Last April, I started a Patreon. The only thing I offer is your name on the sidebar and the promotion of your profile or website. In six months, I’ve only had one person as a patron. Even he stopped because I couldn’t get him enough visitors. I wasn’t happy about it, but I wasn’t angry at him either. It would’ve been immature and hypocritical. As I’ve said before, no one’s obligated to read my comics or donate to me. It’s something I have to earn.

I should start offering more on my Patreon. I’m going to share a few ideas I have, but I’m either unsure about or I didn’t flesh out completely. To get the obvious idea out of the way, I’m not gonna make Patreon-exclusive comics. I won’t always have the time to draw three comics per week and if I suddenly locked half my comics behind a paywall, you’d want my head on a pike. Now that I got that horrifying visual out of the way, let’s get started.

Early access

This is something a lot of people offer on their Patreon. If you pay them, you can see their content early. To be honest, I never got the point of it. Yeah, it’s nice the first time, but then you have to wait the same amount of time as everyone else for the next picture/comic/video. You just go back where you started.

Then again, people do pay money for early access and it is something I can easily do. Most of my comics are drawn a few weeks in advance. If you’re willing to pay for early access, I can give it to you. It’s not something I would pay for, but there’s clearly people who think otherwise.

Behind-the-scenes content

Another thing Patreon users do is show their work mid-production. For those of you who are curious, I can show you what my comics look like before I scan and draw over them in Paint. I might even share some amusing mistakes I make while drawing. Happens to the best of us.

Ask blog

Here’s a more original idea. People who donate enough money could ask me or my characters any question they want and I would draw a comic answering it. Sounds like a fun idea on paper, but I shouldn’t be short-sighted. What if I get too many patrons and have to draw too many comics? I don’t want the entire webcomic to become an ask blog. I could put a cap on the number of patrons, but that ruins the point of crowdfunding. I could increase the price, but no one’s gonna pay 10 dollars for just one comic.

There’s also another way to approach this. Once a month, I could ask everyone, not just patrons, what questions they have and choose 10 of them via a random number generator. The patrons could vote on the questions to make a comic about and the top 3 would win. I wouldn’t charge you too much for an opportunity to vote. This method is more manageable for me, but I fear it might be too complicated for the fans. I hope I explained it right.

And that’s all I have for now. I could make more suggestions in the future. Tell me if you like any of these ideas and if you would pay a few dollars a month for them. I’m still trying to figure out the prices. Right now I have zero patrons, so if people show interest, it’s a perfect opportunity to rework my Patreon page. Do not feel pressured about anything. You don’t have to become a patron and if you do, you can leave whenever you want, no questions asked. Let’s see how good of a businessman I am.