Some final tweaks to Patreon rewards before we go live... (Patreon)

I want to start this message by saying: If you're reading this, thanks again for backing my Patreon! It's been so heart-warming and encouraging to see folks who I've known for decades pitch into this thing. It really feels like I can make my online work into something that's sustainable for the long term. So, thank you!

I hope you've enjoyed all the stuff I've put onto Patreon so far. One thing to note: As of right now, nobody has been charged for my Patreon yet. The first time that'll happen is next week, on the first of every month!

In anticipation of this momentous occasion, I've been looking at a lot of the feedback on my page in the past couple weeks and I've decided to make some tweaks to the rewards. I'm letting you know now to give you ample time to change your reward tier (or cancel altogether). 

I've summarized the changes in the video above or you can read about them below:

All tiers: I'm removing the "Access to Community Chat group" option for now. I initially thought this would be a low-impact way to create a community but I realized that a) there's already a pretty great community going on in the Patreon comments for my posts, and b) it takes a lot of work to get an online slack/discord community up and running, and I'm not sure if I should commit the time to doing that, especially when I could be making other stuff for you to enjoy. 

However, I'm now ADDING a new reward to all tiers: Early/exclusive access to bonus Patreon content. I now believe it's possible that I'll be able to post either early access content or bonus content (e.g. Batman trailer commentary) with some regularity. So that's where I'm going to put my time instead. 

$10/month tier: No changes except to say that the bonus audio podcast feed will stay at $10. This audio feed will likely contain either early access to stuff I'm planning to publish elsewhere, or stuff created just for this tier. At this point, I'm planning to invest a bit of time and effort into this and I'm so grateful that many of you have chosen to back at this level or higher. I've renamed this tier to "Bonus podcast feed with early access to episodes and other experiments" to better reflect what is being offered.

As always, things may change over time. This isn't an exact science. But I'm grateful to all of you for being so supportive of me as I figure all this out.

Finally, I'm setting some dates for my first Patreon hangouts:

$10+/month Patrons: Let's plan to have our first monthly hangout on Saturday, September 12, 8am Pacific. I will post an update here again when we get closer to the date. I'm going to try experimenting with a new live streaming platform, Crowdcast, so I'm excited to see what kind of interaction that will allow! 

$20+/month Patrons: This is VERY tentative (so don't even put it down on the calendar for now) but let's plan to do a movie watch-along on Saturday, September 26, at 8am Pacific. More details to come.

That's all for now. Thanks again!