I regularly read my spam emails to make sure a comment from a friend hasn’t been arrested by the Filter Police and dragged into the holding cell. Most of them lately are from someone with a Spanish username that translates to “Email lists”, but this time, one was from a different user and started with the word “Warning.” Of course that piqued my curiosity, so I read the whole thing.

This person was warning me that I won’t make any money on my blog the way I’m running it.

Really? *headpalm* And here I thought I was going to start raking in the dollars suddenly after three years.

News flash, my friendly neighborhood spammer: this blog isn’t monetized because I don’t want it to be. Thanks for offering your services and leaving the dozen or so links that landed you in the Spam folder, but I’m not interested.

Believe it or not, some of us write blogs because we want to write. If I were offered a ton of money – I’m talking “quit your day job and write for us” money – to do regular blog posts, and I could be guaranteed a steady payment schedule, I might consider it. But this blog is mostly commerce free because I choose to keep it that way. I have a link to my book’s page on Amazon and a small widget for the Dreamstime photo service in my sidebar, but those are my only concessions to commercialization. I’ll also occasionally link to a book’s Amazon page in an LRW post, but that’s to help out a brother/sister author; I don’t make anything from those links.

This world is full of advertising – everything from clothing to cars to the fencing around sports arenas is littered with ads beckoning us to buy this or try that. I think we all need a little white space for the brain and wallet sometimes. So, my blog is one of those white spaces.

Will I ever monetize? Maybe, but not right now. So a word to all the spammers trying to “help” me make money by using your services: Thank you, but no. No solicitations here, please. This blog is not for sale.

P.S. – If you see an ad below this, it’s WordPress’s doing, not mine. And yes, the irony is obvious to me.