Writers here with Patreons, how do you do it? What are your backer rewards? How do you make sure your patrons are getting their money's worth? I want to try and earn more money for writing as I work towards publishing a short story collection (at first) then novels. Medium's partner program is okay, but I can't seem to get the views I need.
I would say the two biggest things to take into consideration are:
1. Very few creators can make a living solely from their Patreon (though I suspect there might be more writers among that group than other types of creators). It's significantly easier to become
moderately successful on the platform (say, an extra hundred bucks or so per month), but there are still huge numbers of unsuccessful creators.
2. Patreon won't help you get views. You need views elsewhere to help push readers
to Patreon. You can't browse creators on Patreon. (I don't have any suggestions on increasing views for short stories--all of the sites I've tried give greater visibility to longer stories.)
When I started my Patreon account, I selected a model that I've seen other authors be successful with--a long, serialized fantasy story (with the potential for sequels), where patrons receive early access to the chapters plus additional goodies (e.g., background info about characters, sneak preview of potential scenes with a request for feedback, sneak preview of my upcoming book cover). Then I chose several sites that allow authors to post their stories, and readers can read them for free. Those sites are how I generate new readers, who may or may not be interested in becoming patrons (only a tiny percentage will ever become patrons, and it takes a long time to build up those numbers). After about four months, I'm nowhere near making a living at it, but I'm up to the low end of "moderately successful".
I believe this particular model works best with fantasy or sci-fi. Other genres don't typically expect long, epic, ongoing stories, and with this model, you've got to stick with the same story (or its sequels). If you follow this model but start charging your patrons for other miscellaneous stories, you're likely to lose them.
But there are other models for other styles. Once you've narrowed down
what you want to write, then I'd recommend finding successful creators who write similar things, and then figure out how their specific model works.
I just did a google search on:
site:patreon.com "is creating" "short stories"
... and found some successful to moderately successful short story writers on the first page of the results. You can narrow it down further by adding a genre to the search terms.
One other suggestion: Why wait until you have a collection of short stories? Have you thought about publishing them individually? Get your author website set up, then some promotional sites, and then start releasing them once per week on Amazon for 99 cents (and for short stories, consider putting them on Kindle Unlimited). You won't make much money on them, but if you have regular releases, you might build up a readership there, and then you can sell the collection once all the stories are done. It might be tricky to put together cheap book covers for this model, though.
