Reflections on Six Months on Patreon

I thought I'd share a bit about what I learned and am currently dealing with based on my experience on Patreon. This isn't a super mandatory read, but if you're interested in understanding some of the decisions I've made and the ones I'm likely to make in the future, you're welcome to have a read.

1. Most income comes from a few dedicated readers/supporters. I think more than half of my Patreon income comes from, like, 8 people. This means that having tiers and rewards available for those who are willing to support you as a creator is crucial to success.

2. People don't follow me for art or audio. I do have a decent amount of art patrons, but most people are here for chapters. More often than not, people join to see the art they want, and then leave. This means I need to revise the way I handle art in the future to give people an incentive to stay, but I'm not sure how to go about it yet. This also means...

3. Posting frequent chapters of my most popular stories is the best way to get new small patrons. MGS, in reality, is why most of my patrons have joined. A few joined specifically for art, while others joined to get early chapters of kindle books, but there is no doubt that most of my Patreon is MGS-specific readers.

4. Pushing your patreon is important. If you don't sell it to readers, they won't bother to click. For now, I'm happy to sit where I'm at, but I'll be pushing it hard by late summer.

5. Shorter, more regular chapters are more valuable, in general, than infrequent long chapters. This is for a lot of reasons, and I think some readers may disagree, but in terms of clicks and scene management, it's really a crucial lesson.

6. Web novels are tricky because you make mistakes and it's hard to go back and fix them because few will notice or read the fix if you try. MGS being as successful as it is as my first web novel is really amazing, but I know that my next one will be even better. That being said, I don't plan on ending MGS forever, ever. Even when the story is done, I'll keep posting fun little slice of life chapters every now and then. This poses a lot of challenges, though, because I didn't have a plan early on and it shows.

7. Getting readers to engage is hard—and as an author who is also a reader, I can understand that. Still, readers, if you want to make your author's day, leave a comment or click the heart. That kind of thing motivates us and feeds the algorithm on sites like SH. Our success and motivation means more chapters and stories for you.

8. There is such a thing as posting too often on Patreon. I have actually had complaints that I post too many chapters too often and the feed gets buried. This is a good problem to have, I guess, as far as problems go, but it's still a problem. When I'm full-time writing in the future, I'll post batches of chapters on Patreon—maybe 6 MGS per week, and then post single chapters twice a week on SH.

9. Patreon is not a great platform for authors. The way things are organized on Patreon does not lend itself well to authors. I wish I could have pages for each of my stories. The keyword/tag system is laughable. This makes it hard for readers to sift through the massive amount of content I have, especially art, but also chapters.

10. Authors that post less actually generally do better. I've seen authors with $5000 Patreons that update a couple times a month and almost never bother with art. Too bad. That ain't me.

I may update this later, but for now these are my thoughts, and I just figured I'd share them. They might not be that interesting, but I pride myself on always being transparent. Right now I'm scrambling to finish Esoterica 4. It's going well, but the deadline is creeping up on me and I still have a bunch of chapters to do. After this, it's MGC and MGS for a couple months. After that, it's MGS and probably a new project I'll announce when I have a cover and title.

Thank you, as always, for your support. I live and die by my readers!