Monday's "Matters of Monetary-Management" Musings

I think it's important to start this post off by saying that THE PROPOSED CHANGES BELOW ARE NOT SET IN STONE. This will be quickly followed up by an interest poll including a TL;DR version of what's below.

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[Stories without SFX] won't be gone entirely, or even be phased out all that much to begin with. I just have to make room in the schedule for SFX stories and comic dubs. 

The more I think about it, the more enticing abandoning SFX-less stories becomes. The regular fodder has always had notably low engagement in terms of both Patreon and YouTube. One look at the views a story gets compared to a comic is certainly telling, not to mention the majority of people who prefer SFX'd stories to all else. 

SFX-less stories are also the single biggest expense on SR right now, costing around $100-150 total per month. That's nearly half the budget, why spend so much money on something people aren't enjoying as much? That's funding better used on improving the overall quality of our voice-dubs, whether it be more experienced VAs, (potentially!) BGM, or writers to create more original content for us to dub. 

So, how would we go about this?

Step 1: Old and Busted

Standard SFX-less stories are discontinued entirely in favor of progress updates of bigger projects. One day's Patreon post could contain the script and raw audio to an upcoming project, and another day's post would contain the finished project itself.

SFX stories* become the norm, with either a completed story or comic dub being posted at least every other week, if not more often. Regular character polls** encourage engagement with patrons. 

For reference, you could expect stories similar to the stories in the "Audio Stories" tag I just created. The only difference would be that if a story has a narrator, the characters would be voiced by different VAs.

This is as opposed to story requests and giveaways, which were often never fulfilled (or fulfilled extremely late) due to volume and cost. While any requests that weren't yet recorded will be tossed to the wayside, I plan on wrapping up anything that was recorded into a neat little package for patrons to enjoy.

 (Speaking of engagement, I'm always available on Discord if you have any questions.) 

Step 2: The New Hotness

Every finished project will become public, meaning you can freely share and discuss the latest audio story or comic dub. In terms of what you get as a patron, I'll be ditching the Monday/Friday upload schedule in favor of posting things as soon as they're done. Whether this means 3 or 1 update(s) a week remains to be seen, but at least they'll all be updates that you have reason to care about. All Patreon tiers will also be adjusted accordingly:

• $2 - Ability to vote in Waifu Warz polls, access to all WIP audio story materials.
• $5 - Early access (1 week) to comics, ability to vote in comic polls and access to all WIP comic material.
• $15 - Ability to suggest characters for Waifu Warz*** and ability to request any preexisting short story (with sfx) under 1000 words, maximum 1 per month.
• $30 and 60 -  While any stories that have been recorded won't be re-recorded, future rewards will see an increase in quality in that they'll feature more than 1 VA when applicable.

Basically: $2 is the audio story tier, $5 is the comic tier, $15 is the Illuminati tier, and $30/$60 are the free story tiers.

* I'll be referring to these as "Audio stories" from here on forth

** I'll be referring to these as "Waifu Warz!" from here on forth. Yes. With a Z.

*** Expect a post detailing how exactly character polls work later this week. 

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Overall, I personally feel this would be a big step toward growing the Patreon page. Though, if this idea is not welcomed by those who help make Swell Reads possible, then I obviously won't implement it. Keep your eyes peeled for that interest poll coming in about... 60 seconds from now.