A PATREON ANNOUNCEMENT

Lovely Patrons, Dear Readers, and anyone else who might happen across the blog this morning... it's time to talk about my Patreon's future. 

Setting up a Patreon of my very own was an impulsive decision. Someone suggested it, I checked it out and then signed up all within a very short period. I had a hope-for-the-best attitude - after all, if only 5-10% of the people who visited my blog a week were willing pay $3 a month for the Patreon, then that content, which previously earned me nothing, would be generating a substantial return.

But it's not that easy. Patreon seems to be the kind of thing that only works really well when the person running it constantly promotes and sells it. You have to throw yourself at it full-force, and link all your other social media to it, and come up with all kinds of other content that entices people toward it. And it turns out, I'm not actually comfy doing that, or any good at it either. I'm happy to babble on about my books and try to sell those to people, but talking about my own brilliance in an effort to set myself up as an indispensible writing expert? Watch me cringe.

As a result, although I'm super grateful for you folks who subscribe, and anyone else who visits regularly, the Patreon isn't really earning very much. And what's more, people - online and in real life - keep referring to my blog as a resource and recommending people go there for wisdom and advice, and I have to keep breaking the news that none of it is THERE anymore, it's all on my Patreon, and by the way you need to pay to access it... 

Watch me cringe twice as much, argh.

So: my Patron base just isn't growing as I'd hoped, and It's entirely my fault because I'm clearly not prepared to do the sorts of things to promote it which are required. But this also means that so far I'm not doing any of the other interesting stuff which I promised I would when I got to a certain number of Patrons, which means that to me this doesn't feel like value for money for the Patrons I do have. And on top of that, I miss being able to freely link people to an archive of writing advice on my blog instead of cringing away from 'selling' the Patreon to them. I also miss being able to muse and ramble about writing on my blog and talk about my works in progress and other tangentially related topics, using it as a kind of craft journal without worrying if what I write is accessible, useful and relevant as writing advice rather than just something I want to express.

Conclusion: Patreon is not for me.

I've posted a similar announcement on the Patreon itself, and from next week I'll start migrating all the content - all the links on the All About Writing page - back onto the blog here. In addition, because the pieces I posted on the Patreon have been heavily revised, updated and retitled, I'll post them here as 'new', I think, at a pace about one a week. That will help to salve my conscience over how I've neglected the blog lately.

I want to say a massive thank you, again, to my lovely Patrons for supporting me during this little experiment, and to everyone who checked out the free content there or shared the link through Twitter or FB or whatever. And also, of course, to all the readers of my blog, past and present, whether they were also Patrons or not! You motivate and inspire me every day, and I couldn't do this job without you. 

 Read you later, muffins.