June 2019 General News #3 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! June is shortly coming to an end, so now's a good time to reflect on how the month went.

June Art Achievements

First of all, I met the art quota I set for the month, which was 2-4 colored works, of which two are hi-res, and one is patron exclusive (tier $5+). Commissions don't generally count towards this, but the one I did and posted this month was very much like my usual stuff, so I'd say I did a total of 5 colored works. Last night I sent patrons of tiers $5+ June's exclusive colored work. I also did three 'sketch' requests for the $60 patrons, and nine doodles/previews. These are available for patrons $3+. There's not much for $1 tier folks to enjoy, so I'm still considering moving dialog variants to that tier from July onward, to spread out rewards a bit.

I will shortly message everyone about this month's rewards, so don't be alarmed if you haven't been able to access the stuff I mentioned yet. However, if you joined in June, read below!

For New Patrons, And About Upfront Payments

Now, since a bunch of new patrons joined during the month, it's best I mention that I deliver rewards only to people whose pledge has gone through, and since my Patreon is not set to accept payments upfront (yet), that means your first pledge will go through at the start of July, and you'll begin receiving rewards from there on. I plan to set payments to 'upfront' if everything goes well with my Patreon in June and July. The primary reason why I haven't done so yet is that the change is permanent, and I could no longer switch my account to function without it afterwards, or switch to 'per creation' payments. I want to make sure everything goes well with my Patreon for at least the first couple of months until I commit to the change. So, tentatively, from August onward I'll do upfront payments. It'll also help with controlling content thieves, as they can no longer access anything until their pledge is paid. Not that there's a lot to see. There's no exclusive stuff here in my Patreon feed.

Rewards Available Separately?

Did you miss on June rewards because of a late pledge and would absolutely like to have the stuff? I will very likely soon establish a Gumroad store to separately sell archives of monthly content, so you can purchase them there. I will make a separate announcement when that happens. Just need to look into a few things first to make sure it all works for me, accounting and legality wise.

Changes to Pledge Tiers

Since my new Patreon is still in a fairly experimental stage, I keep finding things I still need to change in various pledge tiers. I already mentioned possibly moving dialog variants to $1 tier. Additionally, I will likely drop some or all of the $60 tier slots in the coming months. Not July, but possibly August. The reason for that is that I need to diversify my income sources, and I want to move the time spent on those to doing stuff like commissions. Likewise, the $20 tiers may see changes at some point, though I'm undecided on those yet. Having to drop some of these high pledge tiers will admittedly bring my total Patreon income down considerably, but it is a change I feel to be necessary, to ensure my income isn't relying entirely on Patreon, because you never know when they decide to limit what kind of content they accept, or do some other change that forces me to drop Patreon as income source. While I plan to move on to a new platform if that happens, it'll still be a blow financially for a while at least. I want to be prepared.

July Plans 

July will probably see less exclusive doodles than June, but I hope to focus more on original characters and action scenes, and do more elaborate pictures, with multiple characters and the like. So if you liked the kind of stuff I did a lot back in 2014-2016, that's what I'm aiming for. :)

If you have any feedback, comments, critique, questions or anything else to do about my Patreon, rewards or my art in general, don't hesitate to send me a message, email me at harmonist11 (a) gmail.com, message me on Discord, or post a comment here!