How to support My Favorite Suspects

Why is subscribing free? Will it continue to be free?

Welcome to all the new subscribers that joined in October! I really appreciate your likes and comments.

I’ve had some questions recently about how to support my writing and MFS so I thought I would address these here.

I realize that all my readers have other, more important, demands for their money and time and I want to make it as easy as possible to access my work.

I think the best way to support MFS (and me as a writer) is simply to subscribe to MFS, read the stories, be active by liking or leaving comments, share posts on social media and Substack, and buy my books on Amazon.

MFS subscriptions are free and will continue to be free for as long as I can offer this.

Any subscriber can leave likes or comments on the stories.

You can share stories by forwarding the emails to your friends, sharing posts on social media, or just talking about the stories with others.

Stories are available for free until 6 months after publication, and at that point, they are archived. To access stories in the archive, you’ll need a paid subscription or a free trial paid subscription. With the free trial, you’ll get 7 days of access to the archive. (As an alternative to the archive, I publish some of the content from MFS as books on Amazon, so check my author page if there’s a specific story you’re interested in.)

Why this approach? I’ve spent 38 years trying to make it as a fiction writer and in that time I’ve had exactly one fiction story published. I could continue to push for payment, but the fiction market is flooded, and I’m not going to live forever. For me, personally, I’ve overcome basic challenges such as “finish a novel,” “establish a writing habit,” and “have your work critiqued.” I love writing but I have demands on my time, too. I’m at the point in life where if no one reads my stories, then I don’t see a point in writing them. So I’ve decided that getting readers is a better goal than getting money.

Why buy my books on Amazon? Again, the goal is readership. Amazon provides handy statistics that I can use to determine interest in my writing such as sales numbers, pages read, and recommendations. Since I don’t need to make a living as a writer any more, I only need to cover costs of advertising and fees in my book pricing.

The very best thing anyone can do is let me know they read a story and liked it. The second best thing would be to let me know they read a story and didn’t like it. At least I know someone read it.

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Photo copyright 2023 by Todd Brasel.