Patreon

[Alicorn]

So, that went well. So now I have a Patreon. All my writings will remain free to read, but you can get extra perks and control over what those writings are if you give me money, and encourage me to write faster, in case that helps. Please feel free to lecture me about reward levels, they are basically totally made up.

[Eva]

Your reward levels sound like they're one-time rewards for recurring payments, unless you're planning to send people a book per month they support you. Also, it would probably be a good idea to at least estimate your usual output per month so that people can budget their patronage.

[Alicorn]

Is there a good way to handle one-time rewards? I figure people can always scale back their pledge level once they have what they want but perhaps that's not a good thing to structure in. Alternately, can anyone think of recurring rewards that don't entail holding back content from people who do not care to fork over money?

[DanielH]

I have only closely examined two other Patreon campaigns, so I am by no means an expert. However, I see four potential things you might want to improve about this:

1. It isn’t necessarily clear what “per chapter or story” means. Does glowfic count at all for this, or does it not count at all because you aren’t the sole author, or does it count halfway because you are half of all the authors for most glowfic you do? Some people might also expect to get charged twice when you publish the last Goldmage chapter, because you complete both a chapter and a story in that case.
2. More clarification about what can go wrong with one-time rewards: At one extreme, you could have somebody pledge $40, and then withdraw the pledge when you mail the books, without you having published a chapter or story in between and thus without them ever paying you a penny. At the other, you could have five people sign up for bossing you to a particular setting, boss you in that direction, and not withdraw their pledge, making that reward level perpetually full but without anything actually happening there. When you published the previous announcement, I was imagining people at that level would get to boss you once per month, but if that was your plan it isn’t clear from the page.
3. The reward levels where you ship books both promise delivery, but that might be more than you expect for international shipment. I don’t know how this is handled for continuing charges, but for Kickstarter the common answer is “Add $10 for shipment outside the US”.
4. I second Eva on the thing about output estimation. If you do that, I’ll probably sign up at some level, but I don’t know what level without that.

EDIT TO ADD: Oh, and it might be nice to have links to your stuff in the description too.

[Alicorn]

I have fixed the easily fixed problems. I may just remove the physical book rewards entirely. People can buy those the regular way.

ETA: Removed physical book rewards. Maybe people can subscribe to Kindle editions as they come out or something? Will contemplate this.

I don't want to be bossed once a month. That is too often if even one person signs up for it. I'll remove that except for the milestone version till I think of something better.

[anthusiasm]

I would like to sign up for this but my ability to do so is contingent me getting some kind of steady source of income and also figuring out how to pay for things online.

If I do end up pledging, because I am terrible trash, I am extremely tempted to request the Incandescent BDSM AU. Would that be an option even though you haven't written anything in it yet?

[Alicorn]

I can't commit to things on behalf of Aestrix, so it would contain no Adarin, but I could do a short about the dom Bell and her Alex or something if you wanted. It would not contain sex scenes, I cannot write publishable sex scenes.

[anthusiasm]

A short about the dom Bell and her Alex would be amazing and everything I want out of life. I am going to figure out what my budget for this thing can be.

[pistachi0n]

Ooh! I want you to keep writing and I'm happy to play a small part in supporting that. I signed up to pledge a dollar per chapter/story.

[Tamien]

Sadly I do not have an income so I cannot funnel money towards you. But, here's the result of me thinking about your Patreon for a while:

One thing I've seen patreons do is have patrons get access to stuff first - donno if this counts as "holding stuff back" if you're only doing it for, say, a day. So like, you could maybe offer up beta reader positions? (Or gamma reader, maybe :P) Or just post stuff to Patreon a bit before anywhere else, to give patrons an early sneak peek.

The "chat with me" stuff you have is another thing that seems common, but I usually see it in the form of "this level of patron gets access to a once-a-month Q/A group chat" or "this level of patron gets access to a weekly livestream of me as I work" rather than one-on-one stuff which could theoretically get pretty time consuming?

Another common thing I see only applies to those who keep a regular update schedule (which you don't), which is like, "in addition to the monday and friday updates, I'll also post an update on wednesdays!" or "i'll write another thousand words per week" or the like. I'm not sure how to translate that to your irregular update schedule - if your writing habits involve anything frequent or regular, even just like, "sit down and try to write for an hour", you could maybe promise to do that more often if a certain amount per month is achieved?

The last thing I can think of that I've seen done is giving patrons access to like, behind-the-scenes stuff like early drafts, concept work, commentary, scraps/snippets, that sort of thing. So if you have anything along those lines that you're okay with people seeing, you could maybe do that. If you didn't have the worldbuilding threads here, access to that sort of thing would be good. Maybe some level grants access to spoilers-on-request?