Patreon, resources, and content changes

Happy new year everyone! If you read our main new year’s post, you’ll know we’re trying to do things a little different this year. Notably, we want to offer more tutorials and resources to share what we learn as we go.

What’s the deal with Patreon?

If you pledged to our Patreon, you may have noticed the hullabaloo recently. If you didn’t pledge, feel free to skip to the next section! In December, Patreon announced fee changes that would result in patrons paying for service fees instead of creators. Most creators fully expect to pay fees for the services they use to get paid, and did not like the idea of their patrons paying extra – as much as 38% more than the advertised pledge amount. Patreon received a lot of backlash over this from the community, us included.

Patreon has since announced that they will not be making this change, which we’re happy to hear! However, this situation made us realize that having a lot of exclusive content on a third-party site is a pretty risky move. We want to start posting more content here on our blog on our terms, instead of relying so much on a another company.

So where does that leave our Patreon? We’ll hang onto it for now, but find other ways for our fans and friends to access extra content. Patreon is developing a charge-up-front feature which would reduce a lot of risk for us as creators. If we receive that feature, we’ll probably go back to Patreon – though not exclusively.

Tutorials and early access

We’re developing a schedule for posting tutorials and resources to Azdion’s blog in 2018. We’re looking at posting one extensive step-by-step tutorial and a few additional lighter resources each month.

Early access to these items will cost a small amount of money – only a few dollars, in most cases. This way, those who are able to pay for them can have them right away, but those who can’t will not be excluded. We appreciate all support, monetary or not, and understand that sometimes people who need tutorials and other tools the most are those who can’t afford as much. We will eventually release resources for free after a set amount of time so everyone can make use of them!

Delivery

Early-access resources will be served through Selz (our online storefront), likely as PDF files. When we release them for free, the corresponding blog posts will be edited with the tutorial content instead of a purchase link. We trust Selz as a service, though we will research other options too in the event that Selz ever makes changes we don’t approve of.

If we receive the charge-up-front feature on Patreon, we may use it as something of a mirror for the blog – a convenient subscription model for those who use Patreon already.

Closing

In addition to the above, we’re up for some experimenting. If you have a suggestion or feedback, let us know! Is there something we’ve done that you want to know more about? Is there something we haven’t done that you want us to find out about? Do you know about a great service we should be using or posting resources to? Should we make videos??? Let us know at our contact page!

Happy new year, and see you soon!