Moving Forward: January 2019

I mentioned near the end of last month that I'm looking to expand the art side of my content creation and this month I've been and plan to continue working on that. I don't plan on writing more this month, aside from the second part of the Rubber Girl commission and so have been trying to think about what kinds of alternative rewards I can offer patreon tiers. At the moment, my idea is to release comic pages as they finish to $10 patrons, and the first half of the comic to $5 patrons when that's done, and the second half when it's finished. I wanted to release the first comic page with this post (hence why it's ~14 days into the month already), but I had to overhaul the comic idea so it's not ready yet. I intend to get the first few pages out to $10 patrons by the end of this week though. I'll talk more about the comic when I get the first page up.

You might have noticed that I did not mention the $1 tier in that list and here's why: Thinking back, I've historically been very bad at creating content for the $1 tier. I put a lot of effort into everything I make and even the smaller stories I've attempted for this tier have often taken just as much energy and time as $5 and $10 tier stories and that doesn't feel right. So, I think I'm going to switch the $1 tier to a simpler, "support the artist," deal, though I do intend to still throw the little extras I currently offer (deleted scenes, and moving forward, concept art/character designs, maybe rough sketches as well), but I'm no longer promising that I'll have something unique for this tier every month (and I realize I've never been great at delivering on that promise in the past anyway).

Essentially, I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing and if something comes up that would make for a good $1 goody, I'll post it, but I'm not going to stress myself out or go out of my way anymore to actively make content for the $1 tier. Content will happen, just more organically.

Moving on, I also mentioned being unsatisfied with the password system for protecting patreon only content on my wordpress site. Hence why I haven't updated general section passwords in almost two months. My plan for this front is to give each story that's patreon locked a unique static password that is posted only to patreon - this saves me from having to worry about updating passwords every month. So far, I believe I've done this for one or two stories and have begun using the patreon tag "password" to indicate which posts contain a password. Unless I get in trouble for direct linking again, I'll make sure each of these posts also has a link to where to use its password so that you don't have to search for it. 

The unfortunate consequence of this that I'm aware of, is that it makes patreon more of a hub again or otherwise requires jumping between my wordpress and patreon to find passwords for stories, if someone wants to read more than one in a row. The best I can do right now is try to keep links back and forth convenient, but I'm still looking for a better solution.

If you're still reading, thanks for sticking with me! I know that was a wall of text and not a lewd thought among them. I sometimes think I'm not transparent enough with my patrons so spilling my thoughts like this is at least a first step in communicating my intentions better.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to comment on this post!