State of the Patreon (Patreon)

Happy new year! Hope y'all had a good one. Meant to pop this out yesterday but I got busy.

I've been giving the state of the Patreon a lot of thought since the shift back to polls several months ago, and I've been feeling out what I feel has worked and what's not worked. And in general, unfortunately, I think that a lot of it has just Not Worked.

tl;dr I'm shifting into focusing on commissions, scrapping the current poll process for the most part, and simplifying tiers to take worrying about creating Patreon exclusive content off my mind.

If you're currently on any tier that's not the $1, $3, or $5 tier you'll need to change it again and I am so so sorry about that inconvenience. 💦

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So, the intent behind shifting into polls several months ago was to stimulate audience growth by creating audience-influence on what I drew, and I had hoped having three polls at a time might have been seen as attractive to some people. It was pretty wishful thinking that process would work, because only much bigger, more consistent artists can really afford to make that their main income.

And even if it had worked, the polls have a few issues to them, one of them being that the internal process behind them is really confusing and doesn't offer a lot of time to really sink in for everyone. My ideal scenario was that within the last week of the month, I push a theme suggestion post out, I gather up some feedback, and then the following two weeks are dedicated to just setting those polls up. 

What's realistically happened every time, and is another issue, is that I find making suggestion posts tedious, corralling people in to participate in those posts is tedious, then calling everyone's attention back in as I try to make the difference between all three poll suggestions more and more apparent is Very Tedious.

Another issue is that there is just not enough time for the polls to settle in for everyone, me included. The process of making the poll, gathering characters, then setting it to a vote is Very Slow, and the time I've been setting on all these steps has not been proportional to how big the voting pool is on them. To say nothing of months where I just haven't had themes conducive to making good suggestions.

And then the actual art process is REALLY slow. I can make art very fast, but the reality with some of these polls is that sometimes I'll just have no idea about the characters in question, so making something I'm satisfied with can take longer than intended. It gets harder for me because I impose a deadline to myself of getting things done within the month, for better or worse. 

(And nobody said I had to, but I don't fundamentally like the idea of just not having a reward out by the end of each month considering most of the process is invisible to half of the supporters.)

A lot of this would have been solved sooner if I had a firmer idea of what I'd like to do and what I'd like to make out of the Patreon, but I didn't trust that what I did actually want to make would be seen as appealing enough to draw people in. That and I was also going a little crazy about maintaining a consistent income the last couple years. Either way, doing things that I thought would be appealing has not particularly drawn and kept a lot of people in since the shift several months ago.

So why bother? I don't want to keep doing things in this format that clearly doesn't work. I've been told by enough people I need to settle in and just do whatever the hell I want, so uh, to achieve that end... Sorry! I'm cutting the tiers back and causing a mad scramble for some of you again hahah im crying and shitting

• $1 tier is the same as it always was, except now they get Discord roles and invites because I think it caused bugs in my server for any $1 patrons who manually received the role and got kicked from it.
• $3 tier is the same as it ever was.
• The final tier I'm locking into just being a $5 tier that lets you see NSFW. It's also getting renamed from Silver Coin to Gold Doubloon.

I'm still deciding to what extent I'd like to keep polls around, but it likely won't keep the same format as before. Certainly not in a format that demands my all-in attention again, but I did still have ideas for future polls. 

Instead of polls, I want to shift to opening commissions more frequently.

Commissions, consistently, have earned more money for me than the Patreon ever has, and I can work with a commission much easier than I can a poll. Commissions will still have a patron-public cycle too, so Patrons will still have their own perks on top of their discount. One thing that's been giving me stress was trying to get things done constantly within a one-month time frame, so as ideal as monthly commissions are I won't be stressing about keeping to that time frame either.

Finally, between doing commissions, I'd like to focus more on just working on my OCs again and doing more fanart of things I'm actually interested in.

I've spoken with a friend recently who wanted to make more prints, and the idea is appealing to me as well. It'd be good to have more pieces in my portfolio I can actually sell, and it's likely that polls in the future are more like "what should I focus on next" type polls. There's also a lot of manga I read, and actually drawing fanart for all of those- especially the ones on the more obscure side- have been on my to-do list since forever. I have a series of Kamen Rider illustrations I've been meaning to make as well too that I can end up focusing on.

At some point within this year, I would also like to work on making a Crash Buster oneshot. I've been very slow to develop it because my time is constantly getting sucked away into other things, and there's a chance that commissions and print work will just do the same thing, but that's on my priority list for this year all the same.

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And that's about it for everything. If you stuck around all the way to the bottom, thank you. If you still want to support me despite everything I have and haven't done for you guys, thank you. If you're tired of dealing with all this and wanna dip, thanks for having supported for as long as you did, commissions will reopen in February for the public cycle.

Hopefully this next year will be better for all of us.