Patreon Pricing
Added 2025-01-12 19:05:00 +0000 UTCOn the advice of some other authors and my publisher I am debating changing the pricing and tiers for Patreon. Details below:
$1, $3 & $6 Tiers would remain the same and be grandfathered.
New tiers would be $2 for 3 chapters and $10 for all available chapters (min 20, max depends on backlog).
FAQ:
What does grandfathered mean?
Anyone on the existing tiers would retain their access at the existing price.
No one new would be able to access those tiers.
If I unsubscribe to a grandfathered tier am I able to re-subscribe at that tier?
No, unfortunately Patreon doesn't have tools for that kind of access as far as I know. Returning Patrons would be forced to choose between the new tiers.
Why the change?
To align better with the rest of the industry and also to hopefully accelerate my transition to full-time author.
AUTHOR EDIT/UPDATE:
Some excellent comments, questions and suggestions below so I am adding an update in here to address a few of them.
There have been a couple of comments about the new tiers and gaps in the proposal.
I have no issue adding in a $5 tier, my only hesitation around doing so has been that 95%+ of subscribers are at the highest tier. It is worth considering whether that would be true with a change in tier pricing but the anecdotal evidence from other authors is yes.
A Stretch/Vanity/AuthorLove Tier is something that my publisher has been suggesting for a while and that I had intended to include in this change but I didn't think it was worth including in the poll because it doesn't negatively impact anyone.
There were also some good questions about writing output and chapters per week if I was full-time and what would change. For that, I am going to give everyone a little context.
Currently I work full-time in a fairly intensive salaried corporate job that pollutes my weekdays, and when things are breaking, sometimes my weekends.
Because of my day job, writing is mostly restricted to weekends and my angel of a wife is very accommodating and supportive to make sure I have the time to write to hit the minimum 3 chapters written per week.
Given the above, I am fairly confident that if I was to go full-time as an author I could comfortably manage 5 chapters a week (this is a minimum, I personally think I could do more) without compromising the quality or planning that goes into the story.
Initially, I would use the extra chapters to create a little buffer in the backlog, but then the goal would be to increase not only the number of chapters available ahead of RR, but also increase the posting schedule from 3 chapters per week to 5.
Just to be clear, I am not making a promise here. I think I could do the above, but until I get the chance to try, it's all just hopes and dreams.
I saw a comment about not getting the eBook and just wanted to clarify that.
For each book released on Amazon, I always post the eBook here available to Patrons (at any tier) up until a day or two before the release. I also notify RoyalRoad that this has been done. I can't leave the post up after launch due to Amazon KU legal clauses but I will always make the book available in eBook format for download for Patrons.
So, onto the poll. You are my patrons and so I definitely feel like you should all have a say in the matter. Do you think this is a good decision and are you okay with it?
PS: Feel free to comment either way below as I suspect this will be contentious. Please be kind/polite to each other. We all have different financial situations and it's a rough world these days.
Comments
You do what you need to do, but if you take the price to high it will likely cut down the number of folks here.
Mark
2025-01-19 15:15:57 +0000 UTCAppreciate you grandfathering
ReadingObsessed
2025-01-14 17:22:21 +0000 UTCMore than $5/6 /month stops being affordable vs waiting for the book or just joining every few months to catch up rather than being constant. It’s certainly a common approach but I don’t think it makes more money. You’re good and consistent and reliable. You just need a bigger base.
Ben Heidenreich
2025-01-13 13:02:13 +0000 UTCQuestion is if his future fictions will be as well received as the current one is. This story might be moderately successful but future one might not be for various reasons. Changing normal job is not as difficult as going back to normal job from full time writing. I think he should try his hand in a few stories first before switching to being full writer. He can also make different tiers for individual stories to get better idea how popular they are, keeping single story subscription low and having all stories subscription for a smaller price than combined single story subscriptions.
Petr Pavelka
2025-01-13 01:13:53 +0000 UTCI agree, but if my available time for writing goes from 7hrs/week to 40hrs/week I would need a more than 6 fold decrease in writing speed to write less per week than I do now.
Ellake
2025-01-13 00:58:39 +0000 UTCI think you should expect your words per hour and household accommodations to both go down when you're writing full time; time spent working on other stuff isn't useless for writing and a flexible schedule always invites more errands
George
2025-01-13 00:56:26 +0000 UTCWith just two tiers it feels kind of like the small and large versions for drinks. The large version just has so much better price/product ratio that you feel obligated to take that option. The 1$,3$,6$ is a nice gradual increase with a corresponding price/product ratio. If raised prices are necessary to faciliate a transition to being full-time author, I'd prefer a 1$,5$,10$ set-up. It preserves the tip-membership of 1$ and than two destinct memberships for 50% and 100% of the content
Kato68
2025-01-13 00:43:07 +0000 UTCAll I can say is the same as everyone else is budget & that with your price you & another author come as a package deal to equal $10 so you two have stayed concurrent in that budget. So you will probably still have me with the the grandfathering
ItWasIDIO!!
2025-01-12 21:56:38 +0000 UTCWith the current price, I dont even think about whether or not i SHOULD stay subscribed, I just do. However I frequently purge my $10+ subs on this platform and others, to rotate between different authors and "catch up" by binging what I missed, then do it all again the next month. Do whats best in your situation, the story has been good so I assume you'll still have a following either way.
ExiledCrab
2025-01-12 21:56:07 +0000 UTCBut also, do remember bias on who actually comments on these posts. It might not be very representative. I hope you have or can build a network with other succesfull authors, and gain some insights into their stats when changing prices. Because you're currently getting way too little for your efforts. I'm rooting for your numbers to go up! :)
Johny Woller Skovdal
2025-01-12 21:21:09 +0000 UTCFirst of all - you are the author, and you need to do what is right for you. Full stop. Are you looking for patreons who subscribe for a long amount of time (lower fee per month, fewer chapters ahead of wherever you publish), or patreons who occasionally buy "a book's worth of chapters" (higher fee per month, more chapters ahead)? I don't think that either model is wrong, but you will attract different spending patterns depending on those two factors. I follow a number of authors on Patreon and/or Ream. There are VERY FEW that I subscribe to for an extended time at $10/month, and it has to do with the opportunity cost of that money. If your eBook is selling at $7 (Just looked up runic artist 2), how much extra am I willing to pay for early access? Generally speaking, the few $10/mo authors I follow all turn out 5 chapters a week - over a year, that's the cost of ~17 books worth of content, and the economics are just silly to stay subscribed without a fast writing pace. I have certainly been known to subscribe to authors with a deep backlog for a single month just to finish a storyline that I was in the middle of. If you prefer a slower writing pace (and you need a pace that is sustainable for YOU), then not having a large backlog of chapters on patreon would balance things out at a $5/mo rate. At least for me, a $5-a-month author that I stay subscribed to would get more of my money than a $10/month author that I only subscribe to for two months a year. None of this is answers - just the thought process that I go through as a purchaser of your work and how I make my decisions.
Evan Van Dyke
2025-01-12 21:18:27 +0000 UTCYou're one of the very few authors where I've stuck with "max" tier for an extended time, because of the quality of the story and the lower price tag. I seldom stick with 10$ tiers for more than a month, and then return 3+ months later. It comes down to Patreon budgets as many others mention as well. The output per month also means a lot of course, so if that goes up, I might even stick around on 10$. But there's a good bunch of others stories out there that I aren't paying to atm, because yours is that brilliant, so I really hope it'll take of for you like the story deserves. :)
Johny Woller Skovdal
2025-01-12 21:14:26 +0000 UTCYou put that really well. Especially the comparison of how many books you could buy with the money spent on a 10 bucks per month subscription really showcases how much Patreon prices have increased in the last years, vastly outpacing book prices. One thing to consider in regards to this is, regardless of how one might feel about Amazon as a company, the price point of Kindle unlimited. For less than two 10$ / € per month subscriptions, I could also subscribe to KU, giving me access to an unbelievable amount of content. This raises the bar of what I expect from Patreon subscriptions by quite a bit, given that I like to stay in a somewhat reasonable range when it comes to value per money.
Flusspferd
2025-01-12 20:53:19 +0000 UTCThere are always two sides to these: What is fair to the author, and what is affordable for the reader? Going by the comments above, I am far from the only person with a set budget I can spend on Patreon each month. And as you mentioned, a lot of authors have (recently) hiked up their prices. Not to mention that Patreon started adding VAT on top of the subscription a while ago. Compared to ~1-2 years ago, although I slightly increased my monthly budget, I can follow less than half of the authors I could support before. So on the side of what is affordable, you'll definitely lose some full-time support. Then there is the part of what is fair to the author. Of course, good work should be well compensated. If you have a target of what you need to or want to earn from Patreon, you can of course increase prices or try and increase subscriber numbers. You could use lower-than-average Patreon prices to advertise for more subscribers. As long as I can afford to stay in my grandfathered tier, I'll stay on as full-time support, but after that I won't ever be able to go back to it for more than 3-4 months a year. It's just not feasible for me to pay ~144 € (incl. VAT) per year per author just for early access. Because at the end of the day, that is what this is, plus supporting the author. I won't own the book afterward, not even the eBook version, I'll actually have to pay again for that privilege. And if I just wait a few weeks, I could spend it on ~10-20 additional books per year. Also, what are your plans for becoming a full-time author, what would it mean for the Patreon? Some people might be incentivized to pay more or complain less about higher prices if this comes with additional benefits, e.g. longer chapters, more chapters, additional stories, or anything else you might plan. It is always the author's prerogative to set prices as they like, and the tier-prices you suggested are, as you mentioned, industry standard and not unreasonable. Grandfathering the existing tiers is a huge plus, in my opinion, but you'll likely see a drop in supporters, at least in the mid-term, even if your income from Patreon rises slightly. How this shakes out long-term, I don't know, and other authors who have or haven't gone this step themselves probably give the best advice on this. tl;dr: Thank you for grandfathering the existing tiers and I'll support you as long as I don't have to drop that, after that I'll have to drop to a rotating support with some other authors. I'll never stop following and reading the story.
Michael
2025-01-12 20:34:43 +0000 UTCI cycle between patrons trying to keep a budget/month. I will likely still cycle to this one, at 10 but will likely do so less.
Jon Lundy
2025-01-12 20:32:34 +0000 UTCI usually cycle Patreon memberships anyway, as I read upward of 30 stories in parallel and have no interest to spend 300+ bucks/month on patreon… That being said I will still give some advice / things I have seen from other authors that I enjoyed. 1. and this is entirely unrelated to the pricing change: with how unbelievably shitty patreon is for reading, please consider doing everybody, especially new people joining, a favor and add a collection containing only one post, which lists the links to all chapters. In addition, pleas add LAST and NEXT buttons to your chapters (example J. L. Mullins, author of Millennial Mage. There are some others as well). This allows readers that are catching up to just click the chapter and click next till they are up to date. Also a massive blessing on a re-read. 2. as someone mentioned previously, just two tiers is very odd. I usually see three regular tiers with increasing rewards and then sometimes some advanced tiers that add stuff like „name a side-character“, etc. I would recommend doing something similar, though whether you want to deal with rewards that directly influence your writing process or not is obviously up to you, so I consider the tiers 4 and above as optional, but would really like to see three tiers. 3, 5 and 10 bucks for example, can be something else obviously… 3. number of chapters. Personally, I find 10$ tiers that provide less than two months in advance relatively expensive, while those that do fell better. This is, of course, highly subjective (and doesn‘t even make any sense to begin with given word count / month or even word count in advance would make much better metrics), but it is something I expect others to calculate as well: how long do I have to wait for the chapters I can get here? I would thus recommend going no lower than 30 chapters for the 10$ tier. With 3 chapters / month and two months being roughly 9 weeks, this works out beautifully. 4. Scaling rewards. To incentivise people to join higher tiers, I would recommend above linear scaling for the perks of your tiers. Something like the following is something I commonly see: 3$: 6 chapters 5$: 12 chapters 10$: 30 chapters Be aware that a transition to full time writing would hopefully result in more chapters per week which would in turn influence my recommended advance chapters (see Zogarth, author of Primal Hunter for a very successful Patreon that grants 50 advance chapters in the 10$ tier). 5. and this is something I have only seen a couple of times, with mixed results, but it can work quite well: Consider 3 regular tiers and one „push the author to write more“-advanced tier. For every subscriber in that tier, either everyone or only this tier get one or two extra chapters in the given month. If you do it only for the given tier, this also helps with backlog management, because you will build a sizeable backlog for public and regular tier releases over time. Examples are Probably a Turnip, author of Chaotic Craftsman worships the Cube (he cancelled the tier due to stress, used to give 2 extra chapters per month for everyone for 90$ if I recall correctly. Obviously, not many people were willing to pay that price, but more and more altruistic people found there way to the community and really fucked the author over with this… another currently running example is Always rolls a one, author of A soldiers life, World Sphere, Town Builder, … Regular tiers and royal road get 2 chapters a week of A soldiers life. For every member of the highest tier (roughly 30$/month) members of that tier get double the output of one story for one week, effectively leading to 4 chapters of soldiers life per week for seraphim tier for as long as I can remember. This obviously adds stress and you need to think deeply whether doubling your output is feasible for you, at the same time, the author does not need to worry about his backlog for regular patrons and royal road, as he currently has more than a year of chapters in the bank… This is everything I can think of off the top of my hat, feel free to a) ignore my rambling and b) contact me or just discuss below if there are any questions.
Flusspferd
2025-01-12 20:16:05 +0000 UTCA common thought for me when reviewing Patreon support for authors is to compare the cost of chapters ahead to buying a book a month. I don't expect the author to be providing me with a full book per month, but if the disparity in advance content is too high I won't invest. Of course I'm taking into account many other factors too, i.e. publishing rate, chapter length, value for money, how enjoyable/addictive the story is, etc... I've seen some authors pushing for $10 for 5 advance chapters on a single chapter per week cycle, and I'd struggle to justify it. Saying that I'm supporting one author who isn't publishing anything currently, just on the off chance she decides to continue a great set of stories that she's started. Can't always know what's going on in an author's personal life to stop them from being writing.
Jason Hardman
2025-01-12 20:02:39 +0000 UTCSo I am in the process of evaluating how much I spend on Patreon, and honestly 10 bucks a month is a lot. I have a divide in my mind between paying for things I can’t get another way (more chapters per week) versus things I can get by waiting (same number of chapters per week, just delayed) for free. Also, Patreon has historically not worked well for me for anything below the top tier. It gets buggy, notifications get lost, etc.
John Smith
2025-01-12 19:56:13 +0000 UTCMy main issue is the lack of something in between for those who can't afford everything, but can go a little higher than the base. Most authors I follow, who have a large enough backlog, have a middle tier that gives extra chapters, but not all. Edit, after re-reading proposed prices, to add: maybe consider a $5 or $6 for 10 chapters option.
Jason Hardman
2025-01-12 19:47:38 +0000 UTC10 dollers is very common for 10 to 20 chapters ahead but like many people here it's also around the point that I start thinking about not going for it. I'd probably sub for a month or two and then stop for awhile. I am unsure if you would make more money from raising the price point to 10.
Shiloh Gallaher
2025-01-12 19:45:36 +0000 UTC$10 for access to all available chapters suits me just fine - anything over that and I recall that the chapters will be available on Royal Road and Amazon KU at some point.
StarWolf
2025-01-12 19:36:49 +0000 UTCI admit that your present pricing is generous compared to many in the industry. While $10/mo is fairly typical, it hits my "nope" point, where I might subscribe occasionally for a month or two but not regularly. And that disconnects me from the community and the timeliness or relevance of any feedback. I've no idea how important subscriber feedback is to you, or how common it is for people to subscribe for a month every so often, so I don't know how this will affect your bottom line... But maybe something to consider?
SteveC
2025-01-12 19:32:43 +0000 UTCTypically speaking I find that if you are 10- 15 chapters ahead and have a consistent schedule of updating chapters like M,W,F then 10$ is very fair.
C
2025-01-12 19:27:41 +0000 UTCSome authors also have a tier above all chapters for people to support extra. I don't do that for any I follow, because budget :(, but you might also try it.
Jennifer Leigh
2025-01-12 19:25:48 +0000 UTCi have a budget for which stories i subscribe to, so i often cycle them out to get the extra chapters. being at the $6 tier here has kept me subbed a few times when deciding on which to replace for new stories. this change will affect me in the future, but its worth it.
Rowsdower
2025-01-12 19:25:14 +0000 UTCI'm cheap so no, but this is your time and effort don't under sell yourself for us, the story is worth it I genuinely thought I found a bargain when it wasn't 10 its easily the same quality as hwfwm, unbound, salvos or btdem in my opinion, as such I'd expect to pay the same
Bri
2025-01-12 19:17:32 +0000 UTCFull time author= more chapters
Joe Monopoli
2025-01-12 19:14:46 +0000 UTCLe Ecònème
Brandon Lydick
2025-01-12 19:06:30 +0000 UTC
