Thank you/ Shoptalk- The Spreadsheet of Madness
Added 2016-03-13 21:54:12 +0000 UTCJust a mid-month thank you and general reminder that I sent out all of the $10+ Patron emails just now. Usually this gets done within the first week of the month... I wanted to thank you again for your patience this month as I have been spending a good 3-4 hours a day since March 1st doing the move and some necessary physical renovations to the place. All commissions and such will be fulfilled on time, but I dislike being so off-schedule so I am just calling myself out here, haha...
Also wanted to show you a slice of the crazy spreadsheet I made to organize my data (only public info is shown but you can see my beautiful colors there~). There are 600+ Patrons now! This is so mind-boggling to me. At the $20+ level I also have to do an additional layer of maintenance to make sure that all of your commission information is collected appropriately so I can schedule a good amount of time to work on those in addition to comic pages. I've been scaling back commission slots slowly in order to make sure I can give all my work for you 100% effort without rushing to finish anything.
If you are donating at the upper levels, I also want you also to know that I know you so personally. Like, I move your rows around one by one, I personally update your color codes instead of being smart and using conditional formatting, and I have a .psd with all of your little icons I make for the support pages lovingly detailed in a file that I hand-export to every month as well. If I met you in the street I would probably be able to tell you your email address haha ok this is getting scary, ANYWAY thank you very much and even if you don't feel like we have a direct connection, I appreciate all of my readers so much, even when I'm just watching you sleep (JUST KIDDING)
Comments
This is exactly how my Kickstarter rewards list looked. Google Sheets is the best, especially if you have to switch workstations a lot.
Hannah Viera
2016-03-22 19:41:38 +0000 UTCoh no i'll never sleep again lol
littlepinkpebble
2016-03-15 04:05:18 +0000 UTCI think my monthly Patreon contributions are getting close to the price of Basic Cable, and it feels like money so much better spent than that. It's not the miracle of micropayments that many have predicted or hoped for, but it definitely is working for a lot of people and that rocks.
Quinton
2016-03-14 03:24:37 +0000 UTCYeah, it's crazy, I do at least 4-5 hours a month just doing Patreon maintenance and trying to streamline my data management a bit more than the previous month... the exciting life of an artist, haha. It's so worth it though, I love not relying on advertising so heavily! Hiveworks is a wonderful system and I've had nothing but great experiences with them, but it definitely doesn't account for a sizeable amount of monthly income (and I am loathe to increase ads on the sites... I think it's a little on the heavy side as it is). But most of all I love supporting other artists so much. I have to keep playing with my pledge list so nobody falls off of it; it's hard not to keep adding more people every month. So glad the system works so well and I also hope more artists can get to the independently self-sustaining level as time goes on.
Der-shing Helmer
2016-03-14 03:21:03 +0000 UTCThanks so much LD! That's hella nice of you
Der-shing Helmer
2016-03-14 03:15:59 +0000 UTCEven if I'm not that high up on the tier list I'm here to support and want to see you succeed.
LD Walker
2016-03-14 02:37:06 +0000 UTCPerhaps "Der-shing will watch you sleep" should be in one of the pledge level descriptions somewhere... okay probably not. Neat to see behind the scenes of your online art empire. It's so encouraging seeing stuff like Patreon enabling people to do awesome content creation full-time (though your spreadsheet of doom certainly drives home the fact that there's much to do to make that work). Models that are not primarily advertising-driven seem like a bonus too. It feels like we're living in a golden age of unique indie online comics/games/books/etc (certainly there's an amazing amount of awesome stuff out there). Or maybe the beginning of one -- it'd be neat if a larger portion of the folks out there making cool art were able to do it full-time (assuming that's their desire).
Quinton
2016-03-13 23:24:39 +0000 UTC
