Relaunch plan changes / Art value musings (Patreon)

Relaunch plan changes

Once again I've decided to change my plans regarding the relaunch of my Patreon page. After doing some more thinking, I'm probably going to stick to this account, rather than creating a new one. It'd probably be more hassle than it's worth to start fresh.

Tentatively the plan is to revamp the current page and the pledge tiers and switch to monthly fee sometime early next month. Once the new pledge tiers are up, I'll let you all know. You'll have plenty of time to switch to your preferred new tier. After a while some of the old tiers might be deleted, which will move you to a 'no benefit' status if you're still pledged on them, according to Patreon. As mentioned before, I will no longer be able to accept such pledges, so I may have to cancel them. I'm going to do my best to avoid having to delete tiers entirely though. I would simply love to adjust the tiers as they are, but I can't touch the pricing while there are active pledges on the tier, so I may have to do something drastic in some cases. I'm confident it'll go fine though!

I will likely also be cleaning my patreon feed, deleting posts that might be misleading in the context of the relaunched page. Like posts mentioning Exclusive Content Archive being $1, and stuff like that. If there's anything you'd like to save in the old posts, please do so within the next couple of weeks. I doubt there's anything of real worth though. All art is either in the archive or in my public galleries.

Art value musings

I recently looked more inward to my feelings on how I value my own art. I was actually a bit shocked to realize how I haven't really thought about this before.

As an example, let's take the Exclusive Content Archive that I'm offering to verified patrons currently. That's $1, lifetime, to see everything I've posted and offered on Patreon to date. All content. 

A patron may look at this and think "hey, that's a very nice price!". 

Me on the other hand... "I just told everyone the value of several years of my exclusive art is one US dollar". 

Seriously?! Is that what I really think? No way. There's demand for my art. I've seen other artists trace or reference my works for their own things. Some of my images on image boards have gathered hundreds of likes, while works from super popular artists might get much less. Yes, yes, I'm sure it's not just the visuals, but also what the art represents, the acts, the dialog, etc. But the reason is kind of irrelevant. It's still a sign that there are people who like my works, a lot! You all especially!

So. I need to get some sense into my pricing of things, as well as how much I give away for free.

Firstly, the Exclusive Content Archive will be staying, but I'm considerably upping the lifetime pledges needed to access it. Tentatively I'm thinking $30. Most of you have the content already, so this won't make a difference to you. Only to fresh new patrons after the relaunch. Also, high resolution works won't be part of this deal. I don't want to enable a way to pay a lump sum to access a ton of high resolution works that some greedy shady online site or art seller starts printing and selling without permission, from a country without a lick of copyright laws. At the very least such party better be ready to pay monthly to gather a portfolio of all those high res works. 

Basically, high resolution originals won't be available retroactively. They'll only be available one time with a corresponding pledge. This should also increase the attractiveness to maintain a pledge at such tier, as each individual pledge has a one-time opportunity attached to it. Also, like I mentioned before, I will acknowledge the demand for high resolution versions and will offer those much more often than now. Tentatively half of my works will be available in high-res, at minimum.

Secondly, I'm giving way too much art for free to the public. From the relaunch onward, much more of my full color art will be patron-exclusive, and likely starting from $5 tier. I'm thinking at least one out of three works, at least one every month. These will likely be mostly one-shot images or short series too, so no one will miss on images that are part of a larger series. I know a few patrons might fall under the $5 budget, and I'm sorry if this will leave you without seeing some of my art, but $5 is still a very fair price, considering how much art everyone still gets to see for free. The lower tiers will give you access to alternative editions, sketches, previews and stuff like that, so there's still plenty of other exclusive stuff to see.

There will likely be some other price changes too, but these are the important ones that I wanted to inform all of you well in advance. Essentially, $5 is the sweet spot where I want people to have access to everything except for high resolution versions and certain very special perks. Those will be available in the next tier up, price yet to be determined.

That's it for today's relaunch talk. By all means, share your thoughts on my plans! Critique away all you want!