularly updating. Getting to the effective end of Circular Reasoning didn't make me want to bribe the author into continuing, it just made me want to write, so all of this is Swimdraconian's fault.

 

I'm kind of interested in what the inverse question would be: Of the authors that are on here, how much would it take for you to pick up a story that you've stopped writing?

 

On the one hand, like a week ago, someone very nearly got me to write a story from scratch, for free, but then disappeared. If, however, it's something I don't want to write, it would have to literally replace my job (I would still do my job, just really half-assed). That comes out to about $1400 a week and I can't see anyone paying that. I have not abandoned anything mid-story, but on my old account there was a mini-universe that I was building and basically I lost interest in building it. I wrote 7 stories for it and then moved on to another account that I originally created for a joke that didn't pan out.

 

$125 per 5000 words. But if I know I'm done with a story, I won't accept it.