When you think of Patreon, you probably think of a membership subscription and roll your eyes. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s MORE than a straightforward menbership site these days. It’s about giving creators AGENCY over their work, giving them a place to set up shop in their own way, and to find an audience that they vibe with and that loves what they make.
With the rise in intellectual property being used without permission to train generative AI, it has become important for creators to find ways to protect their work. There are plenty of rights protection software options out there, but when publishers and selling agents open their vaults to companies that want access to millions of books to train their AI, it is impossible to stop your own work from landing up in the mill along with other authors. This wholesale betrayal of authors by the people who gate the publishing industry and who guard it so closely that it’s a test of a person’s mettle just to query a book, gave me huge doubts that the path I was on towards making books was the right one. I began to look around at the same time as I chose to withdraw from querying agents. I wasn’t in the query trenches for long so my commitment there was minimal, thank goodness. I can’t image how other authors who are through that baptism by fire and into the publishing world must feel right now.
I discovered Patreon by accident, if I’m honest with you. Up until the day I came across another author’s post about their own Patreon, I was researching options for selling my books on my own website. I will probably still do this, but now I have some work to do to build up the specific audience I can engage on Patreon. I look forward to actively growing the community of follower members I attract to my suspense romance stories which will be published in a serialized formate each week. This new approach excites me because it means I have content to share for the rest of the year without having to continuously invent new stories. That’s the problem with a book. All the work happens BEFORE you get to share it, so if your launch fizzles, so does your book. With Patreon, I trickle-release the book I wrote, work on new stories, and grow my audience all at the same time. I lose nothing and gain EVERYTHING. It’s exciting! I’m excited. And I hope you are too. See you on Patreon!