Ebooks and Charity

In this post, I will talk about the two problems that led me to the decision 100% of my ebook earnings to support a charity:

            My first problem:

Whenever I was 18, I read The Stand by Stephen King. I was blown away. I had read a number of novels before, but this was the first that I truly loved.

            To give you some background, I had an entire year of writing under my belt when I began reading The Stand. I had started writing over 10 novels at that time, but had only written one through to completion. I had already decided that I would be an author: I believed that I had aptitudes that, if nourished, could result in work that people would appreciate. But, I wasn’t good enough yet. I often found that I wasn’t finishing the novels because I didn’t know what would happen next. Your imagination is like a muscle, and mine still had a lot of growing to do. I didn’t understand how stories were supposed to flow, and I didn’t know what magic elements made people entertained by fiction.

            I read The Stand like a ball rolling down a hill. The more I read, the faster I read. I found that I had a deep, genuine care for the characters, and an overwhelming desire to know what would happen next.

It wasn’t just that I was reading a good book; I was using the novel to escape some things that were happening in my life. Reading is a safe place. You can go home, and whether you’re bullied, or divorced, or dying, or don’t have any friends, or are on top of the world, the book will treat you the same, and you can enjoy it just the same.

I was at a Chinese food restaurant a couple of years ago in Denton, Texas, and I saw a man come in, holding a paperback. He had called in a to-go order, and he sat down on a bench in the front, reading his novel. He sat by himself, and when he had to talk to the host to explain that he had called-in an order, he was painfully shy. I saw that he didn’t have a wedding ring on. He was wearing stained sweatpants, and a t-shirt over his protruding belly. His face wasn’t shaved. He had glasses on. His food was brought to him, and judging by the containers, it was just enough for one person. He would be eating alone. I didn’t know the man at all, but I began to construct a model life for him in my head. I imagined that he worked from home, online, and would go weeks without having a face-to-face conversation with another person. I imagined that he was painfully alone, and sad, and depressed, and that he didn’t know how to fix his problems. But when he went home, he had his novel to disappear into. I felt a lump in my throat, and my eyes were threatening tears. I stepped outside for a second to get some fresh air. I saw the man pull away in his car. His little girl was sitting in the passenger seat next to him, and I saw that I had been wrong about him. He wasn’t alone, and was part of a family. But, the thought still stood in my mind, and I knew that the incorrect idea I had had of this stranger stood for something true: At times, we need fiction to escape.  

I knew then that I wanted to make something like Stephen King’s novel. I wanted to be a contributor.

So, I became disciplined, and I practiced. I’ve surrounded myself with readers who offer good advice, and I write nearly every day, most often for several hours.

And, to the best of my estimations, I’ve gotten better. I receive a decent amount of fan e-mail, and have a big group of supporters who tell me that I need to keep writing. I still have room to grow, but I believe that I can now write stories that people will love.

With that accomplished, my problem becomes this: How do I expose people to my work? I’ve had novels up on Amazon now for over a year, and the most buys that I’ve received in a month has been around 300 (which is encouraging, but I would like to have more readers). If I could, I would offer my novels on Amazon for free, but I can’t. I wish that I had some way that I could get people to just try my novels out, because if they did, I think that they’d like them.

This is my first problem.

My second problem:

Later in the same year that I first read The Stand, I was in Jamaica with my high school. One of my friends got sick, and we had to take him to the hospital. They didn’t know what was wrong with him. He was scratching, and itching, and crying, and screaming, saying that his skin hurt. I volunteered to ride with the school principal and my friend to the emergency room. The doctor didn’t know what was wrong with my friend. The only medicine that he could give was Benadryl.

The facility was small, and dirty. It wasn’t connected to a hospital. The doctors wrote with pen and paper, not computers. They had no other physicians to consult if something went wrong, or if they didn’t know what to do (like what was happening with my friend). In the end, my friend was fine, and had had an allergic reaction to all the sunlight that he had been exposed to. But I never forgot the experience.

Six months ago, I began working in an emergency room here in the United States as a physician’s scribe. Basically, I follow doctors and help them with their charts and workflow. While working, I’ve seen hundreds of examples that show the powers of modern medicine. An ambulance will bring in a patient who has had a stroke, and the doctor will administer a clot-busting drug that nearly resolves their symptoms. People will come in with gunshot wounds and get life saving blood transfusions. I’ve seen a man talking to his wife 5 minutes after he was seizing in his bed, and his heart beat had stopped.

I compared this to Jamaica, and thought: What happens when patients like this are brought to the emergency department there? And Jamaica’s facilities are a mild example. There are still places in the world today where people die from a small cut on their foot that gets infected. There are warzones the medical personal is spread so thinly that they cannot give attention to every gunshot wound.

And, all of this is completely solvable with the right amount of capital. Organizations like Doctor’s Without Borders (MSF) allow people to donate to this cause: Each dollar they receive actually contributes to providing medical to people in need, whether it’s paying for a physician’s airplane ticket to a remote part of the world, buying scalpels, or latex gloves, or even simple soap that these hospitals can use to clean the patients. Each dollar actually counts, and actually helps to provide someone with better medical care.

While I’ve continued to work as a scribe, and see people get incredible health care at affordable prices in this country, I’ve felt hopeless. I know that there are people, just like me, who will die because they didn’t have access to something as simple as an antibiotic that I could have purchased for them, if I had the money to give.

This is my second problem: I would like to give money to this. I would like to help, but I don’t have the resources.

My solution:

In thinking about these two problems, I’ve noticed some factors.

I have a good product, but find that I’m having trouble convincing people to try it out. If it were free, I think that people would enjoy it. But as it is, people must give me money to be exposed to my novel. Why would they want to do that? What if it’s awful? When people buy a novel from an independent author, they are at a risk of losing money.

The second factor is this: people like to give. I think that it’s an innate instinct to want to donate to people in need.

My solution, in simple terms, is this: If people donate money to Doctor’s Without Borders, I will give them my ebook. If they don’t like it, then they have simply donated money. If they like my ebook, than they have found a great deal.

Here’s how it will work: For every ebook purchase a customer makes, I will donate my earnings to supporting Doctors Without Borders. Every month, I will post proof on my website of what my ebooks have earned, and then I will post a receipt after I make my donation. I will be as transparent as possible.

This is my vision of the outcome: If my ebooks are successful, this could generate a huge campaign for Doctor’s Without Borders, as well as expose people to the novels that I’ve worked so hard over. And, it gives people a unique way to donate. Each time a customer buys one of my novels on Amazon, they have made a donation that will help save lives. In addition to this, every time someone gives my ebooks a positive review, or tells someone else about my ebooks, they have also made a donation by increasing a good cause’s visibility. In this way, donations and support will have a synergistic effect: This model can actually be more effective than simple donations (just look at the kinds of contributions a company like TOMS makes).

I believe that people will recognize this as a valuable opportunity to receive a great work of fiction and to do a great thing.