Sorry I'm a new writer. My first book is The Nexus Foundation story. I'm getting ready to publish the sequel Nexus Rising and I see that some authors also publish through Patreon. How does that work and is it worthwhile in terms of income. I did pretty well with the first book on Bookapy. I published that about half way through the serial chapters on StoriesOnline.
Thanks to everyone for the great info I've found on here!
How does that work and is it worthwhile in terms of income.
I haven't used it, but I've looked into it. There are several authors on SOL who use Patreon.
First, Patreon is not a publishing platform. Its a platform for crowd sourcing patronage.
Way back when, artists of all types had two basic routes for making money from their art.
1. Doing commission work. But when you do commission work the client is paying to to produce something very specific.
2. Find a wealthy patron willing to pay you what would amount to a salary in today's terms to create whatever you want.
Patreon crowd sources the latter idea. Artists of all kinds, painters, graphic artists, musician/composers, video game designers writers, all use Patreon.
The idea is you get a large number of "patrons" to each pay you a few dollars per month to create whatever you want. The patrons get a few simple goodies like access to works in progress.
For it to be worthwhile, you need a fairly sizeable fan base, because likely only a small percentage of your fans will be willing to pay you on that kind of model.
And Patreon is NOT a platform for new fans to find you unless they are already explicitly looking for You.
Also if you intend to use Patreon, while continuing to post to SOL, there are rules here that you need to know about.
Patreon is great if you have a large fanbase who is willing to pay a few dollar for advance chapters. I am supporting a few authors from other sites myself and cant complain.
Biggest issue with promoting your patreon profile are the rules on SOL.
https://storiesonline.net/author/posting_guidelines.php
17.b is the paragraph you need to look at. Personally I would rarely pay for only two advanced chapters, it would depend on the length of the chapter. But there are a some people out there who are willing to pay even without benefits, just for support.
tl;dr
to be successful with patreon you need a quality product, offer good benefits for subsribing and a large enough fanbase.