Relaunching for 2019 with new rewards and tiers!

This is a big one, dear patrons! We’re changing the rewards, the streams, everything. We’re soon to update our tiers and the rest of the page, but we’re posting this message in advance to ensure you know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it!

Quick Summary

• You can suggest and vote on a mini-comic idea Vero will draw every second month! This will replace lotteries.
• Most patrons will get access to the upcoming BCB page a week in advance (!!!)
• Streams will be one day now.
• No action is required from you to get the new rewards!

June is the fourth anniversary of the BCB Patreon. It’s been that long! We launched it when we had just finished moving to the US and were in pretty dire straits financially, but the rapid response we got from our readers really meant a lot to us, and has given us a dependable monthly income this whole time since.

From the start, we developed an idea that we’d reward patrons with monthly streams, and before long, we had so many lotteries and guaranteed drawing requests and other obligations that it became a regular thing for us to spend five days a month on them: a day preparing, three days streaming (for 15+ hours straight, as you likely know) and a day repaying sleep debt at the end of it.

Over time, we realized nearly a quarter of our workdays were being sucked up by stream work, so we reduced the streams to every second month, and began a push for the Patreon as a source of behind-the scenes posts, which Vero dutifully posted over the course of 2017 and 2018. 

But as we reach this anniversary, we took some time to reflect on what’s working and what could be improved. We’re making a pretty solid amount! We have a base of exceptionally loyal patrons, many of whom who attend our streams and have become beloved, regular parts of our lives, alongside Swing Goose and the squealing harp seal pup and Sid the dancing alien. We have a system that works, and it’s still a lot of fun to run it all. But…

What you’re really here for is the comic. And it’s been a painful year for that, as we've reduced our update schedule to build a buffer and find time for our secret project. Despite our best efforts to reduce our stream commitments over time, the massive stream weekends continually suck a lot of time away from getting pages done, and the drawings only ever interest a small slice of our readers.

We’ve spent some time researching and brainstorming and speaking with Patreon’s creator success people to see if we can find a way to rebalance our campaign, to make it something better for us, for you, and ultimately for BCB!

The Plan:

• PATRON-INSPIRED BCB MINI-COMICS: We’ll post a short story every second month, based on suggestions from patrons! (We’ll collect your ideas in a thread, then you can vote on the ideas.)
• EARLY ACCESS TO UPCOMING PAGES: (Yes, finally!!) Find out what happens on the next page before ANYONE else!
• PHONE BACKGROUNDS AND HI-RES COMIC PAGES: From our archive, a permanent collection of nice wallpapers, and regular posts of gigantic PSDs you can pull apart!

These rewards will be short and sweet and easy for us to fulfill — so that you all get great perks while helping us devote as much time as possible to the comic. We also think our new set of rewards will better suit more readers, who we hope will help us boost our patronage and allow the Patreon to cover more expenses than it does currently.

Stream Changes

We’ll still do streams every second month! But with the elimination of lotteries, attending them won’t be necessary for patrons. Each stream will pack 12 guaranteed drawing requests into a single day, with patron-inspired minicomics being drawn during prime time. No more exhausting weekends, just distilled BCB drawstream mayhem with a lovely new comic to look forward to at the end of it, one that everybody gets a say in!

New Tiers

We’re simplifying it all down to three:

• $3: Suggest ideas and vote for BCB mini-comics
• $5: Early access to the upcoming BCB comic page
• $10: Download exclusive phone backgrounds and high-resolution comic pages

There is no need for you to change your pledge. All current patrons get the new reward their current pledge amount covers, automatically (e.g. $8 pledges get the upcoming BCB page, $15 pledges get everything, etc.)  If you do want to change tiers, we recommend doing it in a week when everything is set up.

Special Offers

We’re planning on offering an incentive to new pledges, and will likely play with the new “Special Offers” feature as time goes on. We don’t want anyone to feel left out, so if anyone who has been so kind as to support us in our time on Patreon so far sees an offer for something they want, just fire us a message and we’ll put you down for one too. We hope everyone understands and doesn’t feel left out!

Rollout

We plan to post the changes on Monday, June 17th. The next stream (under the older system) is NEXT WEEKEND on June 21–23, a full three-day stream as you’d expect. After that, we’re shifting to single-day streams, beginning August 9.

Your support has made a huge difference to our lives as independent artists, and we’ve had a lot of fun all the while. We know we’re taking some risks here, and not every change might be ideal, but we’re hoping that the new structure gives you some great new stuff to look forward to (like reading a page in advance!!!) and that you’ll appreciate that we’ll have more time to actually make the comic as a result. 

Do let us know, here or via private message, if you have any ideas, questions, comments, messages of support or concern — you all mean a lot to us and we want to hear from you! We hope it’s a good move for everybody.