Handling a hiatus with patreon

punkarsenic 2018-01-03 23:02:14 UTC #1

I'm coming to the end of a big ol chapter just now, and i wanna take up to 3 weeks Off to focus on college. however, i dont have a buffer on patreon (i dont like pages sitting there unseen) and realise that if i take a whole 3 weeks off from making pages, thats almost a month where theyre not getting their moneys worth.

aside from mayb having a buffer on patreon in the future, how do i deal with this without ripping people off or losing patrons?

NanettesClouds 2018-01-03 23:18:01 UTC #2

I'm planning on doing a similar thing (except a lot longer than 3 weeks.) what I'm going to do is

1) make an announcement so that my patrons know.
2) upload pages AS SOON AS THEIR FINISHED, so that they still sorta have an incentive to patron even while I'm on hiatus.
3) provide frequent news updates so everyone knows that I'm on track/not on track.

for what it's worth, (and you're one of my patrons so maybe you can provide feedback on this but...) 3 weeks isn't that bad of a hiatus? My comic is looking to go on break for like, 3-5 months, but then again it's not like I'll be 100% dead silent either, cuz I plan on uploading some minicomics in the middle of that.

Personally I wouldn't feel ripped off for a 3 week break, as long as the creator was really clear about what was going on, and if they needed a longer break that they came back and gave an update on what was happening.

punkarsenic 2018-01-03 23:42:00 UTC #3

thanks for this insight. i think you do have a good thing going with the minicomics you do, which make the space less dead.

im gonna be working hopefully on a minicomic in this time, so hopefully providing updates on that will help.

shazzbaa 2018-01-04 05:36:35 UTC #4

When I went on a mini-hiatus (mine was 3 months) I kept updating all the tiers that weren't directly related to the comic, and I was upfront with the $1 folks that there wouldn't be behind the scenes and there wasn't a lot I could show off while working on the script, but I would try to show them some like, sneak peeks of concepts and stuff for the next chapter, and make sure they got SOMETHING every month -- but that if they wanted to cancel and repledge when the comic started updating again, that was totally understandable! No one ended up cancelling. ;u;

Though if you don't want to do that, Patreon does have a way to "pause" your page, assuming this still works!!