(Re)introducing… the Luke Smitherd Patreon Page
Hi all.
So your Second Favourite Author has found himself at quite a major career crossroads.
The gap between the time it takes to write, redraft, prep and promote a book and the financial return it is becoming wider and wider. The Physics of the Dead came out… (check notes) holy s**t, in three months’ time it’ll be fifteen years ago. That means I was working on it at least sixteen years ago. That’s a long time. Now, the sheer volume of work being churned onto book sites every single day is simply jaw-dropping, and getting heard above the noise is exponentially harder than in the past (ask anyone who is only just getting into producing books; I shudder to think about how hard it is to stand out now compared to when I started, and it was hard enough then.)
As a result, I’m thinking about changing the way I work on new material. From time to time, readers ask if there’s a way to get a bit closer to my writing process, or just for more insights etc. Early looks, work-in-progress notes, the odd extra of me fannying around maybe on video or in audio that doesn’t really belong anywhere else. At the same time, book sales (not just mine) have become more episodic than they used to be: brief spikes of attention in an increasingly crowded market, followed by long periods of quiet. That doesn’t affect my interest in writing, but it does make the time required to produce quality work harder to sustain economically. I needed a straightforward way of keeping things sustainable without hollowing out the work or turning it into content. A small, predictable base makes it easier to plan long-term, take fewer shortcuts, and make decisions based on the work rather than the market.
So in a nutshell, I’m restarting my Patreon page.
For long-term readers, that may sound familiar; I ran one maybe ten years or so ago? For those that don’t know, Patreon is a website where people can support creators in exchange for extra stuff and cool content. This was help keep the writing coming. On my old page, I wrote a short story a month for my patrons, or a novel in parts (Kill Somone was written that way). I ended up phasing it out for various reasons, mainly workload (although shooting the breeze with you all was a blast, producing on time was a lot of pressure, and I really didn’t want to let you folks down). I don’t want to go back to that, but I decided to come up with something that would be a better balance of price and output. I need to keep Instagram and Facebook posting to a minimum as my attention is always snagged by something on there when I use it (tech nerds just too darn good at their jobs) and my ADHD brain loses far too much time.
So the new Luke Smitherd Mega Patreon is going to be different… but still cool.
It’ll be just $5 a month—about the price of a coffee—and you can leave whenever you like. (To put it into other currencies: around £3.72 for the Brits, €4.26 for the Europeans, £6.91 for the Candians, and about $7.48 for the Aussies). What do you get for that? You’ll get:
- Members-only updates on what I’m writing and why
- Monthly AMA (Ask Me Anything). These will be live Zooms or people can email in
- Early access to all book news, covers, and releases; even before the mailing list gets it
- Occasional draws to have characters, street names, or places named after supporters
- Occasional audiobook extras and behind-the-scenes notes
- Thoughts and opinions about writing and publishing/self-publishing
- Voice or video updates about progress and also my thoughts on random stuff
- Exclusive author commentaries from me on past and future works
- Members-only polls: what cover design works best? What book idea should be next?
- Patrons names listed in a special section of each book and audiobook as supporters in future releases.
- Locked-in founder member pricing: for the early supporters the price will never change even if it goes up in future.
- And—of course—you get access to the entirety of the original Patreon archive. That means posts about the development of books that have now been around for years, where my career was back then, silly videos and audio, the lot.
You sign up here at patreon.com/lukesmitherd
Thanks for your patience, and regardless of your decision: genuinely, thanks for having supported my work at any point.
Luke
