Ramblings around Patreon social dynamics

[mrissa]

I want to be clear that I am not saying that Patreon and similar social supports are bad in any way. I support several! I think they're good! I ponder having one myself! In fact, writing this post reminded me to go subscribe to another! What I want to noodle with in this blog post is: I think that since they're fairly new, we don't have an entirely good handle on the social intricacies of them, as a community. Certainly I don't! And I would like to talk more about them. Please, please use the comments to do that if you also have thoughts, if you think I'm wrong or missing things, etc.! If you have good answers, I would like to hear them!

So. I can see three main reasons to support a Patreon (or similar, I'm going to shorthand it to Patreon). Project support: you like the specific thing that the person is doing on their Patreon and want to get the installments of it. Art support: you like the work they're doing in general, and you want to see that work continue whether the specific updates/installments are your cuppa. Personal support: you think that the person is worth supporting whether they're doing specific work at this exact moment--for hope of future cool work, in appreciation of past work, because this is an easy way for you to slip a personal friend a few bucks even though you think their art is kind of meh, "other."

I don't think that it's necessarily clear to the person who has the Patreon what proportion of each of those things their supporters has in mind with their support. I mean, there are some accounts that have monthly support and are not providing updates/installments of any kind of backer reward, so they're pretty sure that you're not there for the project support! But in general I don't think feedback is very clear on which things you're there for. It also may not be very internally clear to you. Also! Also your proportions of type of support can shift over time. Friend doing a cool project can stop that project and start a new project you're less enthusiastic about...but still you believe in Friend's work. Or Friend can hit one of life's road bumps, but you believe that they'll get back on track and in the meantime you're happy to support. Or! Friend was in one of life's road bumps and you were supporting, but now they're doing something specifically awesome!

So into this set of inputs comes several social problems. There is the Bored Now Problem. If you have a friend whose traditionally published books you were buying, and you get bored with them, a traditional publisher will not give them an itemized list of who has and has not bought them--but they will definitely see if you've dropped their Patreon. Do we have to follow indefinitely if we were mostly on a Project support basis and that is no longer interesting? Is the protocol to politely not notice who has dropped you? Is any feedback possible there, or do they just have to guess why people would have dropped? Can they ask, if they notice a specific or a general downturn in support? If they do ask, will they get honest answers?

Then there's the Lurkers Support Me In Email With $5/Month Problem: if the person has started doing mildly odious things, when is that worth withdrawing your financial support? if you know they really rely on backers? if they're more than mildly odious, deeply odious? does the answer change based on how much of your Patreon backing is skewed toward each of the categories? Do you tell the person why you're not supporting them any more or just back away quietly? Does the answer change based on how much you've had a relationship vs. how much you've been an anonymous fan?

There is the What Did I Incentivize Problem, and I think of that a lot when I think about setting up a Patreon. I write flash fairly quickly. I could easily set up a flash-a-month Patreon. Do I want to make sure that I write at least one flash a month, every month? and that I prioritize them for a Patreon rather than for a professional market I would currently send them to? I already think about this for things like blog projects. I think about it when I consider pitching essays--I love essays, but I pitch fewer of them than I could, because I don't want to get into a position where I'm resenting essays for taking time away from fiction that I value more. I want to be doing the amount of them that I value.

I guess I am currently concerned that a lot of people right now are in a place where they really really need the money from their Patreon and they cannot tell how important the specific project is to their patrons giving them that money. The feedback mechanisms are slow and have a lot of social awkwardness built into them. So there's a lot of early-project feedback, sort of: "would you support me beginning a Patreon that was set up like so"--but this is basically never set up with a control group so that the artist can see what another group would support if it was set up differently. They can see what people did support and what they didn't stop supporting but not where the priorities are.

There's a lot of inertia in that system. And I feel like some of the people who most need the impetus to level up in what they're doing also most need the money they're getting from Patreon. Now...would they be getting impetus to level up from not getting paid? Quite often no. Quite often having zero dollars a month from their art/projects would be giving them impetus to do something far worse for their art/projects with their time, like...not art at all.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is: for people who are setting up something like this, how do you build in checks and balances so that you don't set it up with a feedback loop to reinforce the wrong thing? Do you set up a regular check-in with yourself to see how you feel about the balance of stuff that you're doing? Is there any way to have trusted patrons you can ask? How do you manage emotions around who does and does not support your Patreon (knowing that people honestly may have trouble keeping track of who even has one and what they're doing with it)?

And on the flip side, as a patron of these things, how do you know when and how to extricate gracefully? What are the protocols for what feedback you can give kindly? Even--especially--if that feedback is, "Y'know, this stuff is great and all, but I would still support your Patreon at this level if you were doing way less, so you can maybe relax a little"?

Comments

[pameladean]

Patreon provides people who are cancelling their subscriptions an opportunity to check off a reason for the cancellation, and if they check "Other Reason" they can write a longer comment. These are listed as "Exit Surveys," I think, or something similar, and the creator can see them.

The vast majority of mine are either, "My financial situation changed" or "I only intended to pledge for a limited time." Of course, that is a polite way of deflecting the question if you feel that your reason is nobody's business, as well you might under many circumstances.

I am struggling mightily with almost all of the issues you mention. When I ask for feedback, everybody who answers is emphatic about how they just want to support my work and I should not do things that would distract me from it, but I should do them if I think they'd be fun. Whether this is a true representation of the majority of supporters or whether people with different opinions don't want to post them is, of course, impossible to tell.

In general, I resist Patreon's persistent efforts to get me to pester my patrons in many ways. I don't feel that privately addressing any individual who hasn't addressed me first is appropriate. I can ask questions in a post, but I feel I really should make sure people don't feel pressured to answer. This is not conducive to acquiring much information, but I wouldn't be comfortable otherwise.

As a supporter, and as many people told me they also felt when I did a LiveJournal post about starting a Patreon, I often feel slightly burdened by getting a lot of rewards. I am way behind on reading people's Patreon posts or actually reading the fiction written for my tier. But I don't think a majority of supporters are really like me. Not overall; but I often think I have evidence that most of my own supporters are like me; unless that is just wishful thinking.

My rewards structure is very minimal and only includes things I'd probably do anyway. I am pretty sure this has led to some Bored Now exits, but I only have one that actually said so. I think there are also some What the Hell is Taking You So Goddamn Long exits, aside from the Only intended to pledge for a limited time people, though that could include some polite What is taking you so long reactions, and who could blame them; but people mostly do not say that.

When I set up the Patreon, I did include some things I would do, or do more of, once the current project was finished. They were things that I could begin doing at once, though I mostly did not end up actually doing them at once; so I still have most of them in reserve.

I think considering what one is likely to be able to do and having things in reserve, and doing things one would probably do anyway, are all useful strategies on the creator end. The main bad effect I've seen with my Patreon is that discussions of writing, and of writing my neverending novel in particular, are all on the Patreon, since I committed to at least one of those a month; and so they don't go on Dreamwidth or even Twitter any more. I feel I'm somehow cheating my Patreon supporters if I put up that kind of content for just anybody for free.

This is awfully rambly, so I'll stop for now.

P.

[swan_tower]

Nothing wrong with rambling!

I went into my Patreon operating on the assumption that a certain piece of Kickstarter advice also applies here: do not promise so many rewards that you'll regret it later. It's easy to get so excited with backer rewards and stretch goals that you end up with a pile of waaaaaaaay too much work (and often too much expense as well). So I think a minimal rewards structure of things you'd be doing anyway is very much the smart way to go. I do offer a few time-intensive ones, but they're the upper tiers, and very few people have opted for those.

[pameladean]

That is very good Kickstarter advice, and in some ways even better Patreon advice, since Patreon doesn't operate over a fixed period of time, but goes on and on and on, or at least, one hopes it will.

Even my upper-tier rewards, such as they are, are more things I'm a bit antsy about giving large numbers of people access to in advance, rather than really time-intensive.

P.

[swan_tower]

Yes, the rewards have to be sustainable. Edit: I keep feeling like surely there are better things I could come up with and the reason I don't have more higher-tier patrons is because my rewards suck, but I don't really know.

[snippy]

I am a patron to a handful of Patreons. One is someone I used to read on Usenet, and I'm not doing it for a particular project in that case but as financial support to someone whose (non-fiction, unpublished) writing I enjoy. Two are periodic free things that I want to support continuing (a podcast and a website; neither has ads). The others are for access to specific content that is kept for Patreon subscribers only for some period of time; I could just wait, but I support the artists. I have pulled back on my contribution to some Patreons when I have lower income or greater expenses, and increased some when I get a raise.

I've tried to post in the communities but a lot are basically inactive (the creators don't participate much there). But all of them have public contact info and I've emailed some with ideas or suggestions when asked.

[melita66]

I think I started with patreon to support James Nicoll. Even though I support him at a level that would get me some reviews, I also directly commission reviews a few times a year. I support 8 authors who have varying levels of content there.

I rejiggered my contributions a few months ago and added 3 artists and a magazine (where I already have a lifetime subscription). I also give a small amount to a work-related website.

Some of the creators have shifted a bit to a point where I've tentatively like to drop them but I know they need the money. Others seem to be in good shape now (monetarily) but I feel strongly about their work.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who would look at my current savings/ retirement savings/kids college funds and say I should put that money into savings instead. But they're not in fandom and these creators have given me a lot of joy. I have a great, well-paying job so it's not a hardship.

[mrissa]

Yeah, my concern would be less "will someone think you should put this money into savings instead," because someone will think that of any small joy any person can find in life, and more "will YOU feel that YOU would find more joy in supporting DIFFERENT Patreons but feel unable to switch your pledges due to social pressure."

[lilysea]

Thank you for this post! ^_^

[sartorias]

Reading with interest. I support a couple of Patreons, though I have to be super careful because my tiny social security check is supposed to cover far too many things, including car payments. And one of my main concerns was, do they need it more than I need that bit of money, and can I afford to keep it going so I don't hurt their feelings if I stop..

But I will never get the courage to start one. Just the idea causes my guts to gnaw with anxiety.

[swan_tower]

This is a very good conversation to be having.

On the patron end, I definitely feel the social pressure around supporting or ceasing to support friends. It's super-awkward to imagine a friend seeing the message "so-and-so has canceled their pledge." And on the creator end, while those exit surveys do exist, Patreon makes you jump through hoops to find them: I get emails when a new patron signs up, but only find out about canceled pledges when I go to my page, and even then I've got to click elsewhere to read the exit survey. Skimming them now, the vast majority say "my financial situation has changed" -- but as Pamela said, that's the polite, non-committal option, so as feedback it's of limited use.

I also wonder frequently if I'm Doing Patreon Wrong. I very much set it up for a specific project: essays about worldbuilding, because I've wanted to write a book about worldbuilding for ages but it's such a vast subject that wrestling it into a nice, organized book seemed impossible. Patreon gave me a way to do that, by just randomly hitting topics as they occur to me, then sorting them into books afterward (and when it's over and done with I'll probably do a "Complete New Worlds" edition that reorganizes them more fully, rather than breaking them down year by year). I'm making some amount of money: more than some, less than others. Would I be making more if it were just "Support Marie Brennan Writing Stuff"? Or do the people with Patreons like that who are pulling in ten times my money succeed because they've got a bigger or more devoted readership? Would I have more patrons if I didn't post the essays for free on BVC, but instead kept them patron-only? Or if I released them to patrons first, BVC afterward?

I could experiment. But of course any experiment of that kind risks producing an unwanted result. So I stick with what I'm doing, and it's enough money to justify me doing a thing I wanted to do anyway, plus afterward I have ebooks that can sell slowly but steadily to people who aren't my Patreon supporters. The one large change I made this year was to switch from telling patrons of a certain level and above that they can request topics (which almost nobody did), to having a monthly poll where I offer up a set of possible topics and they vote. That's gotten more engagement, though it hasn't increased the number of higher-level patrons I have. So that's a small amount of feedback. But there's definitely a feeling of "I don't want to break what I have in a quest to make it better."

[pameladean]

I too often feel that I am doing Patreon wrong, and in fact your amazing Patreon is one of the reasons I feel that way. Just so you know. (You have never implied, let alone stated, anything of the sort; just those essays are remarkable.) And I wonder how many of us do feel we must be doing it wrong. I have to say, the various prompts provided by Patreon never diminish that feeling in the slightest.

You are right about the difficulty of even finding out that exit surveys exist. I only found them because I was going through every possible menu looking for something else that I never did find, thought, "Exit surveys? Really?" and clicked through.

P.

[swan_tower]

The various prompts provided by Patreon make it clear to me that the service can be used to do a lot of different things . . . and what I'm doing with it is not the kind of thing they're focused on. Which isn't surprising, since I bet you the types of Patreon that earn the company the most money aren't the kind of thing I'm doing.

[mrissa]

"I want to do this anyway and now I can justify it" sounds like exactly the win condition. Good.

[thanate]

Yes. I have vaguely-for-future-use been considering this model for some time, as it would particularly work to give me a soft accountability on deadlines, which is where I tend to get into trouble.

[swan_tower]

I mean, I would like to be getting more money from it? A post every single week of the year gets wearing when you do it for years on end, and from a cents-per-word perspective it doesn't hit even the low bar of pro rates for short fiction. But it has tipped me over from "not doing the thing" to "doing the thing," so in the end it's a good move.

[okrablossom]

I had, very naively I see now, assumed most people supported me at my Patreon for Project Support, or at worst Art Support, but only after I shut it down, and after listening in on a conversation where people (not my Patreons) overwhelmingly said they toss out $1 almost always for Personal Support, did I realize it was mostly likely to be that last category that most people fell into. It explains---well, a lot, I think.