The only way to travel…
As I said on Twitter a while back (link no longer exists, same as my Twitter account) I’ve had a recurring dream of travelling around the world in a split-screen VW Camper visiting every bookshops I could and blogging about it, picking books up and reading them at the coast and talking to lovely booksellers, authors, and publishers.
This was also part of the idea behind starting the Indie Bookshops and Indie Publishers blogs, visiting various bookshops and publishers, interviewing them, and having a jolly good time whilst doing it.
So this has always been at the back of my mind as a thing I’d love to do and I tweeted about it and got a lot of people agreeing that this is a lovely dream and how fun and fabulous that would be.
Then I got a few people saying have you thought how much it would take to be able to do this and I threw out a few flippant figures, but then it got me thinking how much would it take?
After a bit of rough figuring out I realised that campers are more expensive than I thought and come out at about £30,000 for a half decent one so that would be the first hurdle, getting to that figure feels impossible, but could be achieved with a lot of saving and begging on a crowdfunder platform of one description or other.
The next thing would be how much would I need to live, this would include contributions toward the house and running the camper van at the same time and that was easier and a bit more fun. If 10% of my Bluesky followers subscribed to my Ko-Fi for £1.00 a month that would cover it!
When put like that it seems as if I work hard to push it I could achieve my dream, it would mean I could blog on the move, not just about the book world but I could use it as an opportunity to rekindle my photography and being on the move wouldn’t stop the rest of the projects I’ve got going on either.
It sounds like it could be fun but hard work to get there and worth the try.
So on my Ko-Fi I have various subscription levels, one is set at a minimum of £1 a month and this is general support for all my projects as an appreciation, one set at a minimum of £3.50 a month which gives you access to any documents I develop on and about indie bookshops, indie publishers, author interviews, and illustrator interviews such as checklists, directories, videos and anything else that I can think of, then there is one at £6 minimum which gives you access to all the other benefits plus access to the short stories I purchased electronic reprint rights for on a previous project.
Membership levels
Eventually there will be a monthly tarot reading membership level and a photo of the month level but I’ve still to iron out the details of these, but keep an eye on them if you’re interested.
If you like what I do and want to encourage me to travel more please consider a monthly Ko-Fi subscription.
originally posted 13/07/23 updated 25/11/24
