Wanderer's Tales #10 - Money
Welcome to Issue 10 of Wanderer’s Tales. In this issue is Chapter Eight of Shield of the Goddess.
Welcome to Issue 10 of Wanderer’s Tales, the newsletter of Ancient Roads. Here you will find fantasy fiction set in ancient worlds, where music makes magic, and the road ahead is always uncertain. Wanderers welcome.
In this newsletter is Chapter Eight of Shield of the Goddess, the adult fantasy novel I am releasing here as a web serial. This chapter returns to the viewpoint of Jenan, a shepherd boy who dreams of becoming a horse soldier.
Chris Struble
This month I want to talk about money.
In the new chapter, I describe a society where money as we know it does not yet exist. When Jenan’s family arrives in a city for a spring festival, they have to sell their cargo of wool and find Jenan’s sister a place to live and work. To do that they have to make a series of barter trades over several days.
In our world, from the earliest humans, gifts were given to the community in exchange for reputation. This required people living together and remembering the gift. Gift economy was the earliest form of commerce.
Also from the earliest times, people came together at specific places and times of the year for celebrations to exchange goods, stories, and knowledge, or find mates. In such gatherings, most people were strangers who might never see each other again, so a barter economy was needed.
Several early forms of money grew out of measures of weight. The Sumerians had a unit of weight called the shekel which was equal to a little less than half an ounce. A shekel of silver was officially equivalent to a fixed amount of barley, wool, or other commodities. In Egypt, the deben, a unit of weight equal to about an ounce, was used by officials in marketplaces to facilitate barter trade.
Rings and bracelets made of bronze found throughout Bronze Age Europe, like those in the featured image, were very likely used for money.
All those early forms of money existed more than a thousand years before the first minted coins.
Today monetary economies get most of our attention. But barter economies and gift economies still exist, and are even making a comeback.
With that background, I want to talk about how this website fits into these economic categories and how I see it evolving.
When I finished the first version of my book Shield of the Goddess a few years ago, I spent a year marketing it to literary agents who are the gateway to traditional publishers, with no success. Essentially this was my first attempt to sell my writing in the monetary economy.
Ghost, the publishing platform I use, offers a range of options from public to free subscriptions and paid subscriptions.
The Wanderer’s Tales newsletters are public. Chapter One is public. Anyone in the world can read them. The first song of the novel, Song of the Daughter, is also public. Anyone in the world can read the sheet music or listen to it. Anything I release publicly will remain that way.
I see my public content as operating on the gift economy principle. I am making some content public in the hope that readers out there will find my content, and in the further hope that they will like it and become a subscriber. But they can still consume it if they don’t.
All the rest of my content will require a subscription. A free subscription is also a gift but with a different kind of reciprocity. In exchange for the ability to read my work in almost real time, and give me feedback if they want to, my subscribers are giving me access to their inboxes and their precious time. I know that is no small thing.
I haven’t set up a paid subscription yet. But I have an idea how it might work if I do.
I plan to eventually release my books and the sheet music for my songs for sale. It seems fair to move the content for released books and songs on this website behind a paid subscription, probably an annual subscription, based on the sale price of those items.
Not to worry, though. First, there will always be new chapters available by free subscription on this website. If you have already subscribed, you’ll be able to consume all my content for free as it comes out, and for some time afterward. Second, I will give plenty of notice before moving content from free subscription to paid subscription, so you’ll have time to binge read before it goes behind a paid subscription.
A few final pledges related to money. I will never put advertisements on this website, or sell your information. Also, every word you read here is my own writing. I do not use AI for writing and never will, because there is no way to be sure that AI wasn’t trained on content taken from creators without their consent.
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I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, remember you can always visit my Books, Music, and Reviews pages to see the ever growing organized lists of everything I have published here to date.
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See you on the road!
Chris Struble