The prevalence of Patreon

Harlequin said:

Characters don't tell me what they want--this is never something I have experienced. Characters do what i want them to do, and i alter their circumstances as appropriate to make sure that happens. Just as an aside.

I will admit, I am skeptical of front loading anything, but either way, my judgment of what my limits will be, are judged on what I've written. I know I can reliably produce a book a year, which is broadly acceptable for trade pub. But I write in fits and bursts, have a LOT of real life commitments re carer duties, and probably only spend about 8 of every 12 months writing (and around 4 days of every week). A patreon with infrequent updates could maybe work for me; a strict monthly schedule never will.

Again, it clearly does work for lots of authors, so if t ultimately works for you, then that's great. As before, though, I'm not really interested in how to make patreon work for me, more trying to assess how much I will miss out on (if anything) by adopting it, and/or whether I can put my sporadic energy into other angles instead.

Click to expand...

Ah, great points. Free time to work on project is extremely important. It is crucial for keeping followers and Patreons as well.

Characters don’t literally tell me what they want, but sometimes I find myself trying to write a particular scene that doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, until I realize what really works for the characters involved.

Sometimes I just say, “the characters told me what they wanted”.

I have a Patreon that doesn't have set rewards. It's set up like a tip jar and there are no guaranteed rewards. I post a few stories and other things sometimes. I've done some bigger rewards, like art cards at the end of the year, and an early copy of my novella. But no one knows what'll happen until it does, as I don't state that people will get a certain thing. It doesn't take all the pressure off, as I don't like that I can't produce content quickly like everyone else, but it does mean I don't owe anyone anything. They know it's a tip jar when they sign up.

I used to have funding goals, but it was clear I wouldn't reach them, so now I just have my first level. That was $10 so that I could pay for my website every month. I currently get $16 a month.

It depends how much you need money. If you're like me, where even a little makes a difference, a tip jar Patreon might be worth it. My other income comes at random times in random amounts, so Patreon guarantees that I'll always have enough to keep my website and email running. It's not the sort of use that'll earn a living wage, as you really need to be able to produce monthly content for that.

I really like Patreon set-ups like yours, Polenth. I'm not in the Patreon-pledging financial league at the moment, but the ones that have tempted me--and which I've bookmarked for the future, are more like that. I'm not really in it for the rewards--I know some people are, but it's not for me--I care more about supporting the art I consume on the regular.

Merch is great if you're at a scale to do merch, but I don't think it's a great place to start, necessarily. I've also seen a lot of Kickstarter projects, particularly for games, get bogged down promising too much in rewards way too early, then spending all their development time on the rewards instead of building, yanno, a functional game that people are gonna want to play.

The functional games tend to do better on Kickstarter, to the point it's become really quite competitive to pitch there.

I'm a newbie writer but I'm hoping that Patreon will help me to get support. The idea is to publish my current story in portions on a social network (Instagram) every week for ±2 pages in an interactive way, so that readers get to vote on 1 of 2 options of what the main character should do next. That way, the majority of readers get to choose how the story ends. If you want to see how the other option of the story would go or if you want early access to the next episode, support me on Patreon.

What do you think about this idea? Do you know anyone who did something like this before?

Filigree said:

I considered joining Patreon as a creator, but I simply don't have the fanbase or productivity to make it worthwhile. It was better for me to focus on existing art clients and a reasonable day job.

Click to expand...

I've seen examples of creators in several different mediums (webcomics/writing/art/podcasts) who jumped onto Patreon expecting the money to just start rolling in, so it's good to temper expectations with the practical realization of what it takes to build and grow an audience.

I'd say most of the people finding success on Patreon are people who had an audience already, and were able to build on that. Mur Lafferty is a good example - she'd been doing podcasts on writing for a good fifteen years and so adding the line 'support the podcast on Patreon' met a lot of willing ears. I believe that Ditch Diggers the podcast she does with Matt Effing Wallace about the practical side of the writing business, uses the Patreon money to get the podcast transcribed and otherwise support running it.

It's pretty effortless for me to send a dollar a month to 2 or 3 three dozen different creators I like as a token of support. Multiply that by a few hundred, thousand other people doing the same, and it adds up. If you don't have an audience going in, you're not going to get that. You see lots of examples of people going, 'I'm a new creator on Patreon, give me money?' without putting in any of the foundation or infrastructure work that is going to make people want to do that.

Thomas Vail said:

I'd say most of the people finding success on Patreon are people who had an audience already, and were able to build on that.

Click to expand...

This is entirely true. For Patreon to be of value, you need to
1) Have proven you can produce your content, in good quality, regularly,
2) Probably have been going for several years or be lucky enough to tie yourself to someone who's been going for several years, or
3) have very rich and generous friends and family.

A friend who has talent but no evidence of being able to produce didn't get any funding. Friends in my streaming community who've been going for a few months or a year get maybe $10 to $50 a month from a handful of regulars. Those who've been going for years get a few hundred, and I mean $100-$300. Webcomics are usually fairly successful with Patreon, but they need to have built up their audience and proven they can keep at it. Basically, do not expect to get a lot of money from it for a long time. Even when you have an audience, only a small percentage will both want to get the benefits of supporting you and be able to afford a regular payment. Unless you go viral, it's going to take a lot of work.

I think if you're good at the whole social media thing, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc, you can use Patreon to make some money.

My friend is an anime artist and she makes huge money off of Patreon, she doesn't have to work.

Fortz said:

If you were someone with a million Twitter or YouTube followers you could do very well.

Click to expand...

Depends on your demographic of followers. PewDiePie may have 50+ million subscribers, but how many can afford to donate money if he asked them for it?

There are other factors. How many of his subscribers are dead accounts, bot registrations (fanboys creating accounts to support their very favorite personality), people pass away, and the like. I looked him up, he has 67 million subs now (rounded up). Assuming 7 billion people in the world, that's one of every 104.5 people in the world (if my math is right) are subscribed to his channel (7000 ÷ 67).

Do that many people really have time to follow him, have Internet access, and many other factors? Maybe!

I heard someone, on YouTube, note that his success might be attributed to the majority of his fanbase being kids who like his gaming and angst. I have no idea of knowing if this is true or not. If it is, I think this plays into the 80/20 rule, greatly.

This strictly pertains upon fans ability to donate to him, if he asked them to and not his income.

To be honest, I think Patreon works far better for serialized fiction (or, like lizmonster said, shorter work) than it does for novels.

It's a bit easier to reward people and incentivise them to keep funding you when you can break things up into tiers and give people early or exclusive access depending on what they pay.

That way, they're not just paying to fund you purely out of goodwill, but paying to get benefits that no one else does.

I say this as someone who pays for webfiction on both Patreon and another of my favourite sites.

It works xD