Yesterday in my wanderings across the internets, I came across this site called Patreon. The concept is simple. Remember back in the good old Renaissance days, when artists had patrons who would support them, allowing the artists to do cool things like paint church ceilings or be William Shakespeare? Yeah. Those were some pretty good days, from an artist’s perspective. Well, minus the constant threat of death to disease, and the criminal lack of video games.
But yay for patrons!
Patreon wants to bring that back. The patrons, not the constant threat of death to disease. So people can sign up to support artists on a monthly basis. I’ll admit to being intrigued by the concept. Here’s a video that sums it up:
http://youtu.be/wH-IDF809fQ
I’ve been writing this blog for free since 2007. I’m not going to stop writing it for free, but at the same time, I thought there might be some of you out there who’d be interested in being a patron of mine. If not, no harm, no foul. We can still be friends. But there’s some other cool things I’ve thought about doing online that I’ve never really explored, and this seemed like an opportunity to see if they might pan out.
Specifically, I’d love love love to start a sort of blogging writing group. I’ve been wanting to publish ICHABOD on my lonesome for quite some time, and I’d really like to get some feedback from my fans before I do that. So I set up the patreon page with that in mind. Join at $1/month, and you get a big fat virtual kiss from me. On the cheek though. Because cooties. More importantly, you get access to all the ICHABOD posts as they go up there, week by week. Read them over, offer comments and suggestions. My hope is that I could get a real conversation going about the book.
If you’d like to be a bit bigger of a patron, I’ve set up a $3/month option too. You can read about it over there.
I honestly have no idea if this is of interest to anyone, but I thought it was worth a shot. Denisa helpfully reminded me to start small, and then expand if the interest proves to be there. So that’s what I’m doing. If I get to the point where I have $20/month coming in from this or more, then I’ll start expanding the program some.
Anyway. That’s what I’ve got for you today. I’d love to hear some feedback. Let me know what you think.