Hey gang, sorry it’s been radio silent around here for a while, but ye olde brain chemistry had been pretty out of whack and I’ve been struggling to get anything accomplished. But today was a good day, and it’s looking like it might be a good week. Or at least a damned interesting one. I’m being vague, I know, but all will be revealed in the fullness of time, I promise.
But let’s give you an update on Patreon, and what I’m looking at doing starting next month. A week or so ago, Patreon announced that they were changing their fee structure to let the creators keep a larger chunk of their pledges. Great, right?
Wrong.
While we, the creators, will see reduced fees under their new structure, we’re seeing that reduction on the backs of you, our patrons. Whereas in the past, all processing fees and stuff was taken out of my chunk of money before it was sent to me each month, now those fees will be tacked on to your pledges before they are sent to me. So if you are a $1/month patron, it’s now going to cost you $1.38 or so each month to support me. Which sucks. Especially for the ten or so of my $1 patrons who support a bunch of other artists. I had one friend tell me that these changes would add $40 to her monthly pledge budget overall. Because even though Patreon is only getting tagged once for processing the credit cards of patrons, they are tacking the service charge on to every pledge. We call that profit. And shitty.
So while I have no plans to leave Patreon, I plan to change the way that I address Patreon.
Starting January 1, everything that is available on the $1 patron tier will also be available here, on this website, one week later. I’ll find a place to stick a tip jar somewhere in the sidebar of the page, so if you want to drop a buck or two in there every once in a while, you can. But I don’t want my patrons feeling screwed in any way, so if supporting me happens at the expense of dropping another creator, please – drop me first. It’s not that I don’t need the money. I do. But I’ve been selling pretty well the past few months, and I have a couple of things in the hopper that may turn out to be legitimate Big Deals, so I can handle losing a few patrons. Also, a couple of my patrons have either increased their pledges to cover the loss of patrons, or they’ve offered to pay for other people’s pledges. So neither of us is going to lose anything in the long run. I’ll still get the same money, and you’ll still be able to get the same content, just with a slight delay.
Now if you want to continue to support my Patreon, at any level, I will still appreciate the hell out of you. I just don’t want people to feel guilty if they drop me, or to feel like they have to choose between supporting me or another creator.
I will also likely be starting up a subscription service over at Gumroad once they get all their bandwidth sorted. They’ve been a touch overwhelmed the last few days as people seek out alternatives to Patreon.
In other news, it’s probably too late to get autographed books delivered for Christmas, but I do still have a few things in my Inventory Reduction Sale if you want to get some signed stuff before the end of the year. Anything I still have after Christmas will be donated to a local shelter for LGBTQ youth.
And you should all watch ABC this Friday at 11AM. Watch carefully, there may something really cool happening. 🙂
You may want to look into this again. I was reading about how they cancelled this plan (probably due to everyone complaining about it being an awful plan).