Weekly Update — 45 (Patreon)

Schedule

Firstly, I missed my Wednesday deadline, as many of you noticed. My apologies. As I stated before, this is an experiment, and there are still kinks that need to be worked out.

In future, if I miss a deadline, that deadline is going to be skipped rather than "done tomorrow." That was a bad idea in retrospect. It completely threw me off my game.

This Sunday will be a Richard Struggle publishing day, as will be the Wednesday after, most likely.

Reward Tier Updates

Next, as I mentioned last week, I'm currently in the middle of overhauling my Patreon program. The first step for that is going to be updating the rewards. You can see the new ones on my Patreon homepage, but the TL;DR is:

1. Uncommon Patrons (and above) get work-in-progress (sketch) artwork.

2. Epic Patrons (and above) get digital copies of new books a week before publication date. 

3. Legendary Patrons get limited-edition, physical artworks delivered with each physical book.

This is in addition to the current rewards. This makes Epic level patrons the 'digital reward' tier, and legendary, the 'physical reward' tier (although obviously legendary patrons still get all the epic rewards too).

The next stage in updating my Patreon program will be better artwork for the reward column and the banner, which brings me nicely onto my next point...

Professionally Commissioned Artwork

A little while back, I started taking art classes with the intention of being able to do my own artwork for my books and world building. You might even have seen the one experiment I posted here from that little episode (extremely experimental).

I've since come to the conclusion that getting my artwork to the level that I would actually be okay with it, if I was commissioning it from someone else, would take far longer than I'm willing to invest (thousands of hours, possibly).

So I've started looking around for some decent artists to work with and I've already found a few. Good fantasy books need good fantasy artwork, and I want good fantasy books.

The first few concept sketches should go up along with this post. More will follow in the coming weeks. Might even get some done for DP&SW.

That's all for the moment,

See you on Sunday!

— J.M. Coombs (LeadVonE)