Thursday, April 6, 2017

Patreon

Okay, I got a bunch of responses to my question about a Patreon last month, mostly in e-mail, and all of them were positive. So I've set up a Patreon page, yay. :)

Now that I've poked with the system a bit and seen how things actually work, I've made some changes in how I've set it up, versus what I came up with when I was thinking with my keyboard before.

First, I've set it up for a monthly donation, rather than per work. I originally wanted it to be per work, so if I missed a month (which I've only done twice in the eight years [wow, eight years, really?!?] that I've been doing the anthology listings) it wouldn't be a huge deal and no one would get charged. But Patreon won't let you do a "paid" post that only charges a subset of your patrons -- I don't know why not, but there you go.

So, I want to offer an option to get my whole list (which means all the anthologies I know about at the time, rather than just the two months' worth I post here) as a premium reward. But there's no way to only charge the $5/month people for that one, while only charging the $1-3/month people for the shorter listing. If I posted them both, it'd charge everyone twice a month, and that wouldn't work. Charging everyone once a month seems to be the way to go; I'll do my best to maintain my low rate of missed months.

Also, I originally thought about doing PDFs of the listing to e-mail people, as a sort of slightly fancier way of distributing things. But half the usefulness of the listings, now that I've thought more about it, comes from the links to the editor/publishers' web sites. They very often have more info than I include in the listings, and I always recommend a writer click through and check out the site before submitting something. That's tough to do from a PDF. Scratch that idea.

So I'll be posting the listings to my Patreon page, and patrons will get an automatic e-mail.

If you use the listings, if you find them helpful, any support would be appreciated. If you can't afford to contribute right now, that's fine; I totally get that times are tough for a lot of people. And I'll still be posting the listings here; I'm not cutting off anyone who can't afford to support my Patreon.

Here we go -- let's see how this works. :)

Thanks!

Angie

4 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

good luck. I'll be interested in seeing how it works out. Due to having to replace our entire air conditioning unit we are tightening our belts here. And of course I immediately see all kinds of new books I really need.

Angie said...

Charles -- thanks. :) And yeah, as soon as money gets tight, that's when all the shiny things appear.... [sigh]

Angie

Suzan Harden said...

It's interesting to watch new promotion ideas. Tobias Buckell had an analysis of how Patreon worked for him. Maybe in a few months you can talk about how it worked for you? Break a leg!

Angie said...

I saw that, and was thinking of doing something similar. In fact, I'll probably post something in the next day or two -- I spent all morning putting up listings on Patreon for $5 and $3 patrons, and definitely have a word or two to say about that process. o_O And yeah, I'll probably talk about how it's going in six months or a year.

Angie