Turns out that Annual Membership wasn't such a good idea. Here's why but never mind, here's my much better idea! (Patreon)

As I've mentioned, I'm still learning the ropes about Patreon and in this case, I really should have clicked the button for enabling annual membership first before writing that post because it would have both given me information about it as well as not initiating it without an "are you sure?" before committing.

So I've actually found why I shouldn't do it:

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/210291283

It makes sense for annual payments that you have to enable "charge up front".

Key point here:

Charge up front is a permanent feature and cannot be changed; once you elect to charge your patrons up front, you cannot undo this.

I think everyone knows what this means, presently if anyone joins the Exiern Patreon at present, they don't get charged anything until the start of the next month.

Obvious problem is obvious which is why the charge up front option came to be a thing, I believe.

We haven't enabled charge up front to date because as far as we can tell there hasn't even been significant minor episodes of looting of the content, never mind major concerted efforts to strip mine us. 

Obviously, if that changes we'll reassess the issue but the pattern of signing up and cancelling pledges doesn't suggest that yet.

We wouldn't do it lightly or without consultation with you all first, though as like it says, the change of the Patreon to charging the first time up front is permanent.

Now for the big idea which I've thinking of a while and Jaycee Knight of Bloomin' Faeries! (there are so many webcomics trying to help us with advice, more on them and their efforts for which we are very grateful on a future post) also independently suggested part of it (I will reiterate this section in it's own separate post at some point in order to really focus on it).

The idea is based on the fact that over the years, patron numbers on Patreon dropped off a lot from the peak a few years back (though interestingly enough, the remaining patrons - yourselves pay more on average so it cancels itself out at the moment more or less).

So come December, I'm thinking of freezing the Patreon for that month having written to every single former patron who's spent as little as a dollar to consider rejoining to have a look at the content we've made especially since they left with the option to leave before there's a charge if they decide they don't want to come back after consideration of the additional content.

I think this is also fair and valid for people who left in 2018-2020 as the new Dark Reflections and Neese content ground to a halt after early to mid 2018 until 2021, so a lot of these former patrons should have seen some to all of this content while they were still patrons.

But I want to talk to all of the existing patrons first about this. A fair question would be from the current patrons would be, what's the incentive to continue paying from now until December?

Well, glad you asked! I had a project in mind (rest assured, I'm just paying to get it made, not writing it) which is probably going to be at least 30 multi-panelled pages (planning has already started) - and for all of you still patrons by the start of next year, you'll all get a copy of it.

I think the likely delivery will be as a .pdf attached to an email, it won't be on the Patreon - not anywhere near the same time as you'd be getting it, at the very least. Plus, I don't see the bonuses stopping there either!)

The point of this exercise is to try and get back as many former patrons back, get new ones to join and keep as many of the ones we have as well. This is because Exiern is running at a big deficit. I've been covering it for a long time now. 

Not looking for plaudits (though I'm not fundamentally opposed to them) but I need to at least try to close it as much as possible as soon as possible for future unforeseen reasons out of my control (contingency plans if nothing else). 

So all of this is part of the plan to address this. What do people think? Please let us know in the comments below. We'll be addressing the whole issue of income, expenditure and deficits in greater detail on March 31st 2021, the last of this current run of frequent behind the scenes updates after which we'll take a break from such announcements.

Can't wait to hear all your thoughts on the subject!