On the matter of the Tiers

Last year I was considering a bit of a change up with how my tiers are structured. However, I didn’t get around to releasing my third book and some responses weren’t too positive, so I put it off. Now, the third book is going to start releasing and I have some ideas.

First, there will be a new $3 tier. This one has actually been kicking around in the back of my head for a while now. I’ve got a bit of a gap between the $1 tier and the $5 tiers that goes from zero to 60. Right now I have 4 steps to releasing a chapter. There is the free offsite (RoyalRoad and ScribbleHub) releases. The free onsite which is +2 chapters to both. The $1 tier which is +2 to D’sP and +5 to NR. Then there are the early release tiers, which are at this point over two hundred chapters ahead for NR and almost a hundred for D’sP. So yeah, it goes from sipping from a teaspoon at $1 to the full on firehouse at $5 and I want to provide a nice cup of water as an in-between. Though that all might be a little confusing so let me make a quick table using what will be the next chapters to release for both stories on the various tiers. I will also include what I plan for the $3 tier, which will be +10 to D’sP and +25 to NR.

So yeah, I’m going to call the $3 tier “Just a little bit more” or something similarly pithy. I was honestly tempted to start counting up from 1, I’ve seen a couple Patreons do that. However, I figured this would be enough. After all, it represents at least ~20k extra words for both stories.

Next, I might make a higher tier that does nothing. I’m thinking $15. That tier is purely for those who want to go above and beyond. I would rather not do something like that, except life isn’t getting cheaper and being a cashier isn’t paying more. If you can think of any kind of reward for that tier I’m open for suggestions. The only real rule I’ve considered on it, is that it can’t give people more access to stuff because that would push people to sub to it. Of all the things in this post, this one needs the most work and so I appreciate any comments.

Finally, we have the early access tiers. Last time I brought this up, I admitted to being kind of annoyed at how I structured things. On one hand, at the time it made sense. I had one story and then I had two. Some people read the one and not the other so make early access tiers for those and then a combined tier that gives a discount compared to if someone somehow subbed to both. The problem is that this ties the tiers too tightly to current stories. I don’t want to keep adding tier X for new story X and tier Y for new story Y every time I start a new story. I would rather just have tiers that contain all of my stories.

My plans on this are to at some point in the future, unpublish the current $5 tiers and replace them with a single $5 tier that has all my stories, but less than the $8 tier. As an example of what I’m thinking of, with NR I could go from two chapters every week at $5 to the same schedule as D’sP with one chapter every week and an extra chapter every other week. More IMPORTANTLY, this is in the future, I will give at least a week heads up, and doing this won’t take away anyone’s current subscriptions. Unpublishing a tier simply means new people can no longer see or subscribe to it. As long as you stay subscribed, nothing changes. I’ll keep releasing chapters to the current tiers at the same rate as long as there are patrons in them.

To prepare for this, my third story won’t have its own tier. Rather, it will release to both $5 tiers at the same rate. Though I don’t see myself cranking out chapters for Banished Talent like I am for my other stories. Just to give an idea, I was planning on only releasing chapters once a month over on RoyalRoad and ScribbleHub. However, I am open to writing more, so we shall see what happens. Though it certainly isn’t going to be a story where I promise weekly chapters. I’ll have a minimum and maybe more will happen. Besides that, I mean for the third story to be a regular book sized story between 50k and 100k words instead of the web novel sized stories that NR and D’sP are. This means a higher turn over rate for that third slot and with enough support maybe more slots in the future depending on how much time I can claw away from my part-time job as a cashier.