Monetizing My Cancer (or Not)

I'm in kind of a difficult place today with the blog. 

The ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) conference starts in about two weeks (it runs May 30 to June 3). They still haven't released their abstracts -- the summaries of the presentations at the conference. If you've been reading the blog for a while, you know that I always go through the abstracts for Follicular Lymphoma research and describe some of the ones that seem interesting or important to me. I always look forward to that.

But that usually means the Lymphoma World is kind of quiet for a weeks before the ASCO conference, and no one is sharing any new research since they will be presenting it at the conference, or at the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma that takes place in late June every year in Switzerland. 

I don't like to go more than about 5 days between posts. It's been a week now, and I was hoping to start sharing some ASCO abstracts. But they still aren't available.

And there are a few other complications. First, I'm going to be traveling for a while, starting very soon, so I might not be able to share the abstracts as they come out. I was hoping to write up a few posts for the blog and have them get published automatically while I'm away.

The second complication: for one of the abstracts I want to share, I am one of the co-authors! My first ASCO presentation! I won't actually be at the conference, but I'm one of many people who contributed to the research. That's a nice little teaser for you. I hope to be able to share it with you soon.

So with no interesting FL research to write about, I thought I'd share a fun experience I had a few weeks ago.

I was asked to speak to a group of university students about writing online. (I do this a lot already. For those of you who don't know, I am a university professor, and I teach writing classes.)

I talked to them about content writing -- the short pieces I have done for Blood-Cancer.com, Lymphoma News Today, The Mighty, and a bunch of other sites. The students were very interested in writing for a living, and they had lots of questions.

I also talked to them about the blog, how it started, and how I write posts, how I do research, etc. I  encouraged them to do this kind of "self-sponsored" writing -- blogs, Substacks, Medium accounts, that kind of thing, where the writer is in charge of everything, from the writing to the editing. The writer gets all the credit, and has to deal with any problems. It's a great way to get experience as a writer.

One of the students asked if I made any money from the blog. I told them that I do not, at least not directly. The blog has led to a bunch of other opportunities that I have been paid for, but the blog itself is free and always will be. I told them that if they want to create their own blog, it's certainly possible to make money from it, through advertising, sponsorships, sites like Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee. But I don't do any of those things. And that's true for lots of reasons. I don't like the idea of having so little control over which advertisers show up on the blog. And I don't like the idea of feeling pressure to "provide value" for subscribers. And I like being independent and saying whatever I want. 

When I told them that the blog has had over 1.3 million page views, they decided that it was ridiculous that I wasn't getting rich from the blog. (To be clear, they have a very unrealistic sense of how much money someone could make off of a blog.) 

But from there, the conversation turned from writing to merchandising, and they started to generate ideas for how I could start to sell Lympho Bob branded items on the website -- t-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, water bottles, stickers and magnets, bobble heads, aprons, even socks with my face printed on them. I thought it was very funny, but some of them were very serious about it all. 

Just so we're clear about this: I have no plans to create any merchandise. I have no problem with other patients making money off their advocacy, but it's just not my thing. 

I think there's a real temptation these days to try to make money off of everything. I hear it a lot -- any time someone describes a hobby that's even a little bit creative, people ask them if their creative output is for sale. Side gigs are great, but maybe sometimes people want to be creative because it's just a fun thing to do. And maybe sometimes people want to share what they do for free, because they think it might make the world a tiny bit better for someone. I do some furniture repair and refinishing on the side, fixing up items that people put out with their trash. I fix them and give them away to people who need furniture but can't afford to buy new stuff. It makes me happy. I don't need to get paid for it. 

I feel the same way about the blog. Doing it makes me happy. And people tell me it helps them. That's enough for me.

So my students will be disappointed at my lack of capitalist instincts. And if you see a Lympho Bob t-shirt for sale somewhere, buy it if you want, but know that it's not from me. And you should also know that I think it's weird that you want to wear a t-shirt with someone's name on it just because you both have the same kind of cancer. 

I hope I'll have an ASCO abstract or two for you soon.

Thanks for reading.