Time, Thought, Turnaround (Patreon)

Hey all.

I know I do this a few times a year: make some announcement that I want to "restructure" and that I'll be either doing that soon in coming months or I will be going on hiatus to give myself time to get myself into a position where I can charge forward again with a plan and ideas.

And sometimes, it has worked; things have happened, changes have been made, the break has invigorated me and/or this patreon page. And sometimes it hasn't made much difference.

That aside, as people normally seem to do around the start of a new year, I've been doing a lot of thinking and reflecting especially about this patreon business. Patreon announced they'll be bringing some changes to their site for creators like myself and for patrons and I have felt optimistic about their ideas for improvements and change. So, this is definitely one of those moments of "yes I'm sticking with Patreon".

Only, I can't stick with the current way I've been running things for a number of reasons. Honestly, it's been a combination of 3 main things: my page is outdated for my own personal tastes of what I want people to see and experience when they come to it, I haven't been able to actively commit to a good, efficient schedule of content creation and release and lastly that content in my eyes feels like it lacks the pull it needs to make this patreon a successful business and show of the capability of my performance as an author and creator.

Frankly speaking I feel like I'm not making any progress with my page. It feels stagnant and it's now too stagnant for me to ignore anymore. The thing is that I love writing and creating stories and I've loved sharing that on my patreon page for several years now. But I keep losing sight of the fact that Patreon is a business not just a platform to share things. I mean, yes you can just share things and not worry about financial returns but I did join this site in order to take advantage of starting to establish myself a little more professionally and make some money doing it. And when I remind myself: yes I need to get a better business model going I run into two things

What am I going to change? What works and what doesn't?

Can I make the necessary changes in a realistic way?

I can normally answer those questions and unfortunately the answer to the latter has often been that's going to take some time to put together and publish. Time which in my life has wavered in its availability and my motivation levels.

As you may know, I had emergency heart surgery last March which really robbed me not just of time but of motivation and energy to keep going with the plans I had in mind at that time for my page here. Now that I'm in the clear and have a lot more energy, etc I've gained full-time employment which has been so great financially but it's really restructured what availability I have for fixing the problems I glaringly see in my Patreon workings.

Before all this, I was meant to go through all of my creator settings and pages and evaluate what I was keeping, altering and/or deleting. I found out to my chagrin that my 'Welcome Message' was defaulted back to a 2015 greeting I'd made and that (after contacting support) there was nothing they could do except advise me to type out my welcome notes again by hand manually. I realized a problem (and learned a lesson) that I did not have a copy of what I'd written in each 'Welcome Note' at each tier. I'd have to start from scratch. Okay, something that was probably for the best but also something that will take up a lot of time and forethought considering I have been putting down plans for new tiers and their offerings so in order for me to customize the welcome note at each tier I need to know what each tier is offering.

A lot of the work that I have to do has to be done in large chunks/all at once because of the interconnectivity of it all. And I'm willing to make a plan to do that, but because of those little glitches that have set me back, I started to feel discouraged. I already felt like "my writing and my patreon posts need to be stronger" and then to add "you also need to rework the entire business around as a whole behind the scenes" in addition to getting the ropes at my new job and feeling more settled and so I hit that wall of seeing too many plates to eat from and therefore starved myself (metaphorically lol).

But I'm going to do it and I want to do it. I am carving out plans behind the scenes as I type this. Yet, I also hesitated about typing up about all of this because I felt like it was an admission of failure and another "please be patient with me" which I have asked so many times in the past and I know that's unfair and not really business saavy.

So instead, I'm just going to say: stay tuned. I'm setting a goal of one month to have my projected changes initiated. Meanwhile, I have decided to still post the most recently due chapter of Beauty and the Brit but please be advised even that will be changing in the future.

So while I have you here, please provide suggestions of changes you want to see as a follower and/or patron. If nothing to suggest, then that's okay and I thank you for reading this far!

My current heads-up that I can give you is that I want to focus more on serious projects this year: actually publishing a novel, providing physical and digital copies of my work available for the public and/or patrons and improving my professional quality instead of quantity. In the past I tried many different types of posts, scheduling, different availability/exclusivity, different charging of patrons and frequency of paid-for posts in order to see what was successful and what wasn't. Admittedly, the biggest lesson I came away with was output and your time vs input and patron value had a huge disparity. I was working so much to get very little back in regards to knowing where I needed to improve and what content was most successful because I had such varied results. 

I've chosen this year to focus on my true passion which is not writing little one-shots or fan-fictions but to tell original stories in novel length. While I love the fun I have in the former, to truly move towards my personal writing goals I need to focus more energy to that path for the time being. And I shall.

Thank you all again. You'll hear from me in late February again when I do a "relaunch" announcement to tell you when things are going to be officially launched and online and what too will be in place!

Any questions, concerns or feedback is welcomed below or to my inbox!

Lastly, a reminder that my author Facebook page is still up and running with sharing of more 'fun' content through posts and story slideshow(s)! Hope to see you there in the meantime!

Love,

Britt xoxo

(PS I think I'm kicking impostor syndrome's ass so like, throw some confetti for me haha!)