I'm considering a Patreon account... Need help with ideas!

[PS Power]

I don't know if I'd even be allowed to do such a thing, but I was thinking that I'd try to set that up, and maybe place a bit about it at the end of the books.

Why?

Amazon.com is, over time, slowly taking a bigger piece of the pie, every few months ratcheting what gets paid to authors down. Normally in subtle ways. With similar sales and borrows as always, I've seen what I've been earning each month drop. It's now 1/5th of what it used to be. Again, the sales are fine...

So, I need to learn to get around them.

What kind of incentives would people like? You know, if you give x dollars a month, you get something from me. (Normally something fairly inexpensive. For instance, if you give five a month, you would get each book or project as it comes out, in multiple formats instead of just getting it from Amazon? That would have to be direct, I think, since anything in KU (where most of the money is coming from now...) can't be up online anywhere else.)

So, what would be good? No one should be giving more than ten to twenty dollars a month. Even at that, I'd have to increase what I was doing, if I can, to make it worth their while. (Otherwise, why not just pay $4.99 for the book when it come out. Or less, since I do that too...)

Any thoughts would be good. What would work for you, personally? It has to be pretty attractive.

Let me know what your thoughts are!

Dale

[Gary F. York]

Damn!

If I'm right in my count, I now have 99 books of yours in my library and the book which you're holding until the Hurricane sit. is handled will make an even 100. That's far more books written and published than any other single author in my library and, more perhaps than is in anyone's library, ever!

Re. Patreon.

I'd rather you didn't need to do that! First I hope you can spend your time writing the books I love to read than by writing blog posts or writing special little pieces to reward your patrons. And if you did offer your books directly to your patrons, I'd have to do a little extra work to get those books loaded into my kindle. And, of course, I'd hate that!

So. I'll keep an eye out here for anyone suggesting ideas and will try, over the next few days or weeks, to come up with some ideas of my own.

Hang in there!

G.

[PS Power]

I pretty much have to do something. It won't hurt the speed of books coming out though.

There would (probably) be a little more work to get them loaded onto your Kindle.

So far, what I have is something like: (Monthly subscription)

Tier one: Five dollars. You get a copy of every book that comes out under the P.S. Power name, that the public can get. You might get them earlier, by a day or so. (At least five books per year.)

Tier two: Ten dollars. You get all the books from the first one (because, that's kind of the point) Plus any short works and at least one extra novel per year available nowhere else. (Probably more than one book extra. My plan would be for three, but there are limits to what I can do.)

Tier three: Twelve fifty The first three tiers, plus having a character named after you, or a dedication put at the front of a book (You don't get to pick the book, but I'll take suggestions!)

Tier four: One hundred dollars. I'll take your suggestion for a book, help you refine the base idea, then write it. This isn't co-authorship, so idea only. You get your name on the book as a contributor (if you like it.) I'll still own all the rights to it, so don't do this with your Masterpiece.

That's about what I have so far. I could split things up a bit. add in something at fifty per month. (Well worth it, of course.)

At tier one, it shouldn't cost much more than buying form Amazon, while sending a lot more of it to me, directly. I haven't put these up yet, so any other suggestions, or ideas would be great! You can still get them on Amazon for the public books. (Like the ones that you've seen from me so far.) So you won't be stuck that way, if the price is too high or you don't want to do the extra work. (Which might be there, though it shouldn't be much.)

Gary, send me an email and I can send you a book that should work on your Kindle to try out putting it on directly? Then you can tell me how. (I don't own a Kindle. Or, really anything like that. Handheld computers or phones... Nope. Not a one!)

power_dale@yahoo.com

[qHnED7SnYgQs]

Personally, I'll happily pledge $10 a month just to keep you writing without getting anything in return.

I' have a Patreon of my own to get some financial support for working a (freely available, open source) software I wrote.

For my Patreon, I don't actually offer any rewards beyond the knowledge that the Patrons are supporting future development. I'm also not making any regular posts or anything. But while that works for me, it probably doesn't work for you.

A word of warning about your Tier two idea: you can expect people to pledge for 1 month, take everything they can get, and then cancel their pledge. My suggestion would be that in addition of what Tier one gives, you allow people to pick 3 or so books from your back catalogue per month instead of giving it all away in one go.

As for your Tier 4 above... In my mind, I've been playing around with a... well, it's not a story seed, as I don't have a story... but... lets call it a seed idea for a different reality that fits in your multiverse and draws it's foundation from one of them for a while now. I've been wanting to write that up and send it to you for a few weeks but haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll see if I can get that done in the next week or two.

[PS Power]

Neat! Send that along.

As to the back catalog: I honestly meant that you would get all the NEW books that came out. Assuming that most people already had the old ones they wanted. (Or were illegally downloading them. I hear that's a thing? I mean with my books. Part of that may well be a format issue. I'm only offering one format in a three or four format world. Right now.)

I plan on making regular posts though. I want this to be a benefit to everyone doing it. I do need to change Tier four into being "Commission a book". Though you have a thought there, these are all monthly contributions. People could just sign up, get what they want and then leave. That's not so bad if it's a book or two. Even ten. (It probably means they want to read them, after all.) I might feel a bit differently if people got a free/ incredibly cheap book off of me or had me spin my wheels on something strange and then walk away laughing, leaving me with a lot of wasted time.

So, to that end, I need to make sure that everyone knows that I'll only be writing good books. Fiction, as well. (Though I do have a great idea for a book about grilled cheese sandwiches. "Grilled Cheese: Where Sauteing Meets Perfection". Non-fiction, clearly!