Pondering the patreon setup once more (Patreon)

tl; dr - Effective immediately, I'm going to enable annual billing, at the maximum possible (which imho is still too low...) discount. Please be aware that I'm not making set-in-stone commitments further out than the next month. I'm also considering offering draft chapter access to anyone who's been subscribed for 4+ months, and any thoughts or opinions are welcomed. (But please read the full post first...)

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I have, as happens once every few months, been thinking about patreon value for money again. (This time brought on by the way patreon counts patrons, and the fact that now that April has arrived, I'm retroactively not going to have hit 200 patrons in March.) I make no secret how much I dislike straightforward advanced chapter setups, because of the way they effectively punish people for subscribing, and thus there needs to be extra perks or additional benefits for staying subscribed.

The last time it came up, there were three options I considered:

Annual billing

Using the patreon functionality to let people get a reduced rate by paying annually instead of monthly.

Pros:
- Discount for long-term subscribers
- Sort of solves the punishment for subscribing for short stories, but not for long ones.
- Can be trivially ignored by anyone who isn't interested
cons:
- Not much of a discount (patreon limits it to two months free per year, iirc.)
- It fails my commitment rules. I always ensure I have enough drafted chapters ready for everything I've committed to before a new month begins, with the intention of pausing billing should I ever lag behind. I have nowhere near enough drafted chapters for a full year.
- My short stories aren't a year long. What people sign up for wouldn't be what they're getting by the end of any billing period.

Some of that can be mitigated by making clear that the schedule for the current month is only for the current month, and that there are no longer term commitments. (Although something really bad would need to happen to me to drop me below 2 chapters per week.)

Manual price reduction for long-term subscribers

It's possible to orchestrate a larger discount manually. Patreon doesn't let you directly reduce the price of a tier that has subscribers, but in the past, I've given a couple of weeks advanced warning of tier changes, letting subscribers shift down a tier, then obsoleting those tiers, replacing the benefits with those of a higher tier, and creating new tiers to replace the old ones.

Pros:
- Larger discount for long-term subscribers.
Cons:
- If I did it regularly, I'd end up with unwieldy numbers of tiers.
- It's a lot of manual work, having to go over old posts to add the new tiers to them.
- Patrons who don't pay attention and react quickly enough end up missing out.
- The timing window for setting up the switchover has been made more complicated by the way people are no longer billed on the first of each month. Some subscribers would end up temporarily losing benefits if they happened to sign up at the wrong time.

Patreon exclusive chapters

Kinda an obvious one: post things that aren't just in advance, but that will never be made public. This is what I've been trying to do with the third post of the week, but it didn't really work out. Unborn Hero turned into a serious story, and grew longer than expected, so I didn't stick to my original plan of finishing the entire thing here before posting on royal road. Short stories that do actually end up short simply aren't very popular with patrons, (which isn't a surprise. I tend to not read extra short stories from other authors I patreon, either...) so I want to post on royal road simply to get some reader engagement. Extra side stories for major stories are okay, but their content ends up restricted because they need to account for people reading the story without them, so you end up with filler like unbound soul mating season...

Pros:
- Doesn't result in punishment for subscribing
Cons:
- Eats into my regular chapter writing time (I could do 3x unborn hero chapters instead of 2x unborn hero and one side story)
- Such stories can't include important plot elements.
- Unfair to long-term subscribers, since new subscribers can pop in and get everything in one go. (I suppose I could start deleting the old stuff, but I don't really want to do that either.)

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So three options, all quite badly flawed. What other options could there be?

Higher patreon posting rate:

A slight modification of the above, I could do 3x unborn hero here while maintaining 2x on royal road.

Pros:
- An extra benefit for subscribing
- Patrons joining for a specific story would prefer it over getting unrelated short stories or filler-like side stories.
Cons:
- Makes the punishment for cancelling far far worse.
- Someone joining later on in the story gets all the extra chapters, which is even more unfair for long-term subscribers.

Lifetime subscription

Not something offered through patreon, but could be done via a new patreon tier + discord role, or direct paypal or something.

Pros:
- No penalties for subscribing. The whole have-to-keep-paying-to-keep-reading issue never arises.
- Infinite discount for long-term subscribers
Cons:
- Extra management for me, since it's not directly supported by patreon.
- Commitment issues again. Could I reasonably price it at 10x the apprentice mage tier if I don't expect a story to last the year? (Somewhat mitigated by the way people could choose to go the regular monthly route, I guess...)

Draft chapter access

Something I toy with from time to time is releasing my draft chapters. At the time of writing, I have unborn hero to chapter 55, murder-hobo-damien to part 5, and the first chapters of three new stories sitting on my hard drive, and it wouldn't take much effort to post them. I'm reluctant to, because they're unedited and subject to change (not just in terms of grammar fixes, but the addition or removal of major plot points...) I toyed with making it a perk of the soul mage tier, but decided against that; that main purpose of that tier is for people who want all my e-books but don't want to take them one-by-one from Amazon, so I don't expect people to subscribe to it long term. Adding unedited chapters to it would not only be a kick in the face of the apprentice mage tier, which is advertised as having all advanced chapters, but also a kick in the face of new soul mages, who would be expected to pay more to get lower quality content. (In reality, if I was going to do that, I'd certainly do the tier replacement thing at the same time, to make all existing apprentice mages soul mages for the current price, but that would be small comfort for new subscribers.)

Another way of handling it would be as a perk not for higher tiers, but for longer term subscribers. So anyone who has been a subscriber for x months can ping me for a discord role to get access to them, but anyone who doesn't want them can continue ignoring them. That's fairer, probably, but I'm not really sure it solves the punishing subscribers issue. If anything, reading ahead could make it worse.

Pros:
- Patrons get to actually influence story direction (Normally, by the time I post a chapter, there's so much later stuff already written that I'm loath to make major changes.)
- Can be completely opt-in, and ignored by anyone who isn't interested
- A 'reward' for long-term subscribing, rather than a punishment.
Cons:
- Not much of a reward, given the lower quality content.
- Could get confusing to readers if I shuffle plot points around.
- No fixed release schedule or commitments. Patrons could end up getting invested in the start of a story I never finish, or go weeks without getting anything.