The Search For A New Routine: Minimum Viable Product and Patronage

One of the most confronting terms I’ve seen thrown around in contemporary indie publishing discussions is minimum viable product. It’s a phrase we’ve inherited from the software side of the industry, where developers release an early version of their programs with a core baseline of features that will be useful to early adopters. Later iterations of the product then build upon the feedback of that core user base, guiding the future development and building up the buzz around the product.

On the indie side of things, the first person to use the term appears to be Michael Anderle, a coder-turned-author who applied the philosophy to his early science fiction offerings. Books went out with terrible covers, not-so-great copyedits, and structural edits to be applied later, using the speed of publishing to lure in a particular type of early reader and gauge the future potential. These days Anderle is better known as the founder of 20 Books to 50K, but he lays out his earliest publishing philosophy in his 90 Days to 10K white paper from 2016.

I do a lecture on digital publishing workflows for UQ every year, talking to a crew of aspiring editors, and the response when I lay out Anderle’s philosophy and approach to publishing usually involves a physical recoil. He works completely at odds with the expectations of anyone involved in the velocity model of publishing, where books absolutely need to come out in the best viable form in order to nail the one-month sales window. At the same time, Anderle has built a publishing empire in the space of five years, with LMBPN Publishing putting out a hundred or so books a year.

I’ve used the Minimum Viable Product method myself in the past, despite my reservations. There were books I’ve put out specifically so I can embrace the learning curve, starting with the Short Fiction Lab series and its rapid iteration of cover design and formatting. I’ve released books with the wrong title development (Exile and its sequels) and rapidly worked to update those books. That is Minimum Viable Product in a nutshell, although I wouldn’t have called it that: a confidence that shipping now is okay, because there’s always a chance to fix things and redevelop if it doesn’t work. Even indie writers who don’t believe in Minimum Viable Product, preferring to put out a polished product, still use a variation of this philosophy by releasing books to beta readers and review teams, taking on board their feedback in the lead-up to release.

For all my discomfort with minimum viable product as a philosophy, I’ve found the variation of it that works for me when releasing fiction and non-fiction. I frequently warn authors that I’m completely okay with a Brain Jar Press book launching slow and taking time to find its audience, because I know that all our books will eventually. It’s not something you’re used to if you come out of the traditional publishing space, but that’s part of the charm of working with a small press.

At the same time, there is an area where minimum viable product still causes me to have kittens, and that’s here on Patreon.

One of the quirks of crowd-support platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter is the necessity of defining your minimum viable product before you launch. It’s right there in the reward levels and the promised exchange—support me for this much, and you’ll get this in return—and it’s hard to resist the siren song of promising that little bit more. And while most people are largely interest in supporting rather than rewards, at least in my experience, each of those goals comes with a level of psychic weight for the creator. They’re promises that should be delivered upon. 

We’re eight months into me running this Patreon thus far, and I’m staring down the barrel of another evolution as I learn to work around the day job and figure out the new normal. And one thing that’s incredibly clear at this stage is that the minimum viable product I dreamed up back in March is no longer possible with the time I’ve got.

While I put a lot of this at the foot of the time crunch a day job brings to bear, that’s not the entire story. Where I work is also in a state of flux, and simple changes like writing in a coffee shop have unexpected consequences. I can no longer write and post as a single unit of activity, for example, because the WIFI access is haphazard and dependent on a phone hotspot; and even if I can get online, the bandwidth precludes me from using the online AI copyediting program I use to clean up my messy first drafts before they go live. My writing space is no longer surrounded by a huge pile of non-fiction I can refer to for inspiration and quotes, nor do I have access to my research notebooks as I write. 

Similarly, I’d fallen back into the routine of writing my newsletters on a Tuesday for a few months, doing the whole email in one fell swoop. They’d be uploaded on a Wednesday, giving me Thursday as a back-up if my schedule didn’t allow it. All that changed a few months back, when my Write Club days (which are no longer reserved for writing) switched from Thursday to Tuesday and threw off my newsletter game. Being out of the house five days a week has thrown me off even more, to the point where I’m slowly re-mapping where newsletters fit into my week.

It’s trickier than it used to be, because the time I have to work is both heavily compressed and eats into the time I used to spend hanging out with my partner. So it’s not just a matter of establishing new patterns, but also breaking the groove of two sets of older patterns and expectations about how our life works.

All this is one of the reasons I predicted it would take a few months to hit the new normal, and why we’re only just starting to approach it after finishing up old jobs, clearing freelance gigs, and getting the wedding out of the way. Despite being three weeks into the BWF job right now, it’s essentially three days into figuring out what routines and choices are possible within the new paradigm.

I’d promised myself no major changes to projects until we hit the relative normalcy of December (not a phrase I thought I’d ever use), but I suspect there will be a reconfiguring of the Patreon at the end of this month to bring the expected minimum viable product in line with the delivered minimum viable product.

I think I’ve got regular updates licked at this point—they take place in the twenty minute café window before work, after I’ve done three pages of handwriting on the creative project. That’s the sustainable window in my current schedule, with newsletters and blog scheduling left for the weekend when I’m surrounded by WIFI. I suspect the Patreon will have a bit of a different pitch come December too, given that my focus is slowly inching back towards doing new fiction work.

And while all that feels good—I’ve got the problem of producing new drafts relatively sorted with the current schedule—it means I start looking at the next round of issues. The next thing to feel out is when work gets revised, and how I can manage the shipping/distribution/posting as a sperate activity, and start incorporating time for engaging with comments.

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