Weekly Update — 48 (Patreon)

You may or may not notice that we have new goals! Why, you may ask?

Well, when I first created my Patreon program, I wasn't entirely sure how it was going to work out. Would it successful? Would anyone be interested? I had a lot of cool ideas, but it's taken me a whole year to get my head around what Patreon should and shouldn't be. And now that I have gotten a grip of it, I needed to update my goals to match. This hasn't really been helped by the fact that Patreon is still a new platform, and there are a tonne of other creators out there, all going their own directions and many of whom, I feel, are going in a direction that will hurt the community in the long run.

Patreon is a platform to help artists and creators do things that otherwise, they'd never be able to do. Since its founding, all sorts of people have relied on Patreon when other platforms judged their work not appropriate or desirable for one reason or another. Had your youtube channel demonetised? Patreon to the rescue. Arbitrarily kicked from Amazon? Patreon's got your back. Creating something that doesn't have a standard platform for discovery and commercialisation? Again, Patreon.

Patreon allows creators to circumvent the traditional platforms. But! And this is the important point. I do not believe that the point of Patreon is to replace them.

If you want a book, you go to Amazon. If you want great video content, you go to Youtube. While the day may one day come when people looking for cool new things first go to Patreon, that day is not today (and won't ever come until Patreon buckle down on their promise to improve the discovery mechanics on their site).

My point is this. Patreon is a platform of last resort. For creators whose products do have established platforms, it is both a safety net, and a start-up space — a buffer from disaster and a place where awesome things can be done, which otherwise would never see the light of day.

Which is why I've restructured my goals so that they only contain direct investment in projects that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do, because I haven't yet got them to be self-sustaining on any other platform. Once I have figured out how to make them self-sustaining, the goal will be removed from the list and a new goal will be put in its place.

I've removed hardback books because I've figured out how to do that without a massive upfront cost.

I've removed living expenses because, at least at the moment, that has stopped being an issue — and I can put all the money from my Patrons into my writing and world-building projects (that doesn't mean this won't ever change — like I said above, one of Patron's roles is as a safety-net platform of last resort).

I've changed around the values on some of the other goals, since I now have a far better idea of what certain things cost.

This way, you can directly see what it is you're patronising. Right now all my goals are directly related to stuff that will improve the value of my novel writing, but I have lots of other kinds of stories I'd like to pursue too — stories which would require a lot of hard work from many people aside from myself. But! One step at a time. 

I hope all that made sense. :P

Please let me know what you think of the new goals in the comments section or on discord.

Updates

This Sunday we'll have another Richard Struggle chapter!

See you then!

— J.M. Coombs