Has Anyone Experimented with Patreon?

I don't consider Patreon well-suited for novelists. Short story writers, maybe, but it means producing a regular amount of stories and giving them to backers (and/or uploading them to your own site) -- so it's good for writers who already use their own space to publish shorts, but not for those who sell shorts to a commercial market.

Patreon is more profitable for artists who can produce in pieces: a song a month, or a comic page a week. It might be well suited to a writer who's posting a novel online a chapter a week, but it does require an inbuilt audience to be effective. Maybe a self-published novelist could share chapters over Patreon of her latest WIP?

Rechan said:

Why?

I understand that posting a story online constitutes "first publication", but that's only if it's publicly accessible. If for instance you post it to a password protected forum (like the forums for critique here on Absolute), it's kosher. If Patreon's content is accessible privately, I would think it would be acceptable.

Click to expand...

You're completely right, if it's locked to backers only then it doesn't breach first pub rights. But if your Patreon backers (presumably a core fanbase) have all already read it, it will cut into your remaining commercial audience.

Also, to build the audience in the first place you'd need to have a lot of content available for free. If you don't already have the audience, that's a lot of content you have to just give away and could be selling.

Patreon still doesn't seem like the right fit for most writers, to me. You'd have to tailor your writing approach towards Patreon. Other available tools, like self-publishing through Amazon or Kickstarting a project, seem like they would better suit most.

IMO the benefit of Patreon for readers is "early access". The short story is finished, it's either being shopped about or it's been accepted but not printed yet - members get the privilege of seeing it first.

Click to expand...

Very true! I'm torn between thinking that's a very cool thing, and cringing at the idea of readers getting to read my earlier versions.

I guess if I was really into a writer's work, I'd enjoy it regardless of any roughness, though.

Rechan said:

I understand that posting a story online constitutes "first publication", but that's only if it's publicly accessible.

Click to expand...

I think you might not understand the concept of first rights. It's only partially a concept of "first".

The reason this is important is because first rights are subjective. It's up to the buying publisher whether those rights have been extinguished or used up. Mostly it comes about because a publisher doesn't want to put out something that, and here's the important part, people have already purchased. Why would they spend money to create cover art, pay the salaries of their editors, copyeditors, marketing team, sales team and distributors if everyone who wants to buy the book/story has ALREADY bought the book/story?

Now, if the story has real legs and could potentially be a big winner, then it doesn't matter whether the book/story has been seen. There are plenty of readers in the world. But not every reader will like every thing, so a publisher is very careful about what books it takes a chance on. They always hope every book they purchase will be "the one." But they aren't. So, every reader lost to a sale is one little ding against the book until the book itself proves it's bigger than a tiny subscriber base.

Will a subscriber system totally ruin the chances to sell the book? Depends entirely on the publisher. If the book later became a hit, would the subscriber service want a cut? Would they sue? Depends entirely on the book and the owner of the subscriber service at that moment. Not now. Some future then.

I personally wouldn't take the risk because my goal is to help my publisher reach the widest possible audience and I don't want to blow that by having a subscriber service have a potential claim on the book. To my thinking, it could make my publisher think twice or cause pain to them at some future time when I hit a bestseller list.

But that's just me...

Cathy C, I entirely agree with everything you've said except for this section

Cathy C said:

If the book later became a hit, would the subscriber service want a cut? Would they sue?

[SNIP]

I personally wouldn't take the risk because my goal is to help my publisher reach the widest possible audience and I don't want to blow that by having a subscriber service have a potential claim on the book.

Click to expand...

Patreon would never try to take a cut of an existing work or sue: their entire service model is designed around providing bonuses to existing projects (WIP art, tutorials, behind the scenes, early access, etc etc) -- they don't claim to own the property and would have no legal leg to stand on here.

I completely agree with your first part about cutting into the potential audience, but your second point seems improbable.

Their terms of service are written with reasonable clarity. Section 14, about intellectual property, claims no ownership of "User Generated Content" and the rest of the terms claim no liability or link to the content they host.

I might be confused, but I think you've misunderstoom EMaree.

Patreon wouldn't need to take any rights at all for subsequent publishers to consider the work having already been published: all they'd need to do is host it on their site.

If people have already had access to it, it could be considered published.

RedWombat has a Patreon account wherin she does not have subscriber goals. She just invites her Patrons to buy her a cup of coffee. You might PM her and ask.

I support people through Patreon and other funding methods (like Twitch subscriptions). These people give me free entertainment on a daily (bi-daily) basis and I feel like the advertising revenue is not enough to pay them back for their hard work.

I wouldn't support a writer on Patreon, nor suggest others to go into it. Unless they can put out a steady, regular stream of work that meets expectations and that person's particular situation calls that they need monetary support to bring their focus onto giving people entertainment--this, of course, given that I'm not already paying for the content.

I've mostly noticed webcomic creators having the most success with it. The most I've seen anyone I personally followed/read get from it is $800 a month, I think, and most range from $80-$300.

I don't think that you have to offer up the actual stories themselves up as rewards if you don't want to. I've seen people offer other things. Bloggers and free-serialists, for instance, offering up ad-free on their websites for subscribers, group chats and video hangouts for subscribers, 'top subscriber's gets to name an extra/bit character', dedications to your name, etc. There are all kinds of different rewards you can offer without offering up the content itself.

Old Hack said:

If people have already had access to it, it could be considered published.

Click to expand...

There has to be some caveats for this though; don't a lot of author's have a beta circle for their works or read them at writer's workshops? If a work is only going out to say, 8 top subscriber's, I would think it would fall into that kind of category, like doling it out to a handful of friends.

Moldy said:

There has to be some caveats for this though; don't a lot of author's have a beta circle for their works or read them at writer's workshops? If a work is only going out to say, 8 top subscriber's, I would think it would fall into that kind of category, like doling it out to a handful of friends.

Click to expand...

If you control who has access to it by only sending it out to people you know, you should be safe.

If you make it available to everyone who wants it then there's a good argument that it's been published.

ULTRAGOTHA said:

RedWombat has a Patreon account wherin she does not have subscriber goals. She just invites her Patrons to buy her a cup of coffee. You might PM her and ask.

Click to expand...

It's true! I was in the enviable position of people saying "I have no room for more art in the house but I would like to give you money." But a deadline, to me, is a source of great stress and gnawing anxiety and letting-everyone-down-heebie-jeebies so I said to my blog readers, "Hey, if you want to give me a dollar, awesome. Or there is the SUPER DUPER AWESOME 2$ level, where you still get nothing, but more of it!"

Setting the dollar amount really low has helped, because I don't feel guilty that people aren't getting value-- I do thirteen to sixteen podcasts a month, plus blog posts, plus occasional free stories, I put out a free text game awhile ago..l figure I'm worth a dollar. And if anybody shows up to yell that they want their money back, I can hand it to them without breaking the bank.

As a business model it works primarily because I already have a super awesome community of listeners and readers and art collectors--I've been blogging for a decade and people know me. It's not a fortune, but it pays for the food and booze for the podcasts and the bandwidth to host them, so I'm pretty happy with it.

Not sure how it would work for people who aren't already heavily involved in making a LOT of free content, though.

What if your top 8 subscribers changes month by month? It's not necessarily going to be the same people all of the time. If it takes you longer than usual to polish something up, does it go to the top 8 or June, or July, or August, or the top 8 across all three months, or those who were top 8 most often?

The people I see making Patreon work for them most are webcomics and podcasters; people who are putting something out regularly anyway. That way readers/listeners can see that you're reliable and provide good content without having to take a risk. Bonuses are usually non-commercial items in the first place, like sketches or out takes. They're the extras on the DVD - meaningless without the original source material.

At the end of the day patreon is also intended as a supplement to an artist's income, along with ad revenue and direct sales. I can't see how a novelist would make good use of it, unless you wrote serial novels and had a history of producing them already in place.

Reviving this thread because I started seeing a discussion today on Rachel Swirsky's Twitter about Patreon counting as first rights (part of the conversation). I didn't see a link but I Googled and found this:

Patreon Policies for SFWA-Qualifying Markets, by Andrea Phillips

which is the manually-gathered (wow, thanks!) responses of a lot of short fiction markets.

The answer on whether Patreon uses up first rights seems to be: it varies by market. Some seem to consider "online anywhere, even locked" as using up first rights (would this include places like AW?), whereas others seem to draw the line at being paid for the piece.

If anyone has more relevant links (or if the Twitter conversation is actually about something else that I'm missing), I'd be interested.

(And mods, if this should be a new thread, feel free to split out.)

That's really interesting SLHuang, thanks for that. The idea of "first rights" seems to vary a lot from publisher to publisher, and on the trade publishing side, from agent to agent... which makes a lot of sense because it's not a strictly defined term.

I've been noticing it a lot around discussions of Wattpad (a locked community to serialise stories and receive feedback, massively popular in YA and romance circles right now) -- Taran Maranthu was recently signed from it by a very well-regarded UK agent, and Janet Reid had a discussion thread about Wattpad in general recently.

First rights are first rights. There's no wiggle-room here: if your work has been published then those first rights have been used up and cannot be reinstated.

However, some publishers and agents recognise that not all publishers are equal, and that some publications are not going to soak up all of a work's potential readership. And so they are happy to ignore it if your work has appeared elsewhere, if they judge that elsewhere as insignificant to their plans.

In other words it's not the rights which we can't define here, it's how some publishing professionals judge those rights.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

Old Hack said:

First rights are first rights. There's no wiggle-room here: if your work has been published then those first rights have been used up and cannot be reinstated.

Click to expand...

Including the locked SYW forums?

Janet Reid recently gave her personal definition of "previously published" as commercially available with an ISBN. She also had some words about first rights that I found very interesting:

One of the HUGE problems with the increased transparency in publishing is that a lot of terms get thrown around by people who really don't understand what they mean. Case in point: "first rights"


There's really no such thing because first needs to describe some form of a publishing agreement. First serial? First electronic? First print?

Click to expand...

Janet's just one source, so your mileage may vary -- I don't follow many agent blogs these days so, honestly, I don't have the most nuanced look at things.

shortstorymachinist said:

Including the locked SYW forums?

Click to expand...

Read EMaree's post directly after yours, particularly the bit I've put into bold:

EMaree said:

Janet Reid recently gave her personal definition of "previously published" as commercially available with an ISBN. She also had some words about first rights that I found very interesting:

One of the HUGE problems with the increased transparency in publishing is that a lot of terms get thrown around by people who really don't understand what they mean. Case in point: "first rights"

There's really no such thing because first needs to describe some form of a publishing agreement. First serial? First electronic? First print?

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

I wouldn't count using SYW as using first rights, for several reasons. Putting work up here in SYW isn't going to use up any sort of first rights in a novel because it's not possible to put a whole novel up there, for example; and it's not being made widely available, it's only readable by our members, and it won't get indexed by Google-bots. I don't know any reputable agents or publishers who would have a problem with you using SYW here, because of the various levels of protection we have in place. However, I have encountered several agents and editors who warn against such things, and guess what? None of them were good at their jobs, or had worked for reputable publishers or agencies.

I have, however, seen people put their work up online for free and have agents reject it because it's already been made available. So that might well discount EMaree's point about work being commercially available.

What we need to take away from this, I think, is that we have to be careful where we put our work. Caution is a good thing.

It seems that Patreon might be more useful to self-publishers, although the people I know use it have already had a sizeable amount of success before Patreon came along, so it was just another potential revenue stream for them.