Patreon Rewards?

I have pretty basic rewards. For 1$ pledge I have very common early access, but only teasers like, because I don't really have any buffer. What I do is to throw 3 or 4 pages from upcoming update. For 5$ pledge I provide wallpapers and early access for future projects ^^
Nothing fancy.

I've done some Twitter polls asking what rewards people prefer with interesting results. Perhaps this question needs another poll?

How about a straw poll vote?87

For my Patreon page, minimum $1 unlocks everything I post there. Like a tip jar, supports can donate as much or as little as they want.

I use mine for my caricatures and pretty much the same $1 unlocks everything for now but I will soon be putting my novel on there and letting anyone who gives me $10 read it. ( it is over 200 pages of sci fi / crime novel)

My campaign9 has four tiers of rewards, as well as a bunch of milestones. It's neat to have milestones, since that gives you - and your backers - something concrete to strive towards.

1$ - gets people access to weekly sketchposts, in which I either post previews/sketchy excerpts from WIPs or behind-the-scenes development stuff, like environment sketches or character design. Also gives access to monthly Q&A-comics and sketch-comics in between chapters.

3$ - all of the above, as well as access to upcoming pages ahead of regular readers. Patreon-backers are usually two pages ahead of regular readers - so when regular readers read page 10, backers are already reading page 12, and so on.

5$ - all of the above, as well as access to PDF-downloads of all the comics and stuff I make that isn't Grassblades. I draw - and have drawn - a bunch of oneshot comics, one finished graphic novel, some illustrated stories, etc. New downloads are sent out as projects are completed. Upcoming stuff: my Inktober-story and Wishlight.

10$ - all of the above, as well as downloads of Grassblades-chapters as they are completed, in hi-res PDF format with a bunch of extra materials. Also grants access to extra giveaways (though I haven't had the opportunity to run many; I need to hit a milestone goal first, and get more organised).

Most of my backers are in the lower two tiers, for obvious reasons, but I do have backers spread out across all four tiers.

As a reader, I think early access to pages, as well as sketch-posts would be the main draws for me. But I'm sadly not really in a position, income-wise, to back anyone on Patreon regularly, so I haven't really had the opportunity to think about it. Though ultimately, I think I would choose to back people even if I didn't get any rewards - personally, enabling other creators to continue doing wha they're already doing is good enough for me.

But I'm aware not everyone feels the same way.

As a reader a good comic that comes out regularly is all I care about, so PDF-downloads are a plus. I support creators because I have the income to do so and I want creators to have the opportunity to do what they love!

If/when I can afford to, I would love to support the creators based on their hard work alone as @CyndiFoster put in the straw poll, but rewards are often a nice little extra to thank those who can give a bit each month. (Great suggestions on the poll too!)

Early page access and maybe some behind the scenes commentary and concepts can be quite appealing.

well i wouldnt really call my patreon a success in any way but some of my rewards are like....access to private gallery of wips and sketches, cameo of you or an OC of yours in my comic, umm commissions idk things like that

I have three reward tiers; $1+ gives people access to the general Patreon-exclusive stuff I post: art, giveaways, budget discussions, all of which can be influenced by the supporters. $2+ gives them access to background information about every single comic page, ranging from changes that were made from the first draft to trivia about character design, influences, and all sorts of things. $5+ unlocks additional access to monthly posts about and including upcoming pages as well as other plans for the comic--basically, get a bunch of pages before everyone else and hear about announcements before they're made public. The latter might seem unusually expensive for an "early access" type of reward, but it's a big deal to me since my comic already updates daily and keeping up a good buffer is hard work.

Personally, I'm very happy with those rewards. My supporters enjoy them and I have a lot of fun providing all those extras too! If you're also looking for milestone inspiration, feel free to take a look at mine14. (One of my supporters said he specifically pledged for the $300 milestone, so they really do help!)

Now as for being a patron, to me it's not so much about the rewards (I like having them, of course, but I'm not very picky about what exactly they are), but more about things like honesty and trust. I want to be convinced my money is in good hands, whether it's to help an artist pay their rent or to invest in a series I enjoy. That, and I'll just be honest here and say that even if I enjoy someone's work, I'll never support them financially if they're being jerks about their campaign--such as constantly whining on social networks about "only" having __ patrons (jeez, that'll sure make me feel appreciated if I decide to pledge!) or making more excuses for not getting a "real" job than actually talking about what they do as an artist. I don't think I've run into any of those types here, but it's the one thing that really kills a Patreon campaign for me.

Thanks for the poll, @CyndiFoster! Can you please also post a link to the research you did on Twitter? I'm curious about it.

I'm not in a position to be able to support financially other artists yet, but if I ever get there, I would support just for the sake of supporting the series I love and the artist I admire. Though the rewards seem like nice extras, I think it just makes life harder for the artist (haha, I'm the right one to say that, with my complicated rewards, huh ^^;;; ).

I'm not into physical stuff and actually wouldn't want my name listed anywhere, so the only thing I would find cool is early access. But again, it definitely wouldn't be the decisive factor.

In my Patreon8 I offer early access to new pages of one of my series, "adoption" of animal characters from Trivia from Nature, wallpapers and things like PDF downloads of hi-res versions of my comics. So far I have had one patron who chose a tier "without reward", and I don't think most of the others really give much importance to the rewards. Most have been pleased with the "animal adoption certificates" and wallpapers, but when I didn't manage to upload some other rewards due to bad connection, nobody complained.
Actually, I don't even know if many of them read the early access pages I post there, since I get about 1-2 comments at most, so maybe the early access isn't all that interesting after all ^^;;;

What I liked were milestone rewards in Tapastic support program (not goals) because it feels more fair to everybody, so I've been working on including this "system" into my Patreon, though the website doesn't make it easy at all. (That's why I have those high rewards there, they are meant more as milestone rewards)

I find these tweets both hilarious and sad... I remember seeing a tweet that really struck me at heart, something along the lines "Patreon support is under $1000/month, future updates are endangered!" - that's just downright threatening and showing that the creator didn't give a damn about their patrons and readers, even about their comic XP

Those polls are pretty old now. (back when Twitter polls was a new feature and only two choices were available. Had to dig deep into my tweets to find them lol

I see, it's still interesting, though Thanks for taking your time to look for them!

I'm going through this right now. Its difficult to manage how much I can do as rewards. Some people do SO much for rewards and I don't think I can keep up with the level of work it would take. I'm trying to figure out what I can do that wont take time away from the comic projects while still providing something patrons would want to receive. Seeing @CyndiFoster 's poll is very uplifting! Concept art is a great thing because I have it already!

Yes, I've been sharing that poll on Twitter and with my readers to get a diverse opinion. Popular result is, if money wasn't an issue for them, the deciding factor to support an artist is to help them keep creating their content. Rewards were merely an afterthought and a nice gesture in most their opinions. So my recommendation is to keep creating the best work you can, offer concept art, small print items that don't cost a lot to make, early release, and sketch requests. Best part is all those rewards are fairly easy for creators to provide without cutting into too much time from creating the actual content.

Thanks Cyndi! You have no idea how much better I feel about it right now. I was kind of getting overwhelmed over the thought process of hashing it all out.

I couldn't care less about rewards.

Nope, the early access pages are posted on Patreon before they go live on the main site/Tapastic! Which isn't super-optimal - Patreon's not really made for posting comics on - but without Tapastic's Supporter-locked content and lacking the website-y know-how to set that up on my main site (I'm a tech-Neanderthal - I'm amazed every time I do something with my website and it doesn't explode in my face >.<), it's the easiest way to do it.

Once I've finished a chapter for regular readers, I tend to go back and delete the early-access posts on Patreon, to cut down on the number of posts people have to scroll through to get to sketch-comics and Q&A's and concept-art posts. All those pages are now live for non-backers, so there's no real need to keep them sitting around on Patreon.