Subscription (v)
From the janitor at Viet Nam Literature Project
We have posted a Viet Nam letter 12 times each month since February 2022. The total number of letters now approaches 200 overall, concerning 70 different works.
44 readers have subscribed for the email version of each new post. At least 30 of those subscribers have opened each letter on arrival.
Those 30 make up 2 thirds of the readers so far to most posts. I am deeply gratified to have attracted, entertained, and informed their attention.
Subscribers have lent importance and urgency to my work pointing out a literature, in the sense of something you might want to read, that the nation of Viet Nam has caused around the world.
I have written at least 1 of these things every 3 days because an audience of someones will read. 30 is a mid-sized class for a MWF course of lectures, readings, at a university.
This course of lectures has persisted to gain more readers after I first give each one. I post each old letter again and again in turn elsewhere on the 2 days between each new letter.
At least 3 have begun to find their own audience. 81 readers have found their way to the first letter on Familial Properties by historian Nhung Tuyet Tran, 88 to the letter on Fair Use, and 123 to my second letter on novelist B.K. Marshall’s Dawson’s War.
That is, we have drawn 2 busloads of attention to the work of an historian in Canada about Vietnamese women representing themselves across 3 centuries ending 250 years ago.
60 people who are not subscribers have consulted Viet Nam Literature Project’s declaration of policy on the difficult issue of publishing about literary work while respecting the rights of author and publisher.
Nearly 100 non-subscribers have studied our presentation of the late novel of a United States Special Forces officer about personal growth through a theater of battle in Laos that remained secret until this century.
I feel good about the reach of those 3 posts so far, and hopeful that any of the other 200 may too find flight. That is something to show for our reading.
I feel grateful to our subscribers for signing up for the course and drawing these lectures out of me and our books. I recognize warmly the 15 who have not only subscribed but underwritten this work, 4 of them at $50, 6 at $100, and 5 founding members at $250 and $500.
Our annual budget is well under half the $50 thousand which the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America considers a small non-profit. Each gift at every level lifts the work in a way that I can feel, buying books and paying the janitor.
I thank our subscribers, whose attention has brought me and the authors we cover to all our readers. I ask any reader to consider signing up for regular email and perhaps underwriting the work.
