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Update: Why A New Project? (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-24 20:26:19
Imported:
2024-03

Content

Hey folks,

QTNW chapter should be out tonight, but I wanted to take a few minutes to address some of the comments/questions over on the Poll so that my thoughts aren't rattling around in my head. Not everyone is caught up on the 'Lore' of the Patreon, so I'll do a quick history...

I started the Patreon on my return to Erotica, taking it seriously starting in August 2022. I had left my job in Education at a private school at the end of the school year (June) due to issues with the administration (lying, doing shady stuff, school going downhill) - the main problem person ended up getting fired a year later. The education sector, especially when you aren't a Teacher, pays pretty poorly so even though I loved the job I couldn't realistically go find the same one somewhere else. I decided to return to Erotica while also starting up a freelance Copyediting business. Over the next year things boomed, and this Patreon changed my life, and through 2023 I made the transition to almost full-time on the Patreon and only taking editing jobs that I really like (other people's fiction). I am now a full-time author thanks to this community, and I am SO DAMN THANKFUL for that.

The issue now is that I've run up against something of a ceiling. Throughout the length of the Patreon I have never had a month where I go 'down' in members/income, even if the growth was only $30 more than the last month. Since the start of 2024 I've had a couple of things going on:

  • AMA came to a natural conclusion for Arc 1, and I needed time to plan out Arc 2. This led to some folks leaving the Patreon, saying they'd be back when AMA came back.

  • The OFG Patron, who has been AMAZING for the last year and a half, had to step away. He's invested a lot into the story over time and I can't hold anything against him, but that was a large chunk of income to lose monthly.

  • I haven't had the time to get old stories/early parts of series edited to facilitate posting them to new places (example - getting Font of Fertility onto StoriesOnline), so I haven't had new places to grow and attract new members.

Lack of Growth, and the attrition that comes with subscriptions, means that I'm Stressed Out. This is looking like it will be the first month ever that my income goes down instead of up from the Patreon. I never want people to feel bad about only subscribing for a month or two or taking some time away for their own financial needs, but in aggregate it starts to feel rough when I get the notifications.

Why I Can't Just Write More FoF/QTNW

This is one of the big things that folks have been saying lately (and over time), though you can replace FoF/QTNW for the other series as well.

The answer has two parts. One is creative and the other is business.

Creative: I have a bullet point list 5 pages long of different story ideas. The ones you see on the Poll are just the highlights that have been sticking in my head for a few months now. I love all my other ongoing stories, and have deep plans for all of them - sometimes I get comments here, through email, or on other sites that I'm 'Getting Tired of' or 'Abandoning' them. That's just not true, and I don't know why people think that way. As with AMA, I'll make it clear if I'm taking a hiatus from one of my original stories. Commission works (like Unexpected Affection) are different and I'll talk about them below. Suffice it to say that creatively, sometimes I have TOO MANY STORIES in my head and I need to get one out rather than just have it swimming around in there clogging up my creative brain power and distracting me.

Business: This Patreon is my career, and that's a scary thing to say. It's entirely on me to create and market the product. That means I need to stay VERY aware of what's going on and how things are working on the sites I'm on.

Outside of posting on new sites, the best way to attract readers to check out my big series is by giving them easy entry points into my body of work. Posting Chapter 25 of FoF or QTNW (or Chapter 339 of AMA) is a form of marketing that only targets one kind of reader - people who like long stories and haven't seen the story yet. There is a whole other LARGE category of readers that see 'Chapter 25' and think 'I'm not clicking that.' They need to be given easier methods to test the waters and trust that trying the larger series is worth it; this is where short series and one-shots come in.

Further, I also can't always go back to Commissions that are abandoned by the original commissioner - Unexpected Affections, Love Cruise, and even OFG, were all sponsored or commissioned. If I start projects for people, and then reward them for leaving by continuing the project un-commissioned or sponsored, there's no point to me taking commissions at all. I AM working on an answer for this, which will be a new limited 'Sponsor' tier - more on this at the end of the month.

Lastly, because this is my career, I can't focus on 'One Great Story' at a time because, to be frank, as soon as that story ends so does my career. Sure, plenty of folks would stick around for what comes next, but the drop in income as people leave at the end of a story would be massively detrimental to my well-being. I already HAVE the evidence of that even just putting AMA on hiatus for a few months, and that was with months of warning. I dread reaching the end of FoF or QTNW, not that they are ending any time soon.

Imposter Syndrome

Every creative has it. I talk with many of the other QT-verse authors, I talk with other Lit authors many of you are fans of, and I can say with certainty that it's true for everyone. Imposter Syndrome is the feeling of I Don't Belong Here when it comes to your skill/work/status.

I am blessed to be someone who can manifest a pretty good amount of self-confidence. I'm also a massive worrier behind the scenes, do a TON of research when starting a new thing so I'm as prepared as I think I reasonably can be, and I get STRESSED OUT when I feel like I'm out of my depth or I'm not meeting my own expectations. I'm also AWFUL about celebrating small things in my life and taking compliments.

Despite being deemed 'Successful' in terms of the Erotica/Patreon thing, I read what other people write and consistently feel like I'm not good enough/a sham. Even with the evidence in front of me, looking at the metrics of this patreon, or follower numbers over on Lit, I frequently feel like my craft isn't THERE yet.

One thing I need more practice on, to help me combat Imposter Syndrome, is to practice Finishing Things. I know I can START stories. I know my writing strengths. But my endings are what I worry about. My instinct, if you can tell, is to want to keep going. Even the one-shot stories, when I end them, I always have more ideas that could happen next. I think the only story I've ever finished and said 'Yes, that is the end' is Technically We're Still Engaged (and the original version).

If I'm going to eventually bring FoF, QTNW, OFG, and even AMA into a landing that is worthy of the stories and you readers, I need to practice ending things. That means ending more small projects, which means working on them to begin with.

In Conclusion

I appreciate that folks here want more of my core big series, and I especially appreciate that not every story is for everyone. OFG has been a particularly contentious story due to the 2nd Person perspective.

But please know that there is (almost) always a reason I'm doing what I'm doing. I think I need to get back on track with Monthly Updates too, it's been a few months since I did a proper one.

Hopefully this week we'll see a new project come to life that folks can enjoy.

Cheers,

~Break.

Comments

Jim lynch

I will never take months off to come back and read the chapters that built up then leave and so on. That feels disingenuous and like I’m cheating the author out of his hard work. Your a great author and if you keep it up then there’s no doubt you will do very well indeed.

George McElhoe

I hung around on Lit for quite some time, then joined a couple of Discord servers (notably BtB and CP), and have been on and off Patreon a couple of times. The times I dropped off were when my bank accounts got hacked -- 5 times last year! Now that I have upped my security game considerably, I'm no longer as paranoid as I was, and I'm enjoying the reading experience immensely. Barring any more bad-guy attacks, I'm here for the long haul. I have a whole raft of educators in my family, all the way from my dad's mom who was a one room elementary teacher in rural Washington, to high school (my dad), junior college (my dad's oldest brother), to an Assistant Professor at a comprehensive university (me). In my case, it was a second career after a 20 year military posting. I well remember growing up in the lower middle class as a TK (Teacher's Kid) where we often did not have a lot of discretionary income, and my mom having to work through the 50s, the 60s, and into the 70s just to have a little extra. My dad did everything from pushing logs around on lumber mill ponds to driving trucks for Texaco during the summers while in school and while teaching in the early years. It wasn't until I was in college and his military reserve retirement kicked in that their income allowed them to relax a bit. I worked summers as a seasonal fireman to finance my social life through college, and it wasn't until I had been in the military for about 5 years that my wife and I had a few dollars extra for vacations and hobbies. I well know the financial challenges associated with military and education careers. Thus, now that I have some extra bucks, I enjoy helping smooth the income flows for authors whose works I enjoy. Thanks to all of you creators who give us "stick and rudder" kinds of people the benefit of your skills.

CA2DC

First off, I thoroughly appreciate your candor. As a newer subscriber, I was unaware of your backstory and I’m glad that you shared it with us. Learning that you were a teacher, makes sense. You have an excellent writing style that comes across as totally natural, though, I’m sure in reality it requires a significant time investment. It’s too bad that America doesn’t value teachers as highly as many other countries, given the awesome responsibility. Be that as it may, the school’s loss is our gain. Given this is your primary livelihood, I understand the stress. And given the newness of this type of Patreon vocation, you’re forced to figure out the revenue models as you go along, mostly through trial and error. I am a bit of a cheapskate, so getting someone like me to subscribe, who doesn’t subscribe to much, is a testament to the quality of your work. Since you’re the only author, I’ve bothered to track down on Patreon, I don’t know what types of revenue models other authors might successfully employ. The alpha and beta releases are a solid idea. I could also see a model similar to what many authors do on Amazon. The first book of their series is free, and the rest of the books in the series you have to pay. Employing a similar model would have the first 10 to 20 chapters available on Lit (enough to get people hooked), with subsequent chapters only available through a paid Patreon subscription. Or maybe quarterly releases on Lit, forcing impatient fans to pay. On another topic, while I’ve enjoyed the character sketches, they aren’t necessarily provocative. An alternative, or supplement I think you should consider are AI photos. I’m stunned with what’s now possible, and I think combining the two could be interesting. Not sure if many erotica authors are doing it yet, but it seems inevitable. Plus, if you create a character’s look initially, fans can then use that baseline to create “fan art” of specific scenes. Here are some Reddit forums which demonstrate what’s possible with AI: r/unstable_diffusion, r/AIpornhub, r/sdnsfw, r/realisticAIporn Thanks again for everything you’re doing and I’m hoping you keep it going for a long, long time. PS - I can’t write worth a damn, but if you ever need story ideas that might work as extended series.