Advice for people (especially women) who have been thinking about starting a Patreon

I’ve gotten a lot of really positive responses to my last post about the barriers that keep women from engaging with Patreon. In the comments I mentioned that something I had meant to address in that post was advice for how women could go about having a Patreon ANYWAY, but that time and space constraints prevented me from including that. I’d been planning on moving on to my posts about KickStarter, since I try to avoid spending suuuper-long stretches of time on one particular topic – especially when that topic is highly specialized and isn’t of particular interest to people outside of a specific group. However, I’ve gotten several requests from people to please write this post. So here we are!

0: Material Previously Covered

Last year I did a huuuuge series on “advice for women looking to get into game design”. It covered pretty well everything, from the pros and cons of self-publishing to all of the various economic models for doing so. I’m not going to say you need to read all of that, because seriously it’s really long. However, I’d recommend reading part 2 of the first post in the series here about common cognitive pitfalls to watch out for. I also wrote a little about the different types of Patreons out there in part 3 of that series with some examples (under the heading Serial Content: Patreon), some of which are now sadly out of date.

So you can go read that stuff. You know, if you want.

1: JUST DO IT

If starting a Patreon is something that you’ve been waffling about for a while, then in the words of the immortal Shia Lebeouf…

Seriously, though. JUST. DO IT. Especially if what you want to start a Patreon for is shit that you would do anyway. What’s the worst that could happen? People don’t support you and nothing has changed. Setting up a Patreon page takes 1-2 hours, depending on how much thought you put into it. You’d be out that time, sure, but nothing else.

“But, wundergeek! If I start a Patreon and no one pledges, I’ll be so embarrassed!”

Look, I get it. I do. But I’ll tell you a secret, gentle reader. Failure is an unavoidable part of being creative. Not every idea is going to catch on! Patreon at least front-end-loads the failure so that you haven’t lost tens or even hundreds of hours on something no one wants to consume. (Which is something that I’ve done, by the way, and wow does it ever suck. But that’s a tale for another post.)

However, I’ll also note that sometimes it’s the projects that we most expect to fail that surprise us. Take this blog, for example; when I first started writing it, I thought that there was no way any significant number of people would read it. And yet nearly five years, 2+ million views, and 81 (at the time of writing this post) patrons later, here we are. So don’t let your assumptions about what people will be willing to support keep you from trying, because brains are assholes.

1a. “But the thing I want to do is weirdly specific and there’s no way anyone would pay for it!”

First, while there are some people who become patrons purely with a goal to consume specific content, there are also people who become patrons because they want to support the creator, and not necessarily because they’re a super fan who loves everything that that creator is producing.

Second, never forget that the internet is a weird place. Your weirdly specific thing might be someone else’s “thing they wished someone would make” that they’ve been waiting for someone to make so that they could give them money for it. The outrageous overnight success of Send Your Enemies Glitter is proof of that.

Third, if you are a member of a marginalized community, there’s a really good chance that your brain is being an asshole. Tell your brain that in a market as saturated with RPG content as the current market is, weird and specific also means distinctive, which will help you stand out. And then tell your brain to get stuffed.

2. Don’t feel pressured to make a video.

A profile and a cover picture is more than sufficient to launch a campaign with. Don’t let yourself get hung up on the idea that you “have” to have a polished video in order to be taken seriously, even though I’m pretty sure Patreon says when you’re setting up a profile that pages with videos get more patrons (or at least it did when I was setting mine up, which was admittedly two years ago).

2a. Cover images are easy, and here’s why

Are you making game hacks? Take a picture of some character sheets spread out on a table! Are you making stock art? Collage a few of your best pieces together. Blogs and other writing projects are a bit harder, since the end product is a bit more intangible. But even then there’s no need to get fussed, because here is what you can do.

First, do an image search on Wikimedia Commons (because stealing other people’s work to promote your own is a shitty thing to do). Find an image that you like and put some simple text over top of it that summarizes what you do. No graphics software? No problem. Pixlr’s photo editor is a nice, free, in-browser image editor that is pretty well equivalent to the old Limited editions of Photoshop. (Make sure you select Pixlr Editor and NOT Pixlr Express.)

SO PROFESSIONAL

Now, you might feel like your image looks a little slapped-together when you do that. So here is my totally easy trick to make your image look more polished with about 15 seconds of work: OUTER GLOW. So here’s what you do. You have your image, and your text will be on its own layer. Click the layer styles button (highlighted in the screenshot above). Then follow the steps in the screenshot below:

Now your text has a black border! Except it will still be fuzzy and not really all that useful, so you’ll need to tweak the settings a bit, like so:

Bam. Now you’ve got an image that looks like you actually worked on it. Win.

3. Decide on a content model and communicate that content model clearly to your patrons

There are two basic ways of charging patrons – either they pledge a static amount per month, or they pledge per content – at which point their pledges might vary from month to month if you are getting into posting multiple items per month and they have monthly limits set up to cap their maximum contribution.

My recommendation to people just getting started with Patreon is that they default to per-content for their pledge model. When you’re just getting started, a per-month model is going to deter a lot of folks who might want to support you but also want to see a proven track record of providing consistent return on investment. Setting up your Patreon as per-content means that your patrons are only on the hook when you produce content, and the controls for setting monthly caps are robust and relatively easy to set up such that your patrons won’t need to worry about getting into paying you more money than you’d expected.

If you are someone who has a lot of real-world obligations and know that your content production is going to be inconsistent, make sure you make that part of your pitch upfront. That way your patrons are going into supporting you knowing that the content flow is going to be uneven, and if you have a few weeks where your life explodes and you don’t make anything – it’s okay. (Though if something happens that keeps you from adhering to your usual content frequency, it is polite to drop a note to your patrons letting them know. I’ve done this as patrons-only messages through Patreon when it’s happened to me in the past, and my patrons have always been wonderfully supportive when it’s been an issue.)

There are drawbacks. Per-month funding evens out the revenue stream; per-content logically means that you get more money in months where you produce more. And, also logically, the inverse is also true in that if you have a month where you don’t produce anything… you also don’t get any money. Still, I feel those are pretty minor considerations overall. I’ve had my Patreon for two years and still wouldn’t consider switching the funding model, because per-content is much better for how I operate given the meatspace demands on my time and attention.

3a. Different model subtypes: examples

For the sake of clarity, and because you shouldn’t do exactly what I do just because it works for me, here are the four most common Patreon models that pertain to game type. YMMV:

• Charges per unit content, all content publicly available (ex: this blog!)
• Charges per unit content, all content available to patrons (ex: Kaitlyn Peavler)
• Charges per unit content, content available to patrons with previous content available for purchase (ex: Worlds Without Master)
• Charges per month, grants access to content (ex: Avery McDaldno, now defunct)
• Charges per month, all content publicly accessible (ex: John Harper, now pretty much defunct)

4. Offer a $1 level, even if $1 won’t give access to the thing you are making

Never underestimate the $1 pledges, because they really add up! Having a $1 level makes it possible for someone to say “well I’m not interested in that thing they’re doing, but I really like the creator so it’s worth $1 to me just to help them do what they want to do”.

TEN out of my 81 patrons have set themselves up as “no reward”, meaning they don’t want any of the perks that come with their donation level. They just want to give me money, and that’s it.

Patreon patrons are generous folk, is what I’m saying here.

5. Be conservative in setting up your milestones (if you set them up at all)

Milestones are NOT something that you need to start right away. Hell, two years later I still haven’t set up milestones, because I don’t know what I would set as my goals. I tailor the amount of work I do for posts here on my blog to the amount of support I get. When I first started this Patreon, I was averaging around 1500 words per post. Now 2000-2200 is much more my usual average, because I can afford to go more in-depth.

Still, if the thing you want to do is a thing that it would make sense to set up milestones for, BE CONSERVATIVE. I lose between $5 to $10 per post on pledges that don’t get processed, for whatever reason. People don’t do it maliciously – most often it’s because their credit card information changed and they forgot to update all of their peripheral shit like Patreon. But it happens. Add in the fact that Patreon’s and PayPal’s cut adds up to about 10-11% of your total AFTER dropped pledges… you can end up on the hook for a lot more work per unit dollar than you wanted to be doing.

My advice – don’t set them up right away. And leave yourself lots of wiggle room if you do set them up, and be willing to communicate with your patrons if you have to change your milestones.

Speaking of which…

6. Thou shalt communicate with your patrons

If you’re someone who sucks at email, learn to not suck at it. Patreon isn’t exactly a business transaction, in that your patrons aren’t buying and selling content per se. But they are making it possible for you to do the thing that you want to do, so be courteous about responding quickly to messages. It will go a long way toward building goodwill. It sounds stupid and obvious, but you want your patrons to feel good about you as a human being, since that will make them more likely to want to continue supporting you.

7. Don’t feel guilty about charging your patrons

If you’ve communicated what it is that you want to do, and you’ve communicated your expected content schedule, and the thing that you’ve produced is even remotely within the scope of your Patreon, then let go of your guilt and make that post paid already! Having a clear pitch isn’t just important to attracting new patrons. It’s also important to set expectations so that your patrons know who you are and what you’re doing.

If someone is your patron, they have agreed to become your patron because they WANT to give you money to do the thing that you are doing. So feeling guilty about doing the thing that you are doing and NOT allowing people to give you money for it is actually the opposite of what your patrons were hoping for.

Of course, I say this as someone who still struggles with this. I had to be reassured that it was okay to make this a paid post before I did so, and even then I still feel a bit hinky about it. So, you know, do as I say and not as I… feel? Or something.

Why don’t more women just… you know, create Patreons?

[Big thanks to the awesome ladies in my G+ circle who helped give me ammunition I needed to outline this post. Thanks especially to Filamena Young and Laura Hamilton for being super on-point about evil money things.]

In my last post, I looked at a sample of games-related Patreons and the not-too-encouraging gender breakdown of creators, and the breakdown is pretty dismal; only 24% of the Patreons that I looked at included one or more female creators. Of course, in the face of such numbers, the solution seems simple. Get more women to create and maintain Patreons, right? We can’t expect men to stop using Patreon to rectify the gender imbalance, so logically this means that more women have to get on board to even things out.

Sadly, I can only wish that this was such an easy problem to solve. I know that there were a number of gendered factors that made me a very reluctant adopter of Patreon. And since I ultimately did jump on the Patreon bandwagon, I know that I can’t necessarily speak to the experience of women who have considered it and decided it wasn’t for them.

So I threw out the following questions to my ladies-only circle on Google+, which is chock full of brilliant and talented women: 1) If you don’t have a Patreon, why not? 2) If you used to have a Patreon and have stopped doing things with it, why? And I got a wide variety of responses, which mostly can be broken out into four categories that form a pretty clear picture of the obstacles keeping women from being active, sustained creators on Patreon:

First: Imposter Syndrome[1]

“I don’t have anything to offer”, “No one would be interested in paying to hear what I think”, “I’m not really talented enough to make it on Patreon”. Imposter syndrome is an asshole, and it keeps a lot of super smart, super awesome women from simply believing that they have something unique to offer that people might be willing to pay to support.

And lest you think I’m talking dismissively from my lofty perch as a “successful” Patreon creator about “Those Other Women” who need to learn to “have confidence and everything will be fine”… actually, I’m including myself in this. Because to be honest, I got pushed into Patreon out of financial necessity, and even despite the previous success of my blog, I never anticipated the level of support that I’ve gotten.

Even more absurd, I actually argue with friends who try to state simple facts about how successful my blog has been. Not opinions. Facts. Because I’m not capable of believing that anything that I do or say here is actually important, no matter how much evidence to the contrary that you might show me. Because deep down, this is still just me yelling at the internet. And shit, I’d do that for free, so doesn’t that mean that people shouldn’t be paying me for it?

So just getting past the initial hurdle of believing that you are competent enough to have something to offer through Patreon? It’s a pretty damn big hurdle. But even if you manage to clear that and you do, create a Patreon, you’ll quickly run into the next hurdle that Imposter Syndrome throws at you: feeling guilty for charging your patrons for content that you create. Never mind that you’ve laid out what you want to do and how you want to get paid. Imposter Syndrome is that voice that shouts in your ear that your work isn’t nearly as good as everyone else’s, and your patrons deserve better.

And if you happen to have Imposter Syndrome and depression, that’s when things get really fun! Because not only do you get your brain telling you that your work is worthless, but it also tells you that you are worthless, so good luck ever being able to seriously believe that people would ever actually give you money to create things.

Second: Female Socialization

So. Let’s say that you are a woman who is either 1) lucky enough not to have Imposter Syndrome, or 2) has managed to find ways of at least getting it to shut up for a while. Awesome. That’s the big hurdle, right? From here everything should be easy! Except, wait. Just believing that you produce work that is worth paying for isn’t enough, because once you start actually doing the planning required to make the actual Patreon page, female socialization rears its ugly head.

First, there’s the trap of needing to polish things. A lot of men can have an idea, spend some time throwing together a proof-of-concept, get it to a reasonable level of “eh, good enough”, and expect that when they show it to people what they will respond to is the idea behind it. Unfortunately, if you’re a woman looks matter – even when it’s your work and not your actual personal appearance. In art school, I certainly had enough experiences where my male peers had their work engaged on a conceptual level while mine was criticized for execution, despite being created with the same level of craft.

Unfortunately, “perfect” is the mortal enemy of “good enough”. I’ve seen many a project languish forever in the “polishing” stage, never to be launched because of fear that it wouldn’t been seen as “professional” enough. Meanwhile, there are dudes slapping together some pretty sketchy campaign proposals and simply throwing it out there.

There’s also the issue of marketing. Women are taught pretty explicitly not to put themselves forward, and self-marketing requires doing exactly that[2]. And honestly, it would be pretty hard for me to overstate how drastically hard that is to deal with, because that conditioning isn’t something that simply happens in childhood and stops when you become an adult. It happens every goddamn day.

It happens when I decide to tone down my language on a subject that I feel passionately about, because I don’t want to seem too bitchy. It happens when I disclaim the ever-living shit out of something when I need to talk to a guy about a problem that he is causing because I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with him causing a scene. It happens when someone asks if there are people with specific qualifications who might be able to participate in a thing and I feel I have to choose my words carefully in responding so that I sound interested without being arrogant.

It’s a balancing act, one that women are constantly navigating. So expecting women to be good at the thing we socialize them not to do as part of their success? Yeah, that’s a problem.

Third: “Second Shift” Labor:

Say you manage to get past hurdles one and two. Fantastic! You’re well on your way to becoming a creator! Except, of course, for the fact that the internet is a voracious beast that consumes content at a ferocious rate. The Evil God of Content demands regular sacrifice, and if it is not appeased frequently and on something resembling a schedule, your audience will suffer as a result.

And, you know, fine. As Dorothy Parker once quipped, “writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat”. It’s only fitting that running a Patreon is something that takes work if that work is something you’re getting paid for, yes?

However, actually finding the time to do that work? Is pretty damn difficult if you’re a woman. “Second shift” domestic labor is something that still disproportionately falls on the shoulders of women. If you work all day, then have to come home to more domestic work, when exactly are you supposed to find the time to be creative? And if you have children? Multiply that problem by about three. Nobody is as good at finding ways to interrupt your concentration as a small child, because they love you and want to spend all of their time with you. Which is, okay, adorable (sometimes), but not exactly a boost to one’s productivity. So finding a way to manage all of the competing demands for attention and time, it’s not surprising that a lot of women simply don’t feel they have the bandwidth to sustain a Patreon for any length of time.

Personally, it’s something I struggle with quite a bit myself. I’m incredibly lucky to have a partner who does his fair share of housework and parenting. But being in school and raising a toddler are both full-time jobs, and much as my husband supports me, the economic realities of our situation means that if there is some sort of childcare emergency or doctor’s appointment, I’m always the one who gives up work time to deal with it. As such, keeping up with blogging means that I have to be pretty damn creative about finding time to do research and work on the posts I write here. It also means that I’ve had to learn to be able to write in small chunks – twenty minutes here and there. I don’t have the luxury of slowly “getting into the groove”. When I have time to write, I need to write. It takes a hell of a lot of discipline, and it’s not always something I’m capable of.

So it’s not too surprising that some women would consider all of the factors and say “you know what, I’ve got too much going on in my life to add yet another highly demanding obligation”.

Fourth: Practical reality – money

Even if you manage to deal with the previous three obstacles, money is still going to bite you in the ass. The wage gap is a thing for a reason – it didn’t just spring out of nowhere. Work produced by women is seen as having inherently less worth, which is something you run into… just about everywhere. Take, for example, the fact that white women earn about 78 cents on the dollar for what white men earn, and for women of color, it’s even worse. Hispanic women make only 51 cents on the dollar! Or how about the fact that only 3.5 percent of works of art in the MOMA were created by women – a figure that has held pretty steady despite noises being made about increasing the representation of women artists in the MOMA’s collection.

It’s a self-reinforcing conundrum. Part of the reason women have trouble believing that what they create is worth paying for is because everyone else has trouble believing it too. And if people aren’t going to pay to support the thing you’re making, that causes problems. In some instances, it can be a simple matter of “the time to dollar ratio means that I am working for less than minimum wage”.

Or there can be other problems specifically related to Patreon’s funding model – which takes pledges monthly off of credit cards. Inevitably, when a portion of your pledges get declined (and it happens every month), that’s money that you should have gotten but didn’t. And if you planned your milestones around needing a certain level of support, and your page says your getting that level of support, you can wind up being on the hook for doing extra work for a milestone goal that you didn’t actually financially achieve.

Which, you know, is pretty shitty.

Lastly, according to Pledge Society, there are a whopping 2485 games-related Patreons right now. Given the number of Patreons that exist, and given that we seem to be reaching a level of market saturation in that most people who are patron supporters have long since reached their cap of money that they are willing to contribute to support artists looking for patronage, there is a limited pool of money that is being chased after. If women’s work is seen as having less worth, how exactly are women supposed to compete with the dudes who are hogging so many of the available patron dollars?

For a lot of women the answer ends up being “I can’t”. And I’m not going to lie, sometimes when I look at the amount of money that some dudes are making off of Patreon to do stuff that requires significantly less effort than what I put into what I do here…? It makes me question why I even bother, sometimes.

Fifth: Practical reality – gender

Okay. So there are conceptual hurdles, social hurdles, and practical hurdles, none of which are easy to navigate – even if you happen to be someone with comparatively high levels of privilege like me. (I’m a woman, but I’m also white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and culturally Christian, so believe me. I’m well aware I have a lot of advantages.) But even if you manage to deal with all of that, gender is always going to be a factor that you absolutely can’t control.

IF you persevere through all of the shit I just described AND you manage to achieve a level of success, congratulations! You’re making something of yourself as a female creator!

Except, don’t forget that making something of yourself as a female creator means that you’re also just plain making yourself more visible as a woman, which on the internet is often a dangerous proposition – especially when one is dealing with gamers. As a consequence of writing this blog, I’ve had some truly unnerving shit happen to me simply because I had the nerve to express opinions about games while female. I once had one dude write more than 11,000 original words about what a terrible human being I am in the space of about a week. (For perspective, my games average between 10,000 and 20,000 words.) I’ve had a professional comics artist swamp my blog with fans after telling them to tell me what a horrible, awful cunt I am. I’ve had people accuse me of being a professional victim for making money off of this blog at the inception of Gamer Gate when Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian were being crucified using that same language.

I’ve stuck it out this far because I’ve been lucky – I haven’t become a hate meme (yet). And because I’m stubborn, and contrary as hell. But I also make a point of telling women in my circles who lament that they don’t have my “courage” that not being willing to put yourself in a situation where you can expect this sort of abuse isn’t “cowardice”. It’s fucking self-care.

Does becoming a creator on Patreon guarantee that you’ll get harassed? No. Of course not. But any time a woman makes herself visible online, that is always a risk, and for some women that just isn’t something they are prepared to deal with. And good for them for knowing that about themselves.

Phew

[That turned out a lot longer than anticipated! Next time: I turn my gaze to KickStarter and the unique problems that women face there.]

[1] Mind, in citing this as an obstacle for women, I’m not saying that men don’t ever deal with imposter syndrome. However, it’s definitely something that is a bigger problem for women than men.

[2] And look. Self-marketing SUCKS, okay? For anyone of ANY gender. But as bad as it sucks for dudes, at least they don’t have an entire lifetime of socialization screaming at you that you’re a terrible person for doing it.

The gender imbalance of games-content creators on Patreon

Since the end of the year, I’ve been working on a numerical analysis of my freelance income in 2015 (although admittedly, it did get derailed by real life stuff; I’d been hoping that it would be finished before now). Non incoincidentally, the income I receive through Patreon for this blog is a large part of that.

My Patreon has done pretty well for itself since inception. I started out with 17 patrons in 2014 and currently have 80 patrons – though that’s down from a high of 84. According to data compiled by Graphtreon, as of the time of writing this post my blog is in the 88th percentile of all Patreons by number of current patrons. Still, as well as I’m doing here, it’s sometimes a little hard for me not to get hung up on the number of male-fronted Patreons that are doing… significantly better than mine. And sure – obviously I recognize that a feminist blog about games is much more of a “niche” Patreon than Patreons producing “actual” game content. Still, something I have been quietly discontented about for a while is the fact that Patreon is a platform heavily dominated by men, and it got me wondering – just what are the gender demographics of games-related Patreon creators[1]?

Unfortunately, this is a difficult question to answer, since Patreon’s interface is, frankly, really really bad. To be fair, they are trying to improve on this, but the results so far have been… mixed. So gathering this sort of data required looking to sources outside of Patreon, since I was not able to determine a way to do this using Patreon’s own website.

Sources

In the introduction, I mentioned Graphtreon as a source of Patreon rankings. I actually wound up not using Graphtreon as a source for my data, since it turns out they were actually a little too accurate for my purposes.

Instead, I gathered all of my ranking data from Pledge Society – which combines Patreon’s own data with a pretty, actually sort of usable UI. Unfortunately, Pledge Society doesn’t do anything to mitigate Patreon’s awful sorting algorithms, which don’t take into account the different revenue models built into their own site, and makes the rankings that it comes up with pretty useless if what you want is an actual list of “who ranks higher than whom”.

What do I mean by this? Well, the ranking system used by Patreon (and thus Pledge Society) doesn’t differentiate between Patreon’s structured around revenue generated per unit content and Patreon’s structured around revenue generated per month. So to use my own blog as an example, I average between 3-5 paid posts per month, with a nominal pledge level of $170/post (which doesn’t incorporate the diminishing returns effect of monthly pledge caps, but that’s a different can of worms entirely). Logically, my blog outperforms Patreons which only bring in $170 at the end of the month, and yet that’s where it appears in the rankings.

However, in this case, that mix of high and medium-level campaigns in the top rankings actually wound up more useful in capturing a representative sample for two reasons: First, the very top of the top of the leaderboards are even more homogenous than the lower-high-end and the middle of the pack, which still aren’t terribly diverse anyway. Second, despite the different sorting methods, both Graphtreon and Pledge Society are getting their data from Patreon, which does not include gender of creator in its rankings or campaign summaries. So in order to put together the data for this post, I had to go to each individual Patreon page to attempt to determine the gender of the creator(s), which was a stupid amount of extra, incredibly tedious work.

About three quarters of the time, this was all that was needed. Hooray! However, the rest of the time I wound up needing to go to a YouTube channel, or a Twitter account, or a Facebook page, etc. Given how irritating all of that was, I lost patience early on and decided I was only going to do the “top” 200 games Patreons as ranked by Pledge Society, since the inaccurate sorting method meant that I’d get a random sampling of middle-level Patreons sprinkled in. Because NO EFFING WAY am I going to look at 2485 INDIVIDUAL PATREONS. Nope nope nope.

Data

In gathering data, I looked at two things: 1) what a Patreon was producing and 2) the gender composition of its creators[2] – which I recorded as either “male creator(s)”, “female creator(s)”, “mixed-gender group”, and “unknown gender”. You’ll note that there’s no differentiation between solo creators and homogeneously gendered groups of creators. Unfortunately, this is something I regret, however I didn’t think to record solo versus group until I was around #175 or so, at which point I wasn’t about to go repeat almost all of my work.

As for what a Patreon is producing, the categories that I recorded were: games (video games, tabletop games, game settings and resources, game mods, etc), videos (let’s plays, streams, vlogs), podcasts, comics, and other (multimedia, art, reviews, blogs, criticism, etc).

It’s important for me to note that there was one category of campaign that I trashed from my results entirely, despite being the third largest category overall: porn. It may sound naive, but I honestly was surprised that porn is even allowed on Patreon, and I was even more surprised by how much porn there is and how much support it’s receiving. But it’s there, and there is a lot of it, and wow is it making a lot of money.

Out of the 200 Patreons that I looked at, a whopping 54 are for campaigns producing porn. The largest portion seems to be for campaigns making porn games and interactive novels. However, there were also things like porn comics featuring notable video game characters, porn videos using custom renders of video game characters, and even an online platform for virtual furry sex rendered in… uh… quite graphic detail.

These sorts of Patreons were not only nearly 100% male-created, but it also seemed that the issues present had much more to do with the subculture of porn content production than the subculture of games content production, for all that the content being created uses the medium and visual language of games. As such, these sorts of campaigns were not included, although an analysis of these Patreons would be interesting on its own (even if I’m not likely to ever write it myself.)

The Results

Out of the 200 Patreons that I looked at, here’s how they broke down by category:

Patreons producing video content through YouTube are outproducing Patreons producing actual games by 4%, which was a bit of a surprise. Although reflected in those numbers is an increasing trend of content that would have been delivered as podcasts now being delivered as vlogs or video series – as indicated by the fact that podcasts are making up a measly 3% of the Patreons surveyed. I suspect had Patreon been available five years ago, the proportions of vlogs and YouTube Channels being funded would have been far lower, and podcasts would have been much higher; certainly five years ago[3] it seemed like there were an awful lot of gaming podcasts out there (many of which are now defunct).

Unfortunately, when you start looking at the breakdown of gender of creators overall (again, this is not including porn), the results are depressing but not really all that surprising.

Female-only creator(s) make up only thirteen percent of non-porn Games Patreons! That’s squarely in “just barely better than the MOMA” territory, which is pretty goddamn sad. And creator teams that simply include even just one woman still only bump the total up to 24%! Yikes! Now, yes, it is true that creators of unknown gender account for 10%. However, even if you say that every single one of that 10% of creators is actually a woman (statistically unlikely), that still leaves two thirds of the non-porn Patreons that were examined with no female contributors whatsoever, which is pretty sad.

Things get sliiiightly less bleak when you look at the breakdown of non-porn Patreons that are producing games, although I still wouldn’t start dancing in the streets:

Just under half of Patreons surveyed that are making non-porn games have zero female contributors while fewer than one-fifth of Patreons for non-porn games are controlled exclusively by women. Including mixed-gender teams gets the distribution much closer to half, but again these numbers are belied by the fact that in mixed-gender teams of creators with more than two people, the women were always outnumbered, usually rather significantly. (Again, something I’m kicking myself for not recording actual numbers on.)

But wait, it gets worse. The most popular content type provided by the Patreons I surveyed is also the second-most male dominated!

SEVENTY SIX percent of Patreons creating video content have zero female contributors, while only a fifth have any female contributors at all! Unfortunately, it seems that as Let’s Plays continue to expand in popularity as an entertainment trend, the people actually getting paid to produce that sort of content are… pretty well all male.

But even seventy six percent is still better than zero, which is how many Patreons producing podcasts featured any female contributors:

Yup. That’s a thing that happened.

As for comics, they look downright egalitarian by comparison.

Hooray! Fifty percent of Patreons for comics feature content by women! Except, the sample size is pretty absurdly tiny, so I’m pretty sure all I did for this one was make a pretty chart. Oh well.

Lastly, the “other” category, which encompasses art, conventions and events, reviews, criticism, etc. This is the hardest to gauge, because it has the highest proportion of unknown gender creators:

Is it good that people producing content that is hard to categorize are less likely to be male? Or is it that people producing this sort of content feel more compelled to obscured? I’m honestly not sure what to think.

Whichever way you look at it, though, it’s impossible to deny that the gender imbalance on Patreon in its games-related content is pretty staggering.

[1] It’s worth pointing out that the thesis of this post completely ignores the overwhelming whiteness of games-Patreons, which reflects the overwhelming whiteness of the games industry itself. However, while using names, bios, videos, and profile pictures to make judgements about gender presentation is itself (at the very least!) venturing into problematic territory, it is impossible to use these same methods to determine anything useful about a creator’s racial or ethnic identity. As such, I figured it was best to not even try.

[2] I know that my data falls into the gender binary trap, which is problematic and can be erasing of trans and nonbinary gender identities. And I acknowledge that that sucks! However, I feel strongly that looking at the gender imbalance of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon is important, so this is where I simply acknowledge that “hey, this thing I’m doing is still a bit problematic but I didn’t know how to solve that problem”.

[3]

[Self-promotion sidebar] New project launching on Patreon!

Hello, folks! I have a post that I’m currently working on finishing up – it’ll be up either today or tomorrow. But in the mean time, I’m going to take the time to pimp a new project that I desperately, desperately want to be a thing. (But don’t worry! Go Make Me a Sandwich isn’t going anywhere!)

Here’s how I described it on Google+:

Mostly what I write these days are roleplaying games and blog posts, but my first love was and always will be writing fiction. I desperately miss writing fiction, and would like to get back into it! So today I’m launching a new Patreon with the goal of making that happen. The goal of this project is to write a novel that will be published in a serial fiction format, one chapter at a time. I’m hoping that I can attract enough support to make this a financially viable prospect.

In From the Cold is a novel that I have been planning for the last few months, based on a long-running campaign of Apocalypse World set in the Canadian arctic – albeit with many liberties taken and changes made for the needs of a different format. I have an experienced editor on board to make sure each chapter will be polished, and my goal is to publish chapters approximately once per month.

Yes, this is technically fanfic. But given genre fiction’s long and storied history of glorified TRPG fanfic, I don’t particularly think that’s a bad thing. So if you love post-apocalypses and genre fiction and would love to read about grey morality in the post-apocalypse with a big old helping of gender queerness? Then I think I’ve got you covered.

I’m not looking for much to get started; my initial milestone is about half of what I’d ever accept for freelance work. But really I’m just looking to get the ball rolling here, and hopefully with your help I can make this a thing!

The first chapter is up for free here, and the Patreon itself is here.

Advice for women looking to get into game design: part 3 [LONG]

[This post is part of a series! Click here for Part 1 and Part 2 respectively]

Administrativa

Some caveats:

First, in the comments on my last post, Wendy makes an excellent point about the danger of using Lulu in that they will attempt to hard sell you on a variety of services that you should not pay for. Please read the full comment here.

It’s also worth noting that there are quality reasons not to use DriveThru RPG’s printing service; The quality of DTRPG’s paper at their non-premium printing levels isn’t as good as what is used by Lulu. Also important – DTRPG doesn’t allow for bleeds! For more information, check out this thread on StoryGames comparing POD services. In particular, make sure you read the posts by Johnstone Metzger. Many thanks to Ryan Macklin for making me aware of this, as I have only used DTRPG for PDF and not for print.

I’ve gone back and edited part 2 to add both of these concerns to my post.

Lastly, Rachel Kahn – the artist and creator of By Crom! – linked me to a talk that she gave about her experience of self-publishing as an indie comics artist. It’s not games, obviously, but she covers a lot of useful topics that still apply to game publishing, so it’s definitely worth a listen.

The agenda:

So far I’ve covered the thinky stuff about why you should consider self-publishing and common cognitive pitfalls to avoid. I’ve also talked about the economics of various distribution models and the pros and cons of each approach. However! I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room – crowdfunding! Nor have I talked about alternative content models and creative partnerships. So I’m going to do my best to address those three topics in this post.

I know that this doesn’t exactly make for scintillating reading, so this is the last post in the series and after this I will return to more entertaining things.

Economics of making the thing

It is literally impossible to possess all of the skills needed to make a polished and professional game without needing the input of another human. If you are fantastically lucky, you might be one of the rare humans[1] who can also make art and do layout in addition to writing and designing a game. However, you will always need a human that isn’t you to edit your work.

Yes always. You are legit not capable of editing your own work because your brain is an asshole and will lie to you about what is actually on the page.

So at the very least, you will need to find an editor. Depending on your skillset, you may also need a layout person and an artist. (Sometimes artists can do layout as well. But in my experience, it’s far more common that these would be separate people.) And of course, any editor, artist, or layout person capable of putting out professional-quality work is going to want to be paid for their time.

With that in mind, let’s look at different options available to you. Although it’s worth noting beforehand that generally, the less money you’re willing to spend, the more time you can expect to spend yourself.

1) Shoestring everything yourself

Admittedly, this is a lot easier if you are an artist or layout-capable person yourself. However, it is possible, and is something I have done in the past.

First, you’ll need an editor. If you’re trying to avoid needing to pay people, consider your network of friends. Do you have any friends who are competent editors? English or Journalism majors? Compulsive grammar nerds? Ask if they’d be willing to edit your draft! A lot of the time, friends will be willing to trade favors for favors. Can you help your prospective editor move? Provide free babysitting? Something else tedious and time-consuming?

Be creative – friends will be a lot more flexible in what they’ll accept as compensation. Just make sure not to screw your friend over by not following through on your end of the bargain. Few things sour friendships faster than screwing over someone in a business arrangement.

Next, artwork. Are you an artist yourself? Cool beans! Congratulations on being a lucky human! If not, however, don’t despair. The Prismatic Art Collection is an excellent collection of RPG stock art featuring inclusive and diverse artwork by a lot of fantastic artists.

If that doesn’t meet your needs, consider getting creative. If you can’t draw, are you any good with a camera? Consider using photography instead of illustration. J. R. Blackwell’s work on Heroine is a fantastic example of how well this can work out.what this can look like.

Lastly, layout. It is possible for the layout-inexperienced to do their own layout, but you need to be prepared for the massive time expenditure this will entail. How long do you think laying out your book will take? Great. Now quadruple that estimate. And maybe double that estimate. Essentially, you’ll be teaching yourself a new skill, and that takes time.

That’s not to say it’s impossible! If you want to go that route, grab several of your favorite game books whose look you want to emulate and crib (without plagiarizing!) from the elements that make those books pleasing. This will require trial and error. Persevere! (On no account, however, should you attempt to do this using any Microsoft product. Period. That way lies madness and despair.)

1a) Shoestring everything but art, source art cheaply

If the Prismatic Art Collection doesn’t fit your needs, stock art can be an inexpensive alternative – although it’s important to note that you’ll be sacrificing specificity if you go this route; you may need to go with something that approximates what you were looking for if you can’t find something that precisely fits what you had envisioned.

There are artists doing some really interesting things with stock art collections on Patreon; typically in exchange for becoming a patron you gain access to an artist’s stock art library. My favorites that I’ve seen are Kaitlynn Peavler, George Cotronis, and James E. Shields. However, with more artists joining all the time, it’s worth taking a look at who else is doing similar projects to see whose art you’re most attracted to.

Your other option is to license stock art from a big stock photo site and then modify it yourself. One great example of this is Apocalypse World – Vincent Baker did traceovers of photos he found on stock photo sites and the end result is fantastic. Going this route will also represent a significant time expenditure! Because I can guarantee that you’re going to spend a fair amount of time on trial-and-error before you settle on something you like.

2) Assemble a team of freelancers, do a KickStarter to raise the funds to pay them

Increasingly, this is what the face of game publishing is looking like. If you go this route (and I’d say any project over about 20,000 words, you should definitely consider this as an option), look at what it is you need that you’re prepared to pay for.

Then go recruiting people to fill those needs. Pitch the project and explain what you want to hire them to do, then ask about their rates and availability. (Availability is important! Putting together a team of awesome people who can’t start working as soon as the campaign is over is going to lead to massive delays and headaches.) Add all that together and that’s your creative budget.

I have more to say about KickStarter, but we’ll come back to that in a bit.

3) Creative partnerships

The middle ground between option 1 and option 2 is a creative partnership. Say you have a project that you want to do, and you have about half of the needed skills. Consider shopping around for a creative partner who has the skills that you lack for the purposes of entering into a creative partnership in exchange for a mutually agreed-upon split of the profits (usually 50/50).

A great example of this is my partnership with Josh Roby on Princess Charming. Josh wanted to write a series of books for children; he was capable of handling writing, layout, and production logistics. However, he needed someone to do art as well as character and setting design. So he pitched the project to me and we became partners on this project. And it worked out really well for me! I did a bunch of fun (albeit time-consuming) art things, and then gave them to Josh and didn’t have to think about it anymore while he did all the work of turning them into physical books. Sucker.

If you go this route, it’s super important to put down in writing who is expected to perform which tasks and what the desired timeline is going to be. It’s also very important that you work with someone you can get along with, because you’re going to be spending  a lot of time interacting with your partner. Don’t be tempted to partner with someone who rubs you the wrong way simply because you like their work, because trust me – that will never end well. Also, consider working together on a small project as a trial run before committing to working on a large project with someone who haven’t partnered with previously. It’s no fun discovering halfway through that you like your partner as a person but they drive you crazy as a collaborator.

You will need to figure out how to monetize the thing you want to make and plan accordingly. Consider signing a contract as to how profits will be split and how and when royalties will be paid to the person not receiving the monies. It is absolutely vital that you be on the same page with your partner about money things.

Serial content: Patreon

Everything that I’ve said about self-publishing so far has been predicated on the idea that what you are looking to do is sell a game. But maybe that’s not what you’re after, and maybe you’re open to alternative content models? So here I’m going to divert a little to talk about Patreon, since it would be a massive omission to not talk about Patreon as a way of funding game content.

Patreon is a great way to create small serial content; with traditional publishing models you can invest hundreds of hours in a project before it’s ready to publish. Patreon helps level out the revenue stream by providing income for content delivered in smaller, manageable chunks.

Most people use this to create content in discrete, self-contained chunks. Josh Roby uses Patreon to create “steampunk ports of call”, which are basically steampunk mini-settings. Mark Diaz Truman is using Patreon to create a monthly ezine called the Fate Codex.

Some people, like Caitlynn Belle and Topher Gerkey use it to fund the creation of small game projects. However, it can also be used to fund the development of larger projects; Quinn Murphy has been using his Patreon to fund the development of Five Fires – a hip hop RPG. You can also release games by the chapter, as this Patreon for the development of a Mexican RPG about killing angels. (I know I’m not doing it justice with that description, so please do check it out.)

Alternatively, some people use a per month model to fund the development of a larger project, or to enable more nebulous, hard-to-quantify work such as activism. Avery McDaldno is a good example of this; she makes games, coordinates events, gives talks, and does all sorts of awesome gameish things.

(And of course, because I’m bound to leave someone out here, it’s worth checking out this list of RPG-related Patreons over on RPGGeek.)

It’s worth noting that generally if you’re just starting out in game design, you should consider sticking to a per-content model rather than a per-month model. Without a proven reputation or established audience, a per-month model can be a hard sell; there are too many great Patreons out there to ever be able to support them all. You need to make potential patrons feel secure about seeing a return on investment, and a per-content model is a great way to do that. If you don’t create content, they don’t pay you anything! You’ll also need to invest effort in promoting your Patreon. Simply creating a Patreon and waiting for the money to roll in isn’t going to work. At all.

(And of course, Patreon is still a pretty new platform, so it’s hard to say definitively that these are your only two options. Who knows! There might be other exciting things people are doing that I’m not aware of!)

KickStarter

There are two main crowdfunding platforms for game content: IndieGoGo and KickStarter. I’ve written previously about why I use KickStarter and why you should too, but tl;dr is that IndieGoGo’s ethics leave a hell of a lot to be desired.

Anyhow, this section isn’t going to be about logistics – because there are a ton of people who have written voluminously about the logistics of running a game KickStarter. I could probably do an entire roundup post of KickStarter advice, and now that I think about it I really should. (Hmm.)

Anyway, most of what’s out there is written from the perspective of people who are running REALLY BIG CAMPAIGNS. So here is some perspective from the opposite end of the scale.

Budget, budget, budget

It can be a bit daunting figuring out exactly how to put together your budget, so for illustration here is my budget for Ruined Empire[2]. It does not include an editor! Make sure you don’t omit that.

YMMV, naturally, but this is a pretty good overview of the stuff that you should be thinking about. (Plus editing.) You’ll note that I’ve included payment for myself in my budget. ALWAYS ALWAYS DO THAT. KickStarters are a huge, huge job and you don’t want to wind up going through all that effort essentially for free.

I’m a big fan of spreadsheets, so I put this together using magic formulas to do the math for me. But if spreadsheets aren’t your thing, maybe check out these KickStarter budget calculators I found here and here? (I’m afraid I can’t vouch for their effectiveness in depth, but they looked useful when I was checking them out.)

KickStarter will be your lord and master

Running a KickStarter is like having a baby. No matter how prepared you may think you are, you aren’t ready at all. There will always be tasks that you hadn’t anticipated doing. A KickStarter is like a hungry, angry baby constantly demanding your attention.

Sound annoying? It is! And stressful! And time consuming, if you’re doing it right!

There is no replacement for KickStarter in that it can enable large projects that would otherwise be out of your reach. I would never have been able to put together Ruined Empire in a format that I felt would do it justice without KickStarter. However, KickStarters are a huge time and energy sink. Expect to be able to run 1 per year when you’re starting out; even the really experienced single-person publishers I know only manage 2 per year.

Make sure that your KickStarter revenue and expenses are in the same calendar year

This is actually something covered in pretty much all “mainstream” advice, but it’s important enough that I’m going to say it again here.

I didn’t do that with Ruined Empire and it’s kind of fucking over my taxes. Whoops.

Pay your damn freelancers

The big companies get away with screwing freelancers with unfavorable terms, but you should aspire to a higher standard. Half payment up front and half upon completion of work is a reasonable standard, and paying your freelancers promptly when you determine that their work is the final draft with no further changes needed will endear you greatly to them.

Seriously.

I could say more but I won’t

I know there’s more that I could say about KickStarter, but I’m going to hold off on that until after Ruined Empire and do a detailed post-mortem of that, since it’s the closest thing to a traditional game product I’m probably ever going to publish. Until then, to the Google!

So how much money can I make?

On my previous post, I got asked how much money you can expect to make selling RPGs. But that question is kind of impossible to answer for a number of reasons. To quote myself:

It depends. What kind of game are you trying to sell? What is it about? Is it something with broad appeal, or a weird little niche thing with limited appeal? How polished is it? Is it a standalone product or a supplement that requires another book to play?

How long have you been working on building an audience? Are you part of a community of gamers/game designers who can help promote your game? Have you been going to conventions to run your game? Have you been making an effort to get your games into game retailers?

I can’t give you numbers. Game design is like ANY business in that you have to put time IN to get money OUT.

So that is what I leave you with, my lovelies. I can’t promise you great fame or riches, all I provide here is a roadmap of what self-publishing can look like and how to get there. However, self-publishing is a business, and like any business you can’t expect the money to come in by itself. Businesses take time and effort sustained over years in order to build – they’re not something that just happens overnight.

Still, I hope that writing at such length (!!!) is helpful at demystifying the publishing process.

[1] John Harper is seriously amazing.

[2] Note that these numbers are in $USD, while the campaign itself funded in $CAD

Tuesday Freebies: the edition with infinite class

Well, folks. I’m hard at work on another paid post, and it’s an art post! And it will be glorious. (And maybe a bit NSFW.) Unfortunately, it’s not done yet and I won’t get a chance to finish it until tomorrow. So in the mean time, let’s have some freebies!

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Things that are useful

This post is a fantastic look at communication styles, and how clashing communication styles can cause women to just quietly leave gaming groups without ever addressing the problems that are bothering them. This should be required reading for GMs who frequently game with new people.

Also, I really do try to avoid linking to The Escapist, because seriously fuck them and their #GamerGate apologism. However, this piece is an excellent look at swords and those who say it’s “unrealistic” to portray women fighting with them.

Lastly, this isn’t useful so much as “really effing cool”, but I could totally see this getting used in tabletop campaign, so… Turns out, a Swiss taxidermist did a facial reconstruction of the tattooed Siberian princess that was unearthed last year. And she looks so metal! I’m totally going to play her in a game some time.

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Thing related to #GamerGate

The incomparable Leigh Alexander gave a talk about 90’s culture and how it ties into trends that led to the current state of game culture. It’s super fascinating (especially for me as a child of the 90’s), and the entire talk is online for free. Though make sure you skip to about 10:00, since before that they were just streaming technical difficulties in setting up the stream. Of particular note, the second question that she took was some dude trying to punk her using #GamerGate talking points. Beautifully, she dismantled him and his BS question – politely, and with infinite class. It was pretty much the best. (Transcription of the exchange is here for those who don’t want to watch the whole video.)

Also of note, Feminist Frequency released its first annual report since becoming a registered charity. And like everything that Anita Sarkeesian has a hand in, I am super impressed by how polished it is, and how it paints an honest picture of the current state of game culture while also remaining full of hope for the future.

Lastly, you may have heard about the flap over several feminist Wikipedia articles being censured for their part in a dispute over articles about #GamerGate. Turns out, initial reports may have been exaggerated? This is an interesting behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on that manages to be informative without being boring.

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Things I wrote!

Lastly, I posted the following on G+ in a private thread in response to someone asking how people with longer-running Patreons feel that Patreon has affected their art. It covers ground I haven’t previously covered here, so I thought I’d repost my comment in full here on my blog:

Okay, so disclaimer, I’m using it to support my blog. So, you know, is blogging “art” and all that…

I think the first and most important factor for me is that I wouldn’t have been able to re-launch my blog without Patreon support. I would need to chase other paying work. That is a not-inconsiderable factor. If you are economic circumstances that privilege you from needing to consider profitability of art that you make, that’s awesome! However, for myself and other artists with constrained budgets, Patreon is invaluable simply because it gives us freedom to make what we want to and not simply what will sell like gangbusters.

Now, from a personal standpoint, what has it meant to me personally and my work?

If anything, I find that my standards for what should be a paid post have risen since I first started blogging again. I’ll admit that it’s in small part due to the scrutiny that I’ve gotten from some quarters over being a “professional victim”. But mostly it’s because I want my patrons to stick with me for the long haul, and since I’ve hit a plateau in terms of patron support it’s important to me that I maintain strict standards of quality/quantity in terms of posts that I make as paid.

As far as does it influence what I choose to blog about? Sure. Of course it does. Some of that in good ways and some of that in not so good ways.

The not-so-good is that because I feel pressured to deliver quality posts, I sometimes fall into being silent when I don’t feel like I have things of worth to say. And that’s a trap! (I wrote about it at length here.) I’m trying to be better at not doing that, and also trying to do more free, off-the-cuff things so I don’t fall into that trap of not making paid posts because I’m feeling particularly worthless that day.

However, the good is twofold. First, that the accountability that I feel to my patrons has pushed me to improve my craft. I spend more time on my posts than I did pre-Patreon, for the most part. And I think the difference shows. Also, again because I feel pressure to deliver value, I’ve pushed myself to break out of my comfort zone and start experimenting with different kinds of posts. Like Claustrophobia! That was done with the intention of making it a Patreon thing. I never would have thought to do that sort of thing pre-Patreon, because I wouldn’t have been able to believe that people might find it valuable.

It’s not 100% awesome. There are the above difficulties. I also did another roundup of pros and cons here.

And then there’s just practical stuff. Like how Patreon’s UI SUCKS DONKEY BALLS. But for me, it’s been a game changer. And I think it’s a great thing for art overall, and for me as an artist personally.

Year in Review: My experiences with Patreon and self-publishing in 2014

(ETA: I forgot resolution number 6!)

Because I’m a big fan of transparency, as I find it helps encourage new self-publishers and content creators (women especially), I wanted to do a bit of an analysis of how 2014 went – both in terms of this Patreon, and a little bit in terms of my other publishing. I also wanted to talk about some lessons learned, in the hopes that this will be helpful for folks looking to jump into self-publishing in 2015.

(This post is a freebie, because charging patrons for a post about how much money I’m making off of my Patreon would be totally sketchy.)

1. Patreon revenue

For several reasons, it’s a bit difficult to quantify [money earned] per [standard unit of effort]. Sometimes I’ll do a visual post where I’ve monkeyed with photoshop, or done a redraw, or made a bingo card, whatever. Those tend to have low word counts, but higher time investments than writing-only posts. There’s also no way to quantify time spent on research, short of tracking my hours per post – which is way too anal for the amount of money I’m making on this thing.

So here’s the best approximation I could come up with – [monthly payout] / [total number of paid words]. (I can’t do it per post, because monthly limits mean that I get diminishing returns on subsequent posts in the same month. (That is absolutely not a complaint.))

Now the reason I started my Patreon was to “replace” to revenue that I would lose by writing here on my blog instead of working on other projects that would later earn me money. Kids are expensive, and when I was first looking at starting out, I was really feeling the pinch. So if you look at it from that angle, this Patreon has been a great success. Standard industry rates for freelancers are 2-3 cents per word – which means I’m earning more money per word than I could freelancing, and have been from the start! (That said, standard freelance rates are complete bullshit and don’t represent any sort of liveable wage in terms of financial return on time invested.)

All told, the income I got from this Patreon in 2014 paid for just over half of my kid’s daycare costs, which is a fair chunk of change. Hooray!

2. Patreon: pros & cons

So obviously Patreon is great. And really, to almost every single woman I know who has been saying “I’d like to do more publishing this year”, I will yell GET THEE TO A PATREON. However, it’s not universally perfect. So here are the pros and cons I’ve encountered in the last 10 months (not universally applicable, obviously)

Pros

• Predictable, regular income stream
• Pays better than freelancing
• Gives me the freedom to choose what I write about
• Real, concrete, tangible proof that what I am doing here has value. Literally!

Cons

• I’m now a “professional victim” according to some of my haters
• Every patron-spike (a cluster of new people becoming patrons) larger than 4 people was the direct result of targeted harassment campaigns against me
• It’s hard to expand your patronage once you reach a certain saturation, because even with the ability to set monthly limits many people aren’t willing to take on new monthly expenses
• The pressure to make paid posts “valuable” sometimes makes me post less, perversely
• Patreon is only suitable for small, periodic content; it won’t ever replace KickStarter for huge projects
• Doesn’t support multiple content “streams” (I couldn’t use this Patreon to support, say, fiction writing, frex)

This might make it look like there’s not any real advantage to having a Patreon, but don’t be fooled. The pros easily, easily outweigh the cons.

3. Self-Publishing: lessons learned

This is the year I decided that I was going to be A Real Publisher! And mostly, that worked out pretty well for me!

Most of what I learned this past year is excellently summed up in this piece by Molly Crabapple about how to “make it” as an artist. (Note: I am not even remotely claiming to have “made it”.) But briefly, here are the main lessons I learned this year:

• DON’T EVER WORK PAY ON PUBLICATION. Don’t do it. DON’T. DO. IT.
• Seriously fuck exposure. If someone wants you to work for exposure, tell them to jump off a fucking cliff.
• IT’S ALL ABOUT REVENUE STREAMS. Multiple revenue streams is the name of the game. This year I did patron-supported blogging, game publishing, children’s book illustration, and a few other miscellaneous projects. Don’t put all your eggs in one baskets. Baskets are amazing. You need more baskets. (I think I lost control of this metaphor.)
• Haters have almost zero power to affect your earnings. People willing to listen to a hater were not going to buy your shit anyway. So when someone hates on your work (spoiler alert: this will happen), set your fucks free, do a haters-gonna-hate-dance, and go on doing what you’re doing.
• Communicate with your audience! Your audience is something you should build a relationship with. Ideally it will grow, and much of your audience will support multiple projects. (Remember – baskets!) This is something I’m still working on, but wow it’s important.
• If you’ve ever done a thing and thought “I should sell this thing”, and then immediately talked yourself out of doing that? Tell your brain to STFU and sell the thing. I made $550 this year on a mini-game I almost didn’t publish.
• Speaking of which, small projects are amazeballs. Don’t be afraid to do lots of small projects instead of one HUGE GINORMOUS PROJECT.

4. Resolutions for 2015

So with all of that in mind, here are my thoughts for the coming year.

FIRST, after the shitstorm back in March over my redraw of GenCon’s mascot, I got paranoid and locked comments the fuck down. That’s killed a lot of discussion and I think that level of caution is no longer warranted, at least for now. I’m probably going to start cautiously easing restrictions on commenting, which will mean that people will be able to comment on old posts again. Hopefully people don’t abuse this.

SECOND, replacing troll comments with sarcastic memes is always a good decision. I resolve to keep doing that.

THIRD, I want to get back into doing at least 3 freebie link posts per month. I’ve neglected this blog shamefully the last three months, and traffic numbers have reflected that. I want to do what I can to promote under-represented voices!

THREE-and-a-HALF, I want to do more “creative” posts. Redraws, cartoons, photoshops, stuff like that. They’re fun! I need to do more fun things!

FOURTH, I want to do more to support women getting into publishing!

FIFTH, I really want to find a way to do more fiction writing in 2015! I’m going to put serious thought into how to do this. Maybe a crowdfunding ransom model? We’ll see.

SIXTH, I’m thinking of adding a tip jar, since a number of people told me this year that they would have supported me as a one-time thing. So I’ll probably put up a PayPal link or something. I’ll figure that out.

So that’s where I’m at. Thanks for sticking with me through what was a pretty tough year. I look forward to seeing what we can do this year!

Tired Friday hodge-podge: transparency, status report, and a bit of self-promotion

Hey, folks! Just a freebie here to address a few things that I wanted to give some attention to.

Transparency: My Patreon numbers so far

So far, I’ve been super pleased with how well Patreon has worked for me! Blogging is something I’m passionate about, and being able to do it without having to worry that I’m “stealing” time and creative bandwidth from projects I could get paid for is a god-send. One of the unfortunate realities of not living in a hippie utopia like Scandinavia is that I have to hustle to make my dollars count, especially with a toddler in the house[1]. So Patreon is great in that it gives me the freedom to allocate my mental bandwidth more to my liking.

The patron-supported relaunch only happened six weeks ago, so I only have a month and a half of posts and two payouts (Patreon processes pledges and issues payment the first week of each month for the previous month) as data points. But here are some preliminary numbers and my initial thoughts. (I should state the obvious here – I love spreadsheets. Like, unhealthily.[2])

month	Paid posts	amount pledged (processed)	amount received	total fees (credit card + Patreon fees)
February	3	204.5	182.64	21.86	11.97%
March	6	482.40	432.98	47.42	10.95%

 

February
Post topic	Total # Patrons	# Pledging Patrons	# Patrons Gained
Deep Down	17	17	7
Last of Us: women	24	25	1
Last of Us: Joel	25	23	1
TOTAL
March
Difficulty of satire	26	26	2
Male protag bingo	28	27	0
Jonboy anatomy	28	28	1
Backlash	29	29	10
Circle of Hands	39	34	1
How not to fail pt 1	40	27	0

I didn’t start tracking patron numbers and levels until recently, so I think I missed out on some good data. But an interesting picture is emerging so far. My initial thoughts?

The most positive features result in an unpredictable revenue stream. The ability to initially pledge at one amount and adjust later is great, because it lets people feel in control of the amount they want to spend as a patron and thus actually attracts patrons. But sometimes it can result in weirdness.

Like, there’s an interesting thing that happens where people pledge very highly to start with and then adjust downward later. It’s actually a positive thing, because every time I got a backer pledging at a high amount per post they actually messaged me to say “hey, I really want to support what you’re doing, but won’t pledge at this rate forever because of budget reasons”. And that is GREAT for me as a creator. Really, really great! But it has resulted in a couple weird downward dips. So I was appreciative that these patrons warned me in advance, because otherwise I would have been stressing about WHAT DID I DOOOOOOO.

Monthly caps, similarly, result in an unpredictability of revenue stream. And again, monthly caps are something I totally support! They’re a tool to help people feel confident that they won’t pay more than they want to, which is ultimately good for me. But it means that there’s a weird thing where a spike of new patrons in the second half of a month seems like a good thing, because they’re coming in fresh with no monthly caps that have been hit. But that’s a phenomenon where I feel like I need a lot more data points before I can analyze properly.

Hate spikes are actually pretty awesome. In advertising, there’s the idea that there’s no such thing as negative attention. Well, in social justice blogging circles that tends to be emphatically untrue. Hate-spikes like the one J Scott Campbell and his ilk sent my way are frightening, time-consuming, and mentally exhausting to deal with. When I was blogging for free, I would pretty much say I’d rather have a dearth of traffic than a massive hate-spike. And yet…

While the hate-spike was three of the un-funnest (yes it’s a word, shut up) days I’ve had in a long time, it also had a very concrete monetary benefit as it directly resulted in 10 new patrons. That’s almost a quarter of the patrons that I have now! As they say, the best revenge is living well. And I can’t think of a better “fuck you” than “I’m going to convert your hate directly into money”.

That said, I’m not about to go taunting Reddit or anything because I’m not stupid.

Status report! Posts requiring in-depth reporting.

I’ve mentioned previously that I was working on some posts (series of posts? not sure yet) about sex workers in games and disability in games. (Two SEPARATE topics, mind.) Work on these posts proceeds slowly – I’m still assembling an outline of how I’ll tackle this and the research needed is… daunting. The research file (a word doc where I dump links, quotes, and images) I have for disability in games is up above 10,000 words, with no sense of order emerging yet.

So if you’ve said to yourself, hey! I wonder what’s up with those posts… Working on it! But it’s a big task.

Self promotion! Our KickStarter funded the initial goal!

You guys! I’m so excited! Last night we hit our initial goal, which means the first series about Princess Kadri will definitely be happening!

Also, this week we started revealing the other princesses in the series that we are unlocking as stretch goals. Here is the lineup we have planned.

I desperately hope to be able to do ALL of them, because they are JUST. SO. AWESOME. Fayola is a trans princess who falls in love with the queen of another kingdom after she saves her and her daughter from a vicious ogre. Rowan just wants to go have adventures and gets tired of having to deal with an irritating prince who thinks she can’t because she only has one hand. Chandra is a princess AND sea captain who is pretty much a pirate princess. A PIRATE PRINCESS. WHAT I CAN’T EVEN. And Nayeli is a diplomat and fashionista who uses diplomacy to stop a war, because what’s the point of defining awesome as “things that aren’t traditionally girly”? Screw that. Girly and awesome are not mutually exclusive.

So yeah. Pleased as punch, and I hope our momentum continues so I get to do more awesome books about awesome princesses.

—

[1]Toddlers are EXPENSIVE. It costs a lot of money to feed them, and even more money to pay people to make sure that they don’t kill themselves while you’re off earning money to keep the lights on. Sometimes I’m kind of amazed that we’ve survived this long as a species, because. Man. Toddlers.

[2] (I don’t know why I think this is hilarious. It just is.)