Sitrep and a Heads Up

Hey guys and girls.  So, a few announcements: First, I should be getting back Stallion this weekend, and sending it off to Hiryo that night… so long as I don’t get it at night my local time, anyway.  I have finished Death’s Avenger too, and sent it off to it’s editor.  I had to take two extra days since I lost the weekend again due to family/babysitting.   UGH.  That means I will be starting up on ATP’s final two chapters.  I will get at least the last real chapter, if not the Epilogue, out by the end of the month in revamped form.  Expect combat galore.  After that, I will start work on Making Waves.  I want to finish it next month.

With that out of the way, there are some changes to Patreon that I want to make certain everyone here is aware of.

So, back in November-October, Patreon made a deal with Apple that would allow people to sign up to donate to Patreon creators via the App IOS.   A brief warning for those who are thinking of going through the IOS: this means even less of the actual money donated gets to creators like me.  Apple will take like a… thirty percent cut?  I would urge anyone who has attempted to go that route to instead do so through the actual website. 

But part of this new deal with apple is forcing us to switch to a subscription billing setup by November this year. To Quote:

‘You need to switch to subscription billing by November 2025

Because of Apple’s requirements, you won’t be able to get new earnings or paid members in the iOS app starting November 2024, unless you’ve switched to subscription billing.’

Which apparently will happen automatically in November… So I am wondering if I should just bite the bullet and switch now.  Now apparently for existing members, this won’t matter much. Another quote of what I’m being told:

No impact on your existing members. They won’t get notified and will continue to be billed on the 1st, like they always have.  Great for all you all, LOL.

Whereas new members:

New members will get charged the day of the month they sign up. Rather than being charged on the 1st of the month, members are charged the day they sign up and then each month on the same day, similar to most subscriptions.

Perhaps tied into this, two semi-long time patrons recently told me that their cards have been declined.  Don’t know if that’s Patreon or them.  Just thought I would make certain you all were aware of this change, before I input it.

A bigger issue for me is that last month, Patreon instituted some new kind of anti-fraud thing.  Don’t know what it was, but it tremendously slowed payouts to creators in May.  Normally I would get paid every 5th of the month, but I didn’t see any change until this past Monday, and even then I had to use the manual withdrawal function or else it would have just built up until the next auto withdrawal, having just… not gone through in May for whatever reason.

I hope they get that under control and back to normal, and if doing that interferes with how much I should see on the fifth/sixth of June, I will be monstrously pissed. I don’t quite live paycheck to paycheck but given how I just paid my taxes, my funds are low at the moment, LOL.  And I have lost nearly a hundred dollars in donations since December.  Still wondering about how to stop that.  

In other news, I know I haven’t really been following up on cross-posting.  Sorry about that.  I will first finish using collections and tags here on patreon to gather all the fics/make them easier to read and download chapters for you all, and then go from there. Still haven’t had the time to look at Questionable Questing as another place to post, but given the length of most of my stories, if it’s anything like Spacebattles, I don’t see that as working simply because of how huge the chapters are.

I will be posting the Patron Only Poll tomorrow. Let's go Heroes, and hope you guys have a great weekend!