I'm still not really comfortable with the idea of having a Patreon or a Ko-fi. It feels presumptuous and, well, like I said in the post linked above, "offputtingly venal". And I'm not particularly optimistic that it'll actually be a success; I won't be particularly surprised if it never ends up getting any subscribers or donors at all. Still, I kind of feel like I ought to try, if only because I kind of need the money. I mean, I don't absolutely need the money; even if I do end up taking out loans to fund some of my plans for the Wongery, barring unexpected disasters (well, more unexpected disasters, beyond the recent global pandemic and... what's currently going on in the industry I work in, neither of which has had a positive effect on my income), I'll get by. I'm not in immediate danger of eviction or having my property seized (not that I have much property worth seizing) or... whatever else happens to people who end up too far in debt. But having some extra funds coming in would definitely let me rest a bit easier and remove a lot of the stress I'm currently under, and may let me spend more time on the Wongery if I don't have to spend as much time chasing down money. Things are tough right now, and while I'm willing to take on a little more debt to do what I want to do with the Wongery, that's going to make things even tougher.
I mean, I don't want to overstate the direness of my financial situation. I'm living well above the poverty line. By global standards, I guess I'm actually pretty well off. I own a car, a desktop computer, several laptops, a lot of books, and other items that a lot of people don't have. I live by myself in a one-bedroom apartment.
Still, although I'm not poor by most standards, I'm definitely not rich, either. Even when the industry isn't in a slump as it is now, I typically make less than the median income in my country. And I live in one of the sixty biggest cities in the world, as well as one of the sixty most expensive. The cost of living is high here, and a significant proportion of my income goes to my rent. (Which is of course exacerbated by the fact I live, as mentioned above, in a one-bedroom apartment—that honestly may have been kind of a foolish extravagance, and it might have been wiser to rent a cheaper studio apartment instead.) I may be better off financially than a lot of people in the world, but I'm living from paycheck to paycheck, and I still always feel like I'm just barely scraping by.
(And of course when the industry is in a slump things are even worse. I mentioned a couple posts back that all my credit cards were over their limits and the total balance of my bank accounts was hundreds of dollars in the red; at the time I'm writing this, that is, unfortunately, still the case. I've received a couple of small paychecks since that post, but they went toward paying some urgent bills and I haven't had enough yet to bring any of my accounts back into the black. There are a few much larger checks I'm still waiting on, though, so I'm hoping that circumstance will change soon.)
(Okay, actually, now that I think of it, it's not technically true that all my credit cards are over their credit limits—and it wasn't technically true when I made that earlier post, either. But the two that aren't over their limits are store cards that can only be used at specific establishments, so they may not fully count.)
(Okay, as usual I've had this blog entry sitting on my computer partially written for days until I finally got around to finishing and posting it, and in the time since I wrote the above paragraphs one of the other checks I was waiting on did come in, and my bank accounts are no longer in the red. Hooray! My (non-store) credit cards are still all over their limits, though, except one that has... wait a sec, I thought I had less than a dollar available, but I somehow have $100.24? Was there a payment I made from that card that was reversed or didn't go through? Oh, okay, hm, I see what happened. I wanted to have $100 available because I had to renew my Microsoft 365 subscription, which had been cancelled for nonpayment several weeks prior and that I really needed to have up and running again, mostly because it meant my OneDrive wasn't syncing, and I have a lot of files on OneDrive I wanted to have access to on multiple computers, including all my Wongery files, including in fact the text file for this very blog post, the one I'm typing right now. I figured I'd save a little money in the long run by renewing the subscription for a full year, which would cost $99.99, rather than paying $9.99 every month as I had been, so I paid off just enough to one credit card to get it about a hundred dollars below its credit limit—and then accidentally charged the $99.99 to a different credit card that was still over the limit. (Despite its being over the limit, the charge went through, so that card is $99.99 farther over the limit now than it was.) So, anyway, I have about $100 of available credit on one card now, but all the rest are still over their credit limits. You almost certainly didn't care about any of this. I ramble a lot.)
(All right, three parenthetical paragraphs in a row (four counting this one) is too many. Sorry.)
So... yeah. I could really use some extra money, and even if the chances of Patreon or Ko-fi bringing in anything seem abysmally low, I figured I ought at least to give it a shot.
(Despite the title of this post, which is of course a reference to the Ko-Fi tip jar tagline, I am very unlikely to use any of the money to buy coffee. I actually don't drink much coffee. I do occasionally drink coffee at work when it's an early morning job and there's free coffee available, but I don't really drink coffee at home, and while I have sometimes met up with people at coffee shops I don't frequent them otherwise. I own a coffee machine for some reason, but I've never used it, and I'm not entirely sure right now where it is. None of this is particularly relevant to anything else in this post, but if you've read many of my other blog posts you're probably used to my going off on irrelevant tangents by now.)
So, of course, on both Patreon and Ko-fi, creators can and generally do offer subscriber-exclusive rewards to incentivize subscriptions. So if I'm going to create a Patreon or (more likely) Ko-fi account, one natural question that comes up is what rewards I'll be offering. And the answer is... I don't know. That's one of the reasons that it took me so long to finish this post (outside of, you know, general procrastination and incompetence). I wanted to be able to describe the rewards that subscribers would have access to, and I wasn't sure exactly what they'd be, and honestly I still don't. But I figure I ought to go ahead and finish the post anyway; I guess I have two months to come up with appropriate rewards.
Well, I do know one reward I'd be offering. It's something I'm not sure anyone is going to care about, but, I don't know, maybe to some people it would have some appeal? And that is, subscribers will have some say on the development of the Central Wongery. That's not to say they'll be able to make up their own articles (they can of course make their own articles in the Public Wongery, but so can anyone else), but the Grandmaster Wongers want to keep a tight rein on the Central Wongery, and don't want to make it into a free-for-all where anyone can change Wongery canon. However, if they can't directly influence the content of the articles, they'll be able to influence which articles are written. Every red link on the Central Wongery is an article that we do intend in principle to someday write, although in practice we're never going to have time to get to all of them (and most articles we write will generate new red links anyway, so the supply will be effectively inexhaustible). However, we don't necessarily have a set order in which we plan to write those articles; we'll tend to prioritize those that have the most links to them, or those that are most important as far as getting across core concepts of the corresponding worlds, but aside from that which red links we fill in first is mostly a matter of chance and whim. So allowing subscribers to choose which red links will be covered next gives them some say in the Wongery's development without violating any of our principles behind it. If there's some character mentioned in passing that readers would like more information on, they can designate that as one of the next red-linked articles to be written, even if we'd formerly had no particular plans to write that article in the foreseeable future.
Oh... on doing a search, I find that I have mentioned this plan in a blog post before. Huh. Oh... and then in another blog post a few months later. Okay. I didn't really go into detail in either of those posts, though, so let me expound a bit on the idea here.
This might be a terrible and stupid idea and not work at all, but here's how I see its going down, though this is subject to change. The first through tenth of each month would be the period of nominations. Subscribers could nominate any red link on the Wongery to get a full article. This does include red links in blog posts and Gamespace pages. It does not include red links in the Public Wongery (or any Private Wongery, once those exist), or any other content not written by the Grandmaster Wongers. You can also second someone else's nomination; a nomination must have at least one person seconding it to move on to the second round. You can nominate (and second) as many red links as you want, within reason; this may change if things get out of hand.
During the eleventh through twentieth of each month would be the initial round of voting. There will be a thread on Ko-fi (and/or Patreon and/or whatever or maybe just/also a subscriber-only thread on the Wongery forum) where subscribers can post and make their cases for their preferred articles.
All articles that were nominated and that at least one other person seconded will be included in this round. The articles getting the most votes will be entered in the second, shorter round of voting from the twenty-first to twenty-fifth. (How many? We'll see how the first round turns out and if there's a firm cutoff.) Then there'll be a final round of voting in the remainder of the month, and the top three articles we'll write during the next month.
So, anyway, that's one idea I've had for a while for a possible subscriber reward. I don't know whether this is something anyone would actually care about, but, again, it's at least worth a try. But clearly that can't be the only subscriber reward, or rather, well, hypothetically it could, but that would make the Patreon/Ko-fi/what-have-you even more destined for failure than it otherwise would be. So what other rewards will we offer?
Well, like I said, I don't know. Hopefully I'll come up with something in the next two months. But in the meantime, here are a few possible ideas I've considered but am not really sold on:
- Maybe I'll show subscribers some of our original work for the Wongery? Our old hand-drawn maps and my own (poorly executed) drawings of various Wongery creatures? Would anyone be interested in that?
- Maybe we'll release some role-playing adventures, and subscribers will be able to have a hand in deciding what systems they'll be written for, where they'll be set, and maybe even some plot or character details (I'm more comfortable with allowing outside influence on supplementary content like this than on the content of the Central Wongery itself). Although, again, the Wongery isn't only for role-playing games (even if its origin is kind of rooted there), and I'm not sure I want to place too much emphasis on that aspect.
- Maybe subscribers will be able to participate in an interactive quest comic, like the old MS Paint Adventures and like those on the late lamented MSPaint Fan Adventures forum (oh wait, I just now discovered there's a new MSPaint Fan Adventures website; that's nice). I've long liked this medium; it's a fun combination of writing, art, and improvisational storytelling. However, I'm not sure it would be much of an incentive for subscription, especially since one of the components of an interactive quest comic is the art of the comic part, and as I've said before I am not a skilled artist. (Then again, some of these quest comics have pretty simple art; maybe people would be willing to put up with my scrawlings. I don't know.)
- A subforum and maybe a Discord channel open only to subscribers. Is this something anyone would actually care about? I don't know. Maybe not.
- Subscribers would be able to ask the Grandmaster Wongers questions about Wongery content on Ko-fi/Patreon/whatever. Then again, anyone can already do that in the Wongery forum, so this is... kind of a, okay I don't really like this word and have never used it before and may never use it again but what the hey I guess I'll use it now, nothingburger.
- If we ever do make the virtual environment that's one of the things I mentioned in my stupid post about what I'd do if I were rich, then maybe there'd be some areas in the environments that are accessible only to subscribers, and maybe there'd even be times set aside when they could hang out virtually there with some of the Grandmaster Wongers. But that's a very big if, and even if it does happen, this, again, is a "perk" that I'm not sure anyone would care about.
Oh, also, on Ko-fi, though not on Patreon, creators can also sell merchandise in addition to offering subscriptions. But I don't know what merchandise we would sell. Certainly nobody would want my art. Stuffed animals? I don't know, would anyone want a stuffed chabdach or, I don't know, a stuffed Lord Feck? Eh. Again, I don't know what I have to offer.
So, anyway, as of or shortly after the hard launch, the Wongery will very likely have a Ko-fi and/or (less likely) Patreon account, but as for what rewards will be offered to subscribers, I'm not sure, because, as usual, I have no idea what I'm doing. So there you have it.