Patreon Plans for 2023

[jimhines]

I’ve had a Patreon for a couple of years now. I’ve never really done much with it — people suggested I set something up, and a small group has chipped in each month to help support me and my writing. (And I’m very grateful to those people!)

Much as I’d love to just write and never have to think about money, this past year has convinced me to try something new. One of the deciding factors was paying my older kid’s tuition bill this morning.

So I’ve been talking to folks and studying what other authors have been doing in terms of offering rewards to supporters. Here’s my tentative plan:

• Goblin Corps: For $1 a month (or more), you’ll get to read a short story each month. These will be mostly reprints, because I’m not fast or prolific enough to do a new story every month in addition to everything else. Stories will be posted on Patreon to read, and will include some sort of introduction or commentary.


• Space Janitors: For $3 a month, you’ll also get your very own ebook of that month’s short story in .epub and .pdf formats.


• Libriomancers: For $5 a month, you also get a monthly sneak peek and progress report about whatever I’m working on. These will mostly be snippets and commentary on books-in-progress.


• Team Princess: For $10 a month and up, you get all the other rewards, and once per quarter I’ll mail you a book. It probably won’t be one of mine — it’ll be something I’ve read and enjoyed and want to share. I’ll throw in a bit of swag, too: a signed bookmark, a Smudge sticker, a goblin temporary tattoo…who knows! (Unfortunately, the economics don’t work for me to do this for non-U.S. supporters. For those people, I’ll send you a recommended e-book instead of a print copy.)

I may add additional support levels as I go. Possible rewards could be anything from short story or novel chapter critiques to video chats to Tuckerizations (your name as a character in a future book or story) to live online readings.

But I want to make sure I can fulfill what I’m promising, which means not overcommitting myself up front.

So…what do folks think? Any warnings or suggestions from more experienced (or just plain smarter) people before I jump ahead with this?

Comments

[reedrover]

As Jazzfish said, above, committing to mailing physical anything every quarter could get costly and time-consuming. I assume you’d be using Media Mail for the USA, but even so. You do have a day job and a teenager at home, so possibly you might want to change that to “at least twice yearly” or some other flexible format that better fits your life. And consider the money for the time trade off - are you selling yourself too cheaply? You could also split it and have a bibliovore tier ($15) and a swag tier ($7) for stickers and bookmarks to see if you could push some of the $5 people to move upwards.

Other folks have already mentioned Seanan’s very successful Patreon. If you are conversational friends with her, I recommend reaching out to ask how it has gone. Relevant to the concern about your time and money, it’s worth noting that Seanan’s threshold for mailing anything physical is $25 and she capped the number of subscribers to that tier.

Something else you could do to tweak your rewards could be an “in person” type of reward, where the stalwart Con-going Patreon people get first invitation to an informal round table chat at every Con that you attend, not to be redeemed more than X times a year.