Patreon Revamp: New Goals (Patreon)

This was supposed to be a section in my previous Patreon Revamp Masterpost, but that was getting egregiously long, so I decided to split it into another post.

Aside from obviously telling everyone what's coming up, I also wanted to explain some of the reasoning behind those choices, and also disclose their proposed values as, surprising absolutely nobody, they're going up.

I first came up with those goals around 4 years ago, and since then a lot has changed. While my work has improved both in efficiency and quality, the cost of living due to rampant inflation has skyrocketed. 

A lot of Patreon goals involve getting new equipment, hiring people do make things more efficiently (video editors, script writers, beta readers, etc). Meanwhile, aside from maybe replacing some hardware (my mouse is 8-yo and creaky as hell), I don't really have anything to improve my workflow aside from just working less and writing more, which is what I'm proposing with those goals.

Is it kinda stupid to make even more ambitious goals when I haven't hit the old ones yet? Yes, but I can't in good faith leave the old goals up while knowing I won't be able to dedicate extra time to them at their current value. Also, with the recent uptick of popularity in social media, a writer can dream, right?

With that out of the way, let's actually talk about the goals and benefits, right?

- $200: Extra Monthly Poll

Same old, same old. I've been optimizing the hosting and writing of poll results, but even then there's work involved (getting interesting pictures and ideas, consulting patrons for their suggestions, making the banners, actually writing it, editing), so this feels like a good idea for our first goal.

It'll bring more content to everyone with an extra caption or story per month, and more interaction with y'all, which is always good. With the bigger polls, it also means more value to all patrons with the request box and poll suggestions.

- $300: CYOA Stories

This would probably be the biggest jump in the content hosted here. Long stories with multiple chapters where you'll vote on the fate of a myriad of characters, with your decisions echoing through their adventures (and yeah you'll also decide who bones what or who, that's important too).

Like I've mentioned before, this was the original goal of this Patreon before I stumbled into captions, and working on this would be a lot of fun, but it would also bring a lot of new logistical and creative challenges, but with the extra funding, I would be able to make time for that. I'm glad a lot of people seemed interested in that, though, made me extremely excited to reach this goal.

- $450: Extra Side Content

This sounds a bit vague, but hear me out for a second here. It's basically a meme at this point that our polls get ties every time and, as much as it pains me, sometimes I have to be the tiebreaker and pick one of the ideas. But what if I didn't have to?

An extra caption featuring a runner-up from a poll, or a side chapter of the CYOA story featuring that big-eared goblin thief girl that didn't win the vote for new party member, just more fun stuff to fill out those "what could have been" gaps.

- $600: Full Time Writing

The big one. Living in South America while also having very frugal spending habits means I could support myself and also help out my family with just that, and honestly, that would be a dream come true.

Despite all the challenges of freelance writing (writing the damn thing, being my own editor/proofreader/beta/agent/social media manager, communicating with clients, marketing, etc etc), writing and seeing how much people enjoy my content still brings me a lot more joy than any of the jobs I held while doing this on the side, so doing this as my actual job would be amazing. We're a long way from there, but anything could happen, right?

You're probably wondering where's the actual benefit there, right? Well, me too, actually. It's hard to think about what I could do if I could dedicate all my time and energy to this, so my whole workflow would go through a restructure, maybe even another revamp here, but I hope everyone gets to see that when we get there.

Thank you again for the support and for actually getting through yet another wall of text. If you have any feedback on the new goals, or any new projects for the future, feel free to hit me up on Discord!