Something New: Patreon

Okay, so, I will be trying something new this year!

Have I mentioned I dislike figuring out how to do new things online? I really hate figuring out how to do new things online. But! I think there are some really obvious, really big advantages to trying out Patreon:

* Patreon appears to be the simplest way to make ebooks available to all readers everywhere before dropping each ebook into KU and making it exclusive to Amazon. Unlike distributing ebooks through Draft to Digital, I should be able to make each new ebook available via Patreon and then make it unavailable, click, done, without worrying about some platform failing to unpublish it and thus causing potentially serious problems with KU terms of service. My intention is to drop each new book into Patreon for two weeks or a month before it becomes available via Amazon.

* Patreon gives me a way to make the stories otherwise available only in my newsletter available to anybody. This is especially important as I’m bringing out stories in installments. What if someone subscribes to my newsletter now and gets only parts 4 and 5 of Ryo’s story about stealing the tiger pelt? That isn’t great, and it’s not what I intended when I thought of putting stories in the newsletter.

* Patreon takes 8% off the top rather than 30%, so it would be nice to have people subscribe to Patreon.

SO, what I have up now are the following:

A) The complete story about the fox and the boy –> Word file –> Tier One

B) The complete story about young Ryo stealing the tiger pet –> Word file –> Tier One

C) The ebook of The Year’s Midnight –> epub file –> Tier Two

And what I really, really need to know are the following:

DOES THE LINK WORK? Everything blue in this post has the same link. If you click on the link, does it take you to the right place?

DOES THE PAGE LOOK OKAY? Do you see anything obvious that I plainly did wrong or failed to do with this page? I looked carefully at multiple Patreon pages and I think I did this right, but maybe not!

DO THE FILES DOWNLOAD PROPERLY? If anybody who joins at any tier would kindly check whether the Word files download properly, I would be grateful. If anyone who joins at the middle tier would kindly try downloading The Year’s Midnight to make sure the epub file downloads properly, I would be even more grateful. Patreon SAY it supports epub files, but I would like to make sure.

If all of this works properly, then my goal is to drop an epub of MARAG into Patreon in March and then unpublish it there and drop it into Amazon / KU in April. If something doesn’t work properly on Patreon, my goal is to fix it and follow the same schedule, but if it takes longer to get something fixed than I hope, that would be awkward. That’s why I’m putting The Year’s Midnight there right now, to check and see if epub files work before I try it with MARAG. This is also why I haven’t picked a preorder date for MARAG on Amazon. I can’t do that until I can see if all the rest of this is going to work properly.

ALSO

I’m going to pull the Death’s Lady ebooks everywhere else and drop them into KU. I have hit the unpublish buttons everywhere. What I’m going to do, if all goes well, is drop all four of the Death’s Lady books into Patreon until maybe the end of March, then nix them there and drop them into KU and run a sale on them once they’re on KU.

At the end of the year, I’m going to assess how the Death’s Lady series did exclusive versus how it did wide, but my very strong presumption is that royalties on this series will be much, much higher exclusive. If I didn’t think that was going to happen, I’d leave them wide.

ALSO

Many thanks to commenter Allan S, who told me about Glynn Stewart using Patreon this way. I’m not doing it exactly the way Glynn does it, but I wouldn’t have thought of Patreon at all except for Allan’s comment.

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