Hello, loyal readers and/or people discovering this blog for the first time today! This might be a bit strange for those of you in the latter category.
The two of us writing this blog have been talking, and we have an experiment we’re excited about trying. We’re going to get our 2010s crowdfunding game on and we’re setting up a Patreon. You might have questions!
Hi. What’s Patreon?
Patreon is a service for people who create stuff (eg, Bad Books, Good Times) to receive monetary donations from people who like that stuff (eg, our readers). In other words, it’s an easy way for anyone who would like to support us to give a monthly donation to BBGT, and get a little something extra back in return. If a lot of people do this, and BBGT has more money to play with, then we can afford to do even more. It’s also non-binding, so you can stop donating at any time.
Here’s a few Patreons that Matthew likes, and what they look like:
Ok. But why is Bad Books, Good Times doing a Patreon?
Bad Books, Good Times is free. That’s never going to change. BBGT is and will always be a free source of entertainment/resource for why these books are just the worst. But it does take time and money to keep it going.
So this is an experiment. We have amazing readers, and we’re curious what you’d be willing to throw our way if we gave you a little extra in return. “You” means two things here, really. “You” the individual donor (or “Patron”, as the industry lingo goes) get a reward for your generosity that’s just for you. But if the campaign is particularly successful, then there’s “You” the collective readership, and everybody would benefit from the website-wide changes our vast riches a little extra money could go towards.
What “you” might not necessarily mean, is “you” reading this right now, because it’s totally, totally cool if you’re not interested in this. But you might want to consider donating if:
- You have any personal interest in donating
- You have the means to donate
- You’re that dedicated fan who’s here all the time, been coming here for ages, and we’ve put many a smile on your face
So what will the BBGT Patreon look like?
Here’s what we have in mind:
- $1 per month: $1 a month is a good, simple way to support us, especially if you use ad blockers. We’ll throw in free copies of our eBooks for you, while we’re at it.
- $3 per month: Access to exclusive biweekly posts (as in 2 per month). We have lots of silly and serious questions about the books we read, but we don’t have the time (or space) to get into them. These will be posted on an exclusive Patreon Activity Feed (it’s in all-caps because that’s a Thing), so there’s also the opportunity for extra commentary, tangents we decided to cut from the proper posts, and semi-secret updates. You could be, like, SUPER in the know about what the next book might be. (Plus the eBooks)
- $5 per month: We’ll set up a rotating panel at the top of the sidebar for featured patrons, linking to your own work. Think about it. One to two thousand people a day will go to BBGT, see “Today’s post brought to you by [YOUR NAME]”, and think “oh!” and/or “ah!”. And it’ll link to your blog/portfolio/YouTube/favorite funny cat video/whatever you want. (Plus the exclusive posts and the eBooks)
And if things go really well and a lot of people sign up for monthly donations, we have some milestones in mind:
- Custom CSS: In not-computer words, this just means the website will look nicer, and we can manually improve some issues we have around navigation.
- More books: There are books that we really want to make fun of on here, but they aren’t well suited to our chapter-by-chapter format. But at the same time, we don’t have the budget to buy more books that we’ll only do a few posts on. (Until now???)
- Bad TV! Bad Movies! More Good Times!: Not to sound like Christian Grey here, but there are some limitations on whether we can offer “more”. The money the blog brings in has to justify the time it takes to write extra stuff for the blog (see The Room). But if the interest is there…
But then why isn’t there a Patreon already?
Like we said, this is an experiment. We want to ask our readers about it first. So we want to know: what would you be willing to throw a few bucks our way in exchange for? Maybe there’s something here we haven’t considered. Maybe you’d be interested in a certain donor reward or some other kind of milestone. Maybe you know more about business than we do and you have thoughts about the rewards and milestones we just described.
This whole idea is an experiment to see what kind of relationship we can build between our blog and readers. We’d like to hear from you!