Uploading this time-lapse video here because somehow it didn’t show up correctly on a recent Patreon post about small gifts from invested parties and how much they keep me motivated to work on the book.
Still thinking a lot about how Patreon and my site (and my newsletter!) all relate to one another. My online ecosystem is smaller than it once was, and certainly a lot more under my own control, but that also means I’m operating without the feedback mechanism of social media. When there are no likes, replies, or reposts, it can feel liberating, but also a bit like everything is just waving in the wind. The quality of contact I get now is much higher (a longer conversation over Zoom with a Patron, or a postcard in the PO box from a reader), but it doesn’t always help me understand where to focus my attention.
Quite likely this is good. We’ve seen what happens when people chase those kinds of metrics—how platforms shape our behavior and encourage a certain flavor of posting. But that brain circuitry is also pretty hard to escape. We all want to be patted on the head. We all want to know we are part of the tribe.
On a more practical level, Patreon is the cornerstone of my livelihood. Its growth enables my creative exploration and financial stability, but I always feel best when I’m not focused on growing it from a place of need. Pulling back from Twitter and Instagram (and not replacing them with any of the other platforms cropping up like mushrooms after rain) has absolutely impacted the number of new people finding and joining Patreon. Those avenues functioned as advertising for The Thing I Was Trying to Do. There was a pipeline. But it’s the sour tang of advertising (both as a creator and a consumer) that has led so many people to get off these platforms in the first place.
I had to write my first CV for an application this past week, having previously relied on a résumé for most professional opportunities. It’s a funny thing being both too artistic for an academic CV and too Adventure Cartoonist-y for an artistic CV. You gotta mash a lot of stuff together. When I was Googling around trying to find links to past interviews or news articles or other items that might be a good fit for sections of the document, I kept getting stymied by my own SEO. Page after page of results from my own blog. The sort of thing that I companies are probably training specialists in as we speak. I’ve never taken a class on SEO optimization or made it a deliberate part of my “strategy” (there is no strategy on the site, I love that about it), but I do love tags and I do love linking to things betwixt and between my own thoughts and it turns out that behavior is a cornerstone of taking over your own search rankings.
So where is that thing for Patreon? Where is the behavior I already enjoy that will help me build a stable financial future?
