The Plan

Frankly, I had no idea what I was doing when I started this page, so everything was just kinda cobbled together in whatever way felt vaguely right at the time.

Now that I know more about what I'm capable of and what kind of audience I can expect for this, though, I can now work out a more streamlined and hopefully more appealing system here.

Basically, starting in June, the subscription tiers will be reorganized and condensed; instead of having four tiers at multiples of 5, there will instead be only three.

The three new tiers will be priced at $3, $7, and $12, and their benefits will roughly correspond to the existing 1/5/10 tiers. 

The $3 tier will be the general support level; it'll give basically the same benefits as it does now, but with the addition of the early-access benefit from the current $5 level. Early access will also be expanded to all releases; patrons will see everything early starting in June, provided I can actually finish stories.

The $7 tier will become the combined tier for suggestions and voting, and will retain the current $5 tier's access to the most recent Vineyard release. It will not inherit the discount from the current $10 tier, instead serving primarily as the Vineyard story participation tier; it'll also keep the $5 tier's access to experimental stories, though those were never going to be particularly common anyways.

And then the $12 tier will be the commission-discount level. The higher price means that the discount that comes with it will be raised to 800 free words. I don't expect it to have any particularly-distinguishing features otherwise; it's the "I really want to throw money at Sake" tier and the commission discount on top of all the lower-tier benefits is all just a nice little bonus for that level of generosity.

The existing tiers will become unavailable for new subscriptions, but will remain for those who already joined them; existing patrons will be treated as if they were part of the tier priced $2 above their current level, for the most part. $10 will continue to receive the 600-word discount and will not get the 800-word discount from the $12 level. This means $1 and $10 patrons will not really experience any change, while existing $5 patrons will gain access to story suggestions. The $20 tier, which has no members anyways, will be removed entirely.

Suggestions and polls will also resume in June as well, though their success depends on boosting activity around here. I can really only advertise through twitter and a few other places, so I'll be doing whatever I can to try to get some more people on board, but if anyone does have any friends who may be interested, getting them in on it would be helpful too.

And, finally, ongoing projects continue to be ongoing. Really trying to dig up the energy to finish some of these things, but as is my style these are really long and complicated and hard to work on; something should be happening before long, though, hopefully.