New Year Housekeeping and Plans! (Patreon)

Hey all, Chris here with some important information. First and foremost, Happy New Year! Thank you all for supporting us for another year and enabling us to do what we love – bring you more wonderful stories!

In that vein, though, I want to discuss Patreon and how we’re approaching the service in the new year.

Firstly, we took some time to examine the promises we were making at each tier, and we determined that we wanted to better align our message with what we can conceivably deliver to you as a reward for your support. As a result, we want to do a little dusting-off and house cleaning to update and more transparently lay out what you might expect at each tier as a supporter.

In the spirit of transparency, we wanted to explain the plan to you all before any changes are made in order to feel out what you might think about them, and see if there’s any heavily requested features that we can reliably deliver on.

Up first – let’s address Monstrous Horizons. In a previous Q&A, we confirmed that MH is pretty much dead right now. Other projects and keeping up with the demand of release schedules means that this “serialized” side series idea just doesn’t have enough space and time to exist, so we’re going to be removing that as a perk in the tiers. It will remain accessible (for now at least) but we will not be promising any future work on it.

Second – We’re going to clean up some wording to make it simpler to understand what some of the existing rewards actually are. This includes things like “Patron-only newsletter” being changed to “Patron Exclusive Monthly Update” to remove confusion about this update coming from an external source. Or “Access to preview chapters” being changed to “Access to the first 10 chapters of the book currently in writing” so as to remove confusion about having permanent access to the first 10 chapters of all of the books in the catalogue. These won’t actually affect the way the reward has been delivered, but we hope it will remove some confusion on what exactly they entail. We’ll also be adding in some basic rewards that have been introduced without adding them to the list – like preference in questions for the monthly video AMA.

Third – We know some of the rewards haven’t been being delivered in a consistent format. This includes things like the Patron-Only Q&A’s, Discovery Writings, and a couple others. As a result, we plan to remove these as rewards and instead introduce new rewards in their place. Some examples of things we’re looking at for rewards to replace these are:

• Access to a monthly evening chat in Discord

• Access to Special Print Versions of books

• Sneak peeks of upcoming projects

• Active participation in polls that will shape stories as they are written

• Participation in limited drawings to directly name people, places, or objects in a story as its written

• Unique naming colors for each tier of support in the Discord Server

• Etc.

Now please keep in mind that these are not final, set in stone, 100% chance to occur things – but these should serve as an example of where our heads are at for how we might add more value to the support that you graciously give us. I’ve attached an image here that shows the PROPOSED NON-FINAL tier breakdown with the current benefits and with the new benefits they would be given to better demonstrate how this might look in some of the earlier tiers.

Take a look at them and let us know what you think, and like I said, if you have a great idea for something you’d like to see as a reward, don’t be afraid to shout it out!

Please keep in mind that some of these things are logistically very difficult, if not outright impossible for us to do, so please, please, PLEASE understand that these are NOT final and are merely an indication of the direction that we MAY want to take the reward structure in, and even if they do go into effect, they may take some amount of time for us to logistically spin up and get fully operational.

Thank you again for your continued support, and we can’t wait to show you what we have in store for you all this year!

ChrisEDITING TO ADD: Please keep in mind these changes are not going into effect immediately, and we are looking to gather feedback BEFORE any changes are made.