Worm is an instructive example. It has some of the best speculative fiction worldbuilding, characters and plotting this decade, and it&#x27;s amazing that somebody doing this in their spare time while having to work for a living could keep up that pace of writing for a couple of years. But it also suffers badly from the lack of professional editing and could do with major tightening up.<p>It&#x27;s also not someone just doing it as a hobby, but someone really trying to make a living as an author. And it&#x27;s not at all clear that it&#x27;s been very successful. The $2200&#x2F;month from Patreon is still a fairly pitiful wage for such highly creative work. And I think it&#x27;s pretty sad if we end up with a world where that&#x27;s how things work.<p>(I wrote a bit more on both the merits of Worm as a piece of fiction and on the business model last year here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snellman.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014-05-24-book-review-worm.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snellman.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014-05-24-book-review...</a> . It&#x27;s interesting to note that the Patreon campaign has not really made that much progress in 15 months, it was $1200&#x2F;month then).