As part of my continuing efforts to streamline my business expenses, over the next few months I’m allowing several of my domains to not renew. Most of them represented expenses without corresponding revenues, and while I like the idea of owning domains for the names of my books (e.g.: lostandnotfound.com), the reality is that the books I managed to get the domains for are also my least-popular books—and the sites I’ve tried putting on them (different things, over the years) have never led to sales. ((That I’m aware of.)) Most of my books make less than $10-$15 in sales a year; actually, most of my titles make $0 in sales, most years—so don’t try to blow off the cost of domain registrations as trivial.
Included in this purge is the lapsing of lessthanthis.com—the site of my personal blog, which is now moving to blog.teelmcclanahan.com (and may move again, say, to teelmcclanahan.com/blog/ or journal.teelmcclanahan.com or some such) as it has long been among my sites which cost money and do not make money. I have no need for useless expenses in my “lean” business model—I have a need to keep expenses as low as possible, so that I can remain free to do the creative work I want to do without worrying about whether they make any money.
As you already know, if you’re a long-time reader of this blog, I hate money. Making money an important part of my creative process is the poison that has stopped me from painting for the last 5 years, or writing [fiction] for over two years. Concern over money is a poison to my soul.
So: To remove the concern that this or that domain ought to be making money somehow, I’m simply removing the domains altogether.
The two domains I’m retaining (2 domains are included in my hosting plan) are modernevil.com (since my official, legal business name is Modern Evil Press) and teelmcclanahan.com (since that’s actually my name). One of these sites is where I earn most of my sales (by volume), and I’m moving my art from wretchedcreature.com to art.teelmcclanahan.com, which I think makes more sense. ((Did I mention I haven’t painted much of anything in over 5 years? Maintaining a separate site for it seems wasteful.))
Now, if I could just find people to buy the thousands of dollars in paperback books I have sitting “in inventory”, even just a few a year, it would cover the bare bones expenses I have remaining. Learned my lesson there: Never print a book that isn’t already paid for, one way or another.
