Hi @pattyloof and @SethRing! We don’t currently have any product functionality that supports referral programs within the platform right now, but I’d love to hear if either of you have seen any examples of other creators doing something like this that you were interested in replicating? Regarding tips on getting others excited, one I’ve tactic I’ve seen creators have success with is starting to do Patron shoutouts on social media, which often inspires the person receiving the shoutout to not only feel extra special, but to re-share the post or story to their own followers. Happy Friday!
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There isn’t 100% overlap here because I write webcomics (and work with awesome artists to turn my script pages into comic pages), but I used a Milestone Goal to balance my readers’ desires for more frequent updates against the amount of time it would take away from other income sources.
I announced to my general readership that if we reached $XXXX, I would transition my comic from once-a-week updates to twice-a-week, and we hit that Milestone Goal in short order.
To be fair, this was a “warm” audience, who were already used to triggering a second page of comics per week using a donation bar on my site (which is what I used before Patreon.)
But a reasonable Milestone Goal might be a useful tactic, so long as the amount you receive truly would allow you to deliver pages more quickly. And that delivering pages faster would actually be fun and energizing for you, of course. 
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This make a lot of sense! I’m so glad you posted this because you’re right - my patrons just want t help me and even when I couldn’t write for a long time, they hung in there with me. I did lose a few, but that was OK. I understood why.
Now that I’m back and able to devote more work and attention to my site, I’m going to do away with the rewards because, yes, they stressed me out so much and I was worried I wouldn’t be abe to deliver.
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Really love the idea! I’m an illustrator/writer and published a couple of illustrated zines, but never considered making one just for textual content. It kind of feels silly that I haven’t done that before, but I’m definitely taking a page of your book with this one <3
My writing partner and I run the patreon for our book series together. We haven’t published anything yet, and don’t plan to until we finish writing the series as a whole. We use the money to fund research, rather than as income, which I think changes the way people look at our page. We post several times a month, but we’ve come to the conclusion most people are there to support, not to follow along.
That said, our tiers incorporate a lot of ‘rewards’ that KEEP us working, rather than slow us down. Everyone gets draft 2+ of novel chapters and a new music playlist a month. The playlist is probably the most time-consuming of our rewards. Beyond that, we include spoilers, research posts, behind-the-scenes posts, world-building posts, short story posts, and deleted scenes and chapter drafts. Everything revolves around the book series, so patrons know that everything is somehow connected. As we’ve been around a few years now and have over 200+ posts, all nicely organized in a Table of Contents, the $3 and $5 tiers also get to pick one upper-tier post a month to view. The highest tiers get to have their names included in the books as a character, and EVERYONE will get a free copy of book 1 (and up to the whole series) depending on how much they contribute over time. This means a $20 patron and a $1 can both end up with a free book, even if it takes the $1 considerably longer to contribute as much as the $20 person.
Everything here is designed to keep us going and to keep us accountable. We are research and world-building heavy in our posts, but that’s because that’s a huge part of our process. The idea is to give people a look into what it’s like to write a book series and to contribute to the process if they like, be it by commenting on drafts or providing their own expertise on research subjects.
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I’m going to second Irhall here. My most successful Patreon reward is the $6 Character or Story Critique. Most of the people who have pledged at that level have a story but aren’t that interested in actively getting their 20 minutes. The couple who are, are absolutely entitled to it!
I offer consultation time over Discord and am planning on moving at least some of those 20-minuters to full consultation hours (with the attendant increase in cost), but so far haven’t achieved that. I’m not sure if it’ll work out in the same way but my theory is that the people using that tier - amateur writers - will grow in confidence over time and start to write bigger, more ambitious projects that need more feedback.
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I’ve been creating some more physical benefits off of our banner and icon, which I commissioned from a great UK artist, Geri Coady. She had the great idea of taking our site banner and making a riso print of it, which I’ll give out to $10 and higher subscribers.
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