General Update / Patreon Changes

Hi! I wanted to talk a little bit about the content on this page, since you might have noticed there's been less of it lately! Recently I've decided to go from updating this page 3 times a month to 2 times, and I'm not sure when/if I will be reverting that.

If you wanted the cliff's notes version, that's it! That's all you gotta know, thanks for reading.

If you wanted the reasons why, it's a combination of a few factors, but primarily it stems from the recent shitshow with Apple forcing Patreon to change how their website works. This unlawful action was recently overturned, which is nice, but I also haven't seen Patreon revert any of the the changes made to the page since it happened.

I used to use a site feature called "Charge per creation", where I'd charge every time I uploaded a story. Most people used the "Charge per month" function. Since I was posting 3 stories a month, I made the tiers about half what I felt they 'needed' to be and then let people toggle how many times they wanted to be charged a month. If you were paying for 2 of the 3 story updates, which most people were, then that roughly lined up with what I thought was reasonable? I know most creators think $5 a month is reasonable, but I wanted to let people go as low as $2, or $1 if they wanted to pay the absolute minimum.

When Patreon told me I HAD to change to the charge per month level as part of the Apple lawsuit, I was really put off. They asked me if I wanted to double the pricing of the tiers and I just outright said no, I couldn't imagine any of my backers being happy to have changes made to their account without their consent and on a more important note I've lost about 30% of my backers on average every time Patreon made some sweeping change to the site. When I was at my peak of around 110 patrons the site introduced extra hidden costs that pissed a lot of people off and that number fell drastically. So, yeah, I just wanted to make this as easygoing and accommodating for as many of you as possible.

Maybe that was my mistake, since I went from getting about $500 a month from Patreon to $200 off the back of that decision, which is irritating to say the least. I'm not so shallow I'm going to say something like I don't want to write without monetary compensation - I will always love writing and will continue to do it whether there's money involved or not, but it does mean I've been having to put more of my time into financing myself elsewhere so I have less time overall to write. That is definitely a bummer, and I would like to just have all the time in the world to write for you guys but yeah that's about the state of things at the moment! Sorry if this is a shock to anyone.

In closing, I did wanna say all this really does make me really appreciate the people who've stuck around all this time, and I really don't thank you guys nearly enough. Knowing people love my writing so much they're willing to sponsor it is one thing - being able to do that and also put up with Patreon's repeated incompetence and fucking the userbase over repeatedly is on a whole other level. Thankyou so much!

Anyway this is getting kinda long so I'll wrap it up here, thanks to everyone who read it all. Doing 3 stories a month might come back in the future but for now I am easing off slightly.