January Newsletter (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Happy January! I hope your New Years was wonderful and, if you celebrate the Lunar New Year, I hope your celebrations will be equally fun! We have a pretty meaty update ahead, so let’s get right down to business!

Health

In BIG news, I finished my final Ketamine treatment (click here if you want to learn more about what that looks like) and I am now moving onto more maintenance treatment that is much less intensive. I’m doing great! Regrettably, I still have fibro (lol), but the ambient pain and brain fog are significantly reduced. The onset is quicker, and the fall-off is as well. Basically, it lifted the floor on how I feel most of the time. I’m energized and excited to get back to work. I am so happy to be able to get back to Tamberlane again and engage with you all!

I am, however, making a concerted effort to do so without making myself sick, going too hard too fast, or potentially burning myself out. Thank you all so very much for your patience and your support during this time. So many of you left loving, wonderful comments that really made me feel better during the times when I felt bad about being on such a long hiatus. Because of your support, we were able to afford a fairly expensive treatment, so big HUGE thanks to everybody. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Patreon

As a result of all of the treatment, and wanting to take better care of myself, we are working through the Patreon right now and giving it a major revamp to consider what I can reasonably offer on a monthly scale. I want to delegate more tasks to the Tamberteam (Teamberlane?) to keep things running smoothly and give me more time to focus on the comic. Ari and I have been tinkering with this for the past two weeks, and while we still have more to go, we aim to have the revamped Patreon live by February 1st. It’s been interesting having to write out everything that is done for the Patreon and how it’s currently handled. It’s given a much clearer picture of where the sticking points are and how we can smooth them out. The goal is to have a clear schedule on where everything fits together in a way that prioritizes consistent output and my mental and physical health. We are being very conscious of my needs and what I can offer knowing that my health can be unpredictable and varied. So far, all of the ideas are looking good, and while we won’t give specifics since everything is subject to change, we can say some things for sure.

Edit: A full list of these changes can be viewed here in this entry.  

Tales from Treehollow Changes

For example, we will no longer be offering TFTs as a main focus. They will now become an “as desired by the writers” project which will be done over longer time frames without a given schedule. With that in mind, they will not be advertised until they are fully completed.

While we love Tales from Treehollow and the opportunity to tell you all more stories from the world of Tamberlane, there are a few reasons why we feel that this change is necessary. For one, TFTs are VERY expensive to produce. For transparency, comics are $725 and prose is ~$550, while marketing is ~$300. That is currently every month. For perspective, they earn about $60 at most per month (closer to $20 most months) in return sales and have not seen significant interest from Patrons. They are also an enormous overhead on time and effort: ideating, writing, choosing and chasing down artists, delivery and assembly, quarterly payouts, and the fact that our marketing team currently spends about 90% of their time on TFTs as opposed to other areas of the comic. They simply are not creating a worthwhile return on investment.

Likewise, while TFTs are great for those people who are invested in the comic and want to know more about the world, they are absolutely useless at drawing people in. Who cares about a short comic populated with characters you’ve never heard of? Much less so for a prose story.

So where will this time and effort be redelegated? Not doing TFTs frees up Ari and Thorn to do many more important activities and keep the Patreon running smoothly. Much of the budget will be put towards advertising efforts and experiments instead. For example (and these are suggestions, not guarantees), commissioning high-traffic artists to do high-quality Tamberlane art to share the world and characters with new readers, sponsoring reviews, etc. We hope that by bringing in more readers, we can increase the paid workload for the team and generate even more high quality content for you all in a way that doesn’t break the budget and our backs every month.

I also plan to restructure commissions, though the final form has not yet been determined. If you want to know more about what’s happening on the Patreon or have an ear in sessions where we talk about our plans, Ari and I have sometimes been having our meetings live in the Foxglove Discord where we can give you all a glimpse into our process and how we work through something like this. It’s a fun way to see what’s happening!

Edit: You can still purchase all available Tales from Treehollow here in the Tamberlane Shop! 

Kickstarter

Speaking of what’s happening, KICKSTARTER PREP is kicking up! We plan to have the Chapter 4/Arc 1 Omnibus Kickstarter live in April. We’re going to be dedicating our Thursday Treehollow Talks streams to doing all of the necessary preparations needed for the launch. We’ve already been at it for six months, but there’s STILL MORE TO DO. You wouldn’t believe how much work has to go into preparing something like this, and we’d love to share our progress with you all, so please feel free to join us Thursdays at 2pm PST as we edit previous pages, create some of the smaller rewards, make graphics, etc.

As part of the Kickstarter’s larger scope, we have hired a PR lady, Melissa from Don’t Hide PR, who is super cool, and she is arranging for us to do interviews. Like, real actual interviews with actual outlets! The interviews should start in February, and we’re excited and a bit nervous, but we know we’re gonna knock it out of the park. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on when any interviews go live!

Some Other News

Time for postcard updates! September through December postcards are going out today. Thank you for your patience with the delays - we have figured out the brain block that has kept me from doing them in a timely manner, so they should hopefully be much smoother in the future!

Finally, in a bit of fun personal news: over the course of my treatment, I have started DMing a D&D game in my spare time for my friends and husband themed around Final Fantasy XIV! Basically, I took the FFXIV MMORPG setting, smooshed it into D&D mechanics, and have been running them through the story. It’s still early days yet, but it’s been a LOT of fun, and I’ve been writing up accounts of each session over on my Tumblr! You can check it out here.

Usually, previous newsletters have included posts from last month, as well as new, upgraded, and returning patrons, but for the sake of getting these newsletters out in a timely manner (or at all) we have decided to drop that part. So instead, please accept our heartfelt thanks for your support over the last couple of months. It has helped a lot, and we hope you enjoy the return of Tamberlane!