Dragos Roua's 30-Day Writing Challenge
Note: What follows is the first subject of @dragosroua's 30-Day writing challenge.
The topic: How Did You Get On Steemit?
All are welcome to participate. Rules on how to do so can be found by clicking on this link.
It was a dark and stormy night. Hey! There's no paper in this contraption!
Reader's Digest Version
A friend of mine, @bbrewer, told me about STEEM back in July of 2016. He had recently joined and thought I would really enjoy the concept of blogging and getting rewards for it. Well, of course I would, but not knowing anything about cryptocurrency, especially one that was a few months old, I just didn't take the plunge.
I heard about Bitcoin and found it utterly ridiculous that a made up coin could be worth so much. Not only that, but that it could rise and fall by the tune of hundreds of dollars. What kind of investment was that? Certainly not one without a great deal of risk.
So, time passed. Then, somewhere before Christmas time last year, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't getting anywhere with what I was trying to do on Social Media (I certainly wasn't making any money at it), and I remembered this STEEM deal that @bbrewer had told me about. I had to ask him about it to make sure of the name and to find out if was still around or not. It was, he assured me. So, I went to sign up. I wasn't happy to find out it could take up to two weeks to be approved (approved for what?), but I took the plunge, anyway.
Fortunately, it didn't take that long to get on. My account became live late in the afternoon on December 30, 2017. Other than setting up the account and poking around a bit, I didn't do much with it until January 1 of this year, when I made my first comments and upvotes.
The Longer Version
For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to own my own business and I wanted to write. As time went by, those desires did not diminish. Instead, they amplified, and expanded. Writing, I recognized, was just one form of creative expression available to me, and if at all possible, I wanted to spend my time creating and being compensated for it.
Each time I've made a move to be closer to that goal, the goal would move an equal or greater distance. Just when I thought I had the last piece of the puzzle in place, it would either fizzle, or more gaps would appear. The closest I ever got to combining writing with compensation was as the owner and publisher of two weekly newspapers, but as time went on, I did less writing, mostly layout, and basically whatever owner's responsibilities that might exist week to week.
Ultimately, I wanted to be an author of fiction, but there's always been gatekeepers in the form of the publishing houses, unless you went vanity press, but back then, social media didn't exist (let alone much of an Internet), so you ended up with a bunch of books in your garage. Then, digital self-publishing became a thing, but trying to put your book out there in the ocean of all the other books, great and small, was not the solution. Even using each new iteration of social media was not the answer. It just created more and more layers to try to attend to.
Most recently, before coming to Steemit, I found Patreon, and thought it was the answer. By then, I had four different comic book series ideas floating in my head, and I was hoping to create a following for them by allowing people to follow me through the development stage of each successive series, as well as reading the finished comics.
Well, Patreon doesn't really make any effort to get your work out there in front of anyone. Most people who are doing well have already been creating on the web for two to five years, have a following, and many of those are willing to pay a few bucks a month for some exclusive behind the scenes perks. I was trying to build a product and a following at the same time while paying for concept art and essentially got nowhere.
The Facebook page I was running before that (and still maintain), wasn't producing income either, so I've primarily been doing things to increase followers and engagement there, with some success, but no dollars.
Enter Steemit. Within a couple of weeks of being here, I earned more with posting, commenting and curation than I did with several different blogging and social media projects over the last 15 years. Maybe my writing ability has improved over that period of time, but in reality, the main change is, I'm closer to those who want to see my creations than I've ever been before.
And those folks have some degree of incentives to reward me. As much as I, or anyone, would like to see better compensation sooner, it's still a start. Most days, I feel like I've finally arrived, that I'm finally where I can engage directly with others who are interested in what I'm doing, and me with them.
And that is how I got on Steemit.