My Money Matters (On Patreon & Being A Small Pledger)

Patreon announced new fees this week and has a lot of people (including me) pissed off.* You can complain to them about the new fee structure here.

For those of you who don't know what Patreon is, it's an online platform by which artists can receive funding directly from their fans. Here's more info on them (via Wikipedia). All of the creators I pledge to are writers.

I spend an absurd amount of money on books. New, used, and now e-books too. But I don't know the publishing industry well enough to know how much is going to authors (not much, I know that at least, and nothing for anything I buy used). And I also know that those funds are not steady.

It's made me really happy to find a way to support some authors directly. Even though my pledges have all been at the $1/month level (until recently), I know it makes a difference. And pledging at that level has allowed me to support more authors.

I work at a large liberal church and a big part of my work each year is running donation drives: hygiene kits for disaster assistance, school supplies for our summer students, Christmas gifts for our tutoring students. From talking with donors and my own experience as a donor, it's important to me that everyone be able to contribute as they can and would like to. I sometimes get grumblings about this from new volunteers - it's not efficient, it's not economical, etc. But these drives are part of the life of the church, of that particular community. People need to feel they have something to contribute, that they are a valued part of that community. That what they give makes a difference.

We all do.

And from my end, every contribution does make a difference. Dollars add up fast when you have enough people giving. One women's group I work with has a weekly collection of their "least coins". Trust me, when I'm dragging a sack of coins twice a year to accounting, those least coins are not so little!

Reading Patreon's new few structure, in light of my own experience with asking for donations, tells me my little pledges don't matter to them. That I'm not who they want giving.

I hope that's not the message they want to send. I know it's not the message creators want them to be sending.

For myself, I've dropped out of a couple of pledges (to organizations rather than individuals). I've upped my pledges to everyone else, both because I can swallow the per-pledge fee more comfortably if it's a smaller percentage of the whole, and because I know creators are losing pledges over this. And I've resigned myself to spending more overall this way - I was going to say I'll just buy one less book each month but I think we all know that's unlikely. Maybe a few less coffees instead. And I'll be more cautious about adding any new ones.

And yes, I have registered my complaint.

Sending love to all authors and those who support them,
Annie

*Word now is that Patreon is doing this as a way to freeze out creators that they feel aren't "successful" enough to represent them. What a dick move. I'll stay on it to support those authors I love, but if/as they start migrating to other platforms I'll follow them.