Subscriber Survey Results!

Responses on my Patron Check-Up survey have petered out after netting a respectable 123 responses, 66% of which were current subscribers and the remainder either considering it or… just using the survey to express opinions? Sure, why not, all are welcome!

As usual, the “what’s your favorite content” question gave me expected results: for the most part, people like everything I post, and don’t seem to care what goes up. Cut scenes/sneak peeks were the highest rated, and “access to group/first reads” was second, with “scans of art” and “news and reminders of Kickstarters” right behind. The lowest rated of the group was videos/art-making content, but that only tells me that my youtube followers haven’t made the connection between my channel and my patreon (or don’t want to). If I talk up my patreon on youtube, that number will probably go up and my patron audience will diversify accordingly.

There were some ad hoc answers to this question that I enjoyed seeing: at least two people wanted more politics, and one person wanted more cat pics. I concede that author pet pictures are pretty awesome. I have made a mental note.

Other things people requested:

• More Kherishdar meta-conversations
• More livestreaming (also, less livestreaming)
• More Three Jaguars
• More illustrations of my fiction (interesting)
• More behind-the-scenes worldbuilding info

More real-time chats were requested multiple times, but I have no idea how to do that effectively anymore (barring the youtube livestreams) so for now it’s on the backburner. Maybe someone can run a hosted livechat and I can show up? Dunno. Constant persistent chat is out, but I wouldn’t be unwilling to do a scheduled event: the problem is figuring out where. I’m half tempted to do it on Twitter, via the Spaces function.

Perhaps the most surprising request, which came from many, many respondents, was “post more.” I feel like I’m already super posty, putting up content 2-3 times a week… do people really want more than that? Doesn’t it get overwhelming? Especially if you have the ‘email the post’ options on? I don’t want to spam anyone.

This is one of the things Locals does well and Patreon does badly, in my opinion: it allows community members to post in a way people can easily see on the feed. So if you want to talk with fellow patrons between posts, then you have that option. That would help (I think?) with the ‘more content’… maybe? Dunno.

My next big question was to ask what people were looking forward to seeing most and unsurprisingly all four of the Pelted options were clear frontrunners (even Alysha’s next novel was much higher than the next highest non-Peltedverse option). But of the remainder, Haley was the clear leader, with Kherishdar and Coracle next. Basically nothing I didn’t expect (other than the pleasant surprise that Haley’s popular).

The freeform question netted me some interesting comments, as usual. Some takeaways from that:

• A couple of people asked for ‘book club discussions’ or missed the readalongs, which was interesting because I didn’t think those were creating much by way of engagement. Since the point of the readalong was that I wasn’t involved, I can’t address this one, but I thought it was promising that people were interested in it.
• This final question is where I got a handful of people mourning the languishing of the Twin Kingdoms setting. I’m glad it has its fans still, but the economics continues to militate against my adding to it, alas.
• A lot of specific characters came up too, in the requests, some expected (more Vasiht’h, more Lisinthir, more Reese) and some not so much (more Haley—yay!—and more Brighthaven? And more than one person wanted to see Alysha/Brighthaven’s ship sail). It’s fun to see people advocating for more screentime for their favorites.
• A gratifying number of people like “everything” no matter the tone. Several said they feel like they get good value for their money, both on patron platforms and on Kickstarters. Many hope I’ll write faster—no pressure, lol. I take this to mean that in general, I’m doing well.

Though this survey was open to everyone, and I sent it broadly, I can’t really draw any useful conclusions about what I should be doing to pull in more patrons. I can probably assume that if existing patrons like the content, that it will also attract potential patrons… it’s not like there’s a ton of strategies for posting for writer/artist subscriber platforms. I would like to create a pipeline from youtube to a subscriber platform, though, but I need to get over my ambivalence about video first… I don’t feel I’m very good at it. But in general, I think the message is ‘keep doing what you’re doing,’ so… that I will do.

As usual, your feedback and suggestions are welcome!