Just to be clear, I’m not (yet) hurting for money, and there are certainly billions of people actually in need of charity. I’m only posting this as an author whose work you (the member or visitor) might have benefited from on occasion. 
I’ve been writing Christian apologetics (and some other evangelism) for almost 20 years, probably nearing 20 thousand pages of work by now, including several book-length studies (with more on the way, God willing and the creek don’t rise), plus one novel. Aside from the novel (many more copies of which I’ve given away than ever sold), I have always made that material available for free, and I hope to always be able to continue doing that.
But, if it happened that anyone wanted to thank me for my work by dropping me a tip in the jar, so to speak, I wouldn’t complain about that either. 
Since, as a publisher, I’m a seller on Amazon, I hereby give myself full permission 
to add some “independent seller” listings on my novel’s page which are NOT for buying copies of the novel.
Anyone wanting to tip me for work I’ve done in the past or the present (or the future) has an option of two different kinds of “tip jar”, both of which can be found here at Amazon.
There’s a $5 tip and a $10 tip, but because of the way Amazon works they’re listed as $1 and $6 + $3.99 freight. Amazon keeps a large hunk of either of those, so I’ll see only $2.50 and $6.75 of any single tip – but on the other hand my novel’s sales rank will notch up a bit, so that’s nice. (Amazon forces all sellers to charge at least $3.99 worth of ‘freight’.)
Note: YOU WOULD NOT BE BUYING A COPY OF ANYTHING! No book will ship. I mean, you can buy a hard copy of the novel, too, while you’re there, but those are other buttons from other sellers (including Amazon itself). I’m reasonably sure some of those sellers are lacing my book’s pages with cocaine or something, because there is no way anyone can be legitimately buying a copy of my novel for $90 + shipping. But anyway, these tip jars don’t buy a physical book.
If you have liked an article I’ve written (here or at the Cadre perhaps), buy a $1 tip (which plus freight will be $4.99); if you’ve gotten a free book (CoJ or SttH), you can buy a $6 tip (which plus freight will be $9.99). If for some reason you want to buy multiples of a tip (e.g. you’ve received a free copy of CoJ and SttH, or you want to tip for appreciation of multiple articles), just tell Amazon you want more than one ‘unit’ when you check out (or go back to adjust your 1-click order if that’s what you want). I may or may not get a higher percentage of the tip that way, I don’t know – I can’t test it because Amazon doesn’t let sellers even start to buy their own things.
As I just indicated, this is partly for testing purposes, to see if the system works at all. I’ll accept any actual tips, too. But if you want you can just start the process and try to buy multiple units of an item and see what Amazon says its going to charge, and then report back without finishing the buy. That would be helpful, too. Keep in mind that if the system works, this could be a nice way of setting up tips for other major contributors here, too, like Sobornost’s historical research!
Pursuant to all this, I’m currently appending short paragraphs to my SttH pages and to most (not all) of my Exegetical Compilation pages, alerting readers that y’all can tip me if you want. But if you don’t or can’t, don’t worry, it’s no big deal. I’m just making the option available. 
If anyone has advice on better ways to accept tips, you can suggest them below. Amazon eats a lot of the tip, but most people have an Amazon account now, and after all it does help my book sale ranking (even though I’m not actually selling books this way).
(Incidentally, this whole thing is actually a roundabout experiment to see if I can haxor a way for customers of our family business to pay us with a credit card through Amazon. The request doesn’t happen often enough for us to justify having a credit card processing thingy, and giving out a card’s number on the phone would be UTTERLY CRAPPY security. But if I can pick up a little compensation while ginning up a test for doing it this way, yo! 
)
