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Use Patreon to Market Your Novels Without Social Media

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about marketing for fiction authors without using social media.

Patreon:

I have a Patreon that I modeled after several other fiction authors, especially Lit-RPG and fantasy authors. They post the rough draft chapters on their Patreon, 1-3 chapters each week, as they write/edit them. Patrons subscribe at various tiers and get extra stuff depending on their tier.

For me, I have 4 tiers: Tier 1, $5/month which gets them early access to my chapters before the book is published, along with any bonus content. Tier 2, $15/month which gets them audiobook chapters as they’re available. Tier 3, $25/month which gets them a specially-curated book box once every 4 months. Tier 4, $100/month which gets them a custom short story written for them once a year (I don’t have anyone at this tier at the moment).

Tiers 3 and 4 get to read the weekly chapters first, and then permission is given to Tier 2 the week after, and finally Tier 1 after that. This type of “time-gating” of chapters is very common among authors who post chapters in subscription models like Patreon and Ream.

In addition to the text of the chapter, I also include .jpgs of the annotated version of the chapter, which my readers absolutely LOVE. It’s bonus content that my Patreon gets first before anyone else.

All paid subscribers also get the finished .epub of my novels when they’re done.

Here is the link to my Patreon

You can see that I have content that's public, content for free Followers, and also content that's only for paid subscribers.

Annotated versions:

(I’m not sure if you can consider this marketing, but it’s related to my Patreon and website marketing. Also, not all readers like annotated versions, so you’ll have to decide if this is right for your audience.)

I have lately started adding footnotes to my novels with Easter Eggs, research facts, behind-the-scenes tidbits, and just general author commentary (see further below for an explanation of each of these).

Full disclosure, I didn’t come up with this—I saw that several romantasy Kickstarters offered a handwritten annotated Chapter One for certain tiers, and they were really popular. However, even the authors admitted it was a LOT of work and they didn’t want to do it again.

I thought I could do the same type of annotations using footnotes instead, which would be easier than handwriting the annotations. Then I could offer the entire annotated book to readers rather than just a few readers and a few handwritten annotated pages. Also, my handwriting is TERRIBLE and readers wouldn’t be able to read my scratchings.

I use Scrivener, so I can export the novel with or without the annotations very easily. I export the annotated version of the novel as a PDF with larger font (so the pages are easier to read on mobile phones) and the footnotes at the bottom of the pages.

For my Patreon, I use the Automator app (on my Mac) to separate the PDF into .jpgs of each of the pages, and I post the annotated chapter page .jpgs on my Patreon along with the rough draft text of the chapter.

After the book is edited and formatted into an ebook, I’ve been including the watermarked annotated edition as a free bonus when people buy the ebook or paperback from my website, to motivate them to buy from me direct rather than from Amazon. I use BookFunnel to watermark and deliver both the ebook .epub and the annotated version .epub and .pdf.

Here’s a link to an annotated chapter in my Patreon which is free for my free Followers. I’m sorry, but you might need to create a free Patreon account and follow my Patreon for free in order to see the post, but you can always unfollow me later.

Discoverability:

Admittedly, Patreon is not a great place for fans to find you and discover you. But it’s also what makes Patreon so much better than Facebook—no doom-scrolling.

I put links to my Patreon at the back of my ebooks and QR codes to my Patreon at the backs of my print books. I also mention my Patreon in my newsletter once a month, at least.

Patreon is mostly for my fans, so trying to sell my Patreon to a cold reader isn’t a good use of my time. So that’s why I haven’t tried advertising or trying to get the word out about my Patreon more widely.

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