Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Eliot York and I run Hello Poetry. The website was created in June 2009 as a collection of poems from the so-called "classic" poets. At the time, I couldn't find anywhere to read poetry online that wasn't overflowing with gaudy teeth-whitening and weight-loss advertisements, so I put something together myself.

It has been two years since then, and a lot has changed. I have put 1000s of hours into this site and covered the increasing cost of the service for these years. At this point, I can't carry on this way as it continues to grow. I need support to keep the site going.

Many sites solve this with advertising. I don't want to do that, for several reasons. For one, I've always thought of Hello Poetry more akin to a book than a website. The web is so often frantic and distracting (click here! no, here! here!), whereas Hello Poetry is designed to let you focus. Even more, people rarely click on ads because they're often irrelevant and ugly, so chances are that I'd not only cheapen the experience with advertising, I'd also receive little from it.

This need for support is not new. Last year, I put together some basic publishing tools, allowing writers to easily publish and sell digital books. The idea was simple: writers support Hello Poetry with 30% of their books sales. This has helped, but ultimately book sales have been low. There is more to do here, but I'll leave that for another blog post.

So, here we are. I'm asking the writers that use and love Hello Poetry to support it. The scheme is simple: writers pay $2 per month for a Check-in Card. While you have an active card, you can add as much of your work to Hello Poetry as you like. Everyone gets a Check-in Card free for one month to try Hello Poetry out. Once your work is on Hello Poetry, you have a beautiful format on which to share it, simple tools to receive and respond to feedback, information on what pieces are being read, and other features likes books, messages, groups and collections.

You should know that asking writers to pay was not an obvious choice for me. After all, you're the ones sharing your work, why should you have to pay to do so? Though the more I reflect on it, I'm comfortable with the decision. Chances are, you already pay for other tools for your writing, like pencils and paper, so why not for this? Hello Poetry is a home for your writing (like some kind of omnipresent notebook) and, we hope, a important tool for any writer.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. As always, if you have any questions, please contact me using the comments below.

Eliot