A Heartfelt Apology and More Patreon Changes. (Patreon)

I've been very hesitant to talk about this for a while but this post is going to talk about my patreon, how I do things and some more changes. The last time I made some changes to my patreon people were very supportive and understood that in order to make things work and to make a living I had to cut back a little and cap off requests and other aspects. 

I don't want to come across as ungrateful to any of the people that enable me to do this full time, which is every single one of my patrons at every tier and I can never express fully how much the support means to me, but I don't know if the way I do things works. 

Right now the reward tiers are set up in the same rough kind of way as when I started but things have changed quite a lot since then, I no longer put out content as quickly as I once did and everything is more detailed and complicated, not to mention more and more people want me to make custom maps and tokens than ever before. This means some of my patrons have been waiting a very long time for requests and I feel incredibly guilty and upset that I have in some ways lied about how long it would take in order to entice them into becoming patrons so that I can keep up a consistent growth. Growth month after month is important because it means I can have a steady and increasing regular paycheck to pay for my daily life, it's the dream of any artist to be able to have a regular income rather than ups and downs from commissions and that something I've pursued to a fault as well. 

In addition to that my personality is not very capable of dealing with the increase in attention, I don't post as often as I should about projects, work, updates delays etc. I am very much a hermit and one that is very socially anxious about things sometimes and one that is terrible at staying in contact and aweful at the whole social media thing and marketing myself. 

This is my way of explaining the situation and apologizing to anyone that feels annoyed, upset or disappointed about requests. I know that if I needed or wanted a map or token for game/book/setting and it took 6 months or more from an artist I really liked it would be a pretty big letdown, especially if I didn't have any updates as to why.  

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So!

What can I do about it in the future?

Starting immediately I will be capping $4, $6 and $12 tiers. This means that no one can support me at a higher tier and make a new request. My patreon will bascily stop growing for a little while until I can catch up and fulfill requests. All current patrons will have their maps done and I won't be doing anything apart from patron maps until the backlog is cleared.

After that I will have to look at ways to make it easier for myself on patreon and grow and attract new patrons. 

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I genuinely had the very best of intentions when I started my patreon and again I’m very sorry to anyone that feels let down by the progress of requests. I always wanted my maps to be free, and to be used by as many people as possible. But in order to grow I had to gain support in other ways. Most of my mapmaking peers have a different way of structuring their patreon accounts and after a year and abit of doing this I can now see why. I hate locking things behind certain tiers but honestly it seems to work. I don't know what I will do yet but in order to stop feeling overwhelmed, I am going to have to think of something. 

This is something I am very happy to talk to people about, if you have any ideas about how I might restructure things then please let me know, on the discord server or elsewhere. 

I would like to end this post by thanking everyone that has stuck with me for so long and for those people that are recently supporting me, my patreon and your support is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I cannot thank you guys enough. I might not always keep you updated but I genuinely love and respect everyone for enabling me to make maps for a living. 

All my love, 

Caeora