Patreon Follow-Up

I've figured out how I want to schedule anthology posts, juggling posts here along with the various Patreon levels, two of which get posts a week early. I did the April post yesterday and put it up on my Patreon account, for folks getting the regular listing a week early, and folks getting my full listing, which also goes up a week early. Nobody's signed up for those levels yet, but if anyone does, they're there. :)

I have the post for here on the blog ready to go in drafts, and I'll release it on the 15th. Changing the lock on the April Patreon post from $3 to $1 will let those supporters see it. (I did a test, and $1 supporters do get an e-mail when a $3 post has its lock changed, so that works, yay.)

It's interesting (and sometimes frustrating) to actually dive into a completely new system and figure out how it works, what doesn't work the way I thought it would, and what the most efficient workflow will be each month.

One thing I didn't know when I started this is that Patreon won't accept HTML code in its posts. :/ At all. The completely unhelpful Help topic discussing this says it's because they haven't been able to get HTML to work in their mobile apps. Which isn't my problem, and doesn't make me any happier with this.

I hand code my posts here -- I've been online since before HTML was a thing, and while I'm not any kind of a wizard at it, the sort of coding that's useful for a basic blog post is pretty automatic for me -- and I just assumed I could do a copy/paste to put things onto Patreon. Well, not so much. [headdesk]

Patreon has its own system for formatting posts and inserting links, and once you see how it works, it's very easy to use. Which doesn't change the fact that it took me about an hour and a half to convert my post (keeping in mind that I was doing my full file, not just the two months' worth I post each month) and get everything looking more or less the way I wanted. It wasn't hard, (yay, HTML!) there was just a lot of it. :P

Since I'm still posting on my blogs, I can't just convert over to Patreon's system; I have to maintain two formats for the listings. I'm hoping that, now that I've reformatted my whole file, maintaining two differently formatted files in parallel won't be such a hassle. I usually find a few new markets per month, depending on the season, so I won't have to redo the whole thing again. I'll just double format each new entry and insert it into its master file. Hopefully that'll work. [crossed fingers] I keep my files in Word documents, and in the past I've had trouble saving something to Word, then re-opening the file and posting it into a different system. Not often, but occasionally, something will go Sproing! at that point and it's time to start headdesking again. Hopefully that won't happen this time. [more crossed fingers]

After a night's sleep, I'm feeling a bit better about this. I'm sure I'll figure out a decent workflow, although I won't know until next month. We'll see.

I do think my problem is probably particular to me. What I'm putting up on Patreon is pretty unusual; most other creators whose pages I've browsed are offering art, music, video, that sort of thing. The writers are (unlike me) generally focusing on their fiction creation, and they post downloadable files of stories, or short videos, podcasts or blog posts talking about their creating, their experiences, their characters and worlds, answering questions, etc. Also cat pictures. [wry smile] Writing right into the Patreon form isn't difficult; I'm probably one of very few people trying to paste huge swathes of HTMLed text into Patreon, so I doubt anyone's working behind the scenes to make HTML work on that system.

At any rate, it does seem to be working. Onward....

Angie