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