Patron Hunt

Jamie Winters is not actually a cat. (Shocking, I know.) Jamie Winters is a co-writing team of two married people. They were originally both trying to start their own writing careers, but a few books in, it became painfully obvious just how often they dabbled, helped write, edit, and brainstorm the others work. It started getting to be tricky to decide when they would put two names on a book cover instead of one, so they decided they would just come up with one pen name and share their career. After going over a few different pen names, they settled on Jamie Winters. I asked my spouse something about which gender Jamie Winters should go by (they chose a gender-neutral name on purpose), and they got stumped. Jamie Winters is a cat, I eventually declared with a laugh. Just a cat. I meant it as a joke, but it ended up sticking. And so thatCatAuthor was born. In May of 2018, they released the first Jamie Winters book: im fine., a collection of haiku focusing on what its like to live with mental illness. And they kept releasing books until they had managed to release six other books in addition to im fine., which is where they find themselves today. But now, they’re finding themselves at a bit of a crossroads. The thing is, to make decent money as a writer, there are certain rules that help a writer achieve success. For example, writing in certain popular genres and sticking to that genre, releasing somewhere between once every month to once every three months, and also creating series to help funnel readers from one book to another. This ends up leading to a very particular type of book and reading experience, one which they certainly enjoy from time to time, but find stifling when considering it might be the only type of writing they do. Basically, the type of writing that sells isn’t the type of writing they do. So far, they’ve released 5 poetry books, all of which they’re very proud of… But poetry doesn’t bring in much money. They’d love to create an interconnected world of superheroes through comic books… But comic books take forever to create. They’d love to experiment with ways to combine their music, writing, and visual art into one story… But experimenting doesn’t guarantee the bills will be paid. They didn’t become artists because they wanted to make money. They became artists because they have deep, powerful inner messages that are begging to be shared. They became artists because they can see a brighter, more hopeful world, and they want to work towards sharing that vision to help create it. They would still like to devote most of their time to these stories and messages, whether that’s through writing, music, painting, or what-have-you. Even if it’s not the writing that gets devoured ravenously enough to bring in the dough. They hope that their art will slowly gain a following as more and more people start hearing their messages, but “someday” doesn’t give them the space and safety to create these important messages now, when the world needs them.

You might also like

Goddess Hedone

DETROITography

David C Vorhees