[Doctor Chaos] Promo and production 2015

[Jesse Burneko]

Just to back up what Eero said, anything where you talk about your perspective on comics would get my attention.  Your take on, well, just about anything is always so... different... from the general pop-culture consensus.  I don't know if that's because your view is more academic, more socially/culturally aware or if you're just contrarian by nature but it's always fascinating.

Doing this by blog or video wouldn't make too much of a difference to me.  Blog is more accessible as it can be read at any pace anywhere.

Jesse

[Miskatonic]

Hmm. So you start a blog about comics stuff, with a certain unique spin that isn't found in 1,243 other comics "CHECK OUT THE NEW MARVEL REBOOT" blogs. The blog is actually free to the public, but it's clear that it's fueled by Patreon. Good enough in its own right to attract the interest of general (slightly iconoclastic) comics fans who maybe don't know anything about RPGs. Long term strategy will function as a building a promotional site for the game. (Not completely unlike the Spione sites.)

Entries would have to be non-trivial to justify a pledge payout. So a thoughtful and fun mini-essay could be a thing, a "teaser" piece of original art (after a certain milestone) could be a thing. But a single found image or something, no matter how bad-ass, would probably not cut it.

[Ron Edwards]

So ... I came up with about several dozen blog post topics in a shockingly short period of time. This might be doable.

Given my writing habits, the idea is to be working on all of them simultaneously, and whichever one seems good at the moment gets posted next. They'll be short, emphasizing punchy and exciting points, or maybe OMG How Can You Say That points - not essays, not even the length of my big forum posts. A cross between a G+ post and a forum post. I know blog-readers are hungry hungry hippos, but seriously, twice a week is as much as I can handle given that I'm not getting paid by this Patreon. Maybe a bonus post every so often, when I feel like it.

A lot of my listed topics are long-standing topics for me, and a number are based on reaching back into my extensive but ultimately finite store of supers RPG experience. That means that eventually, I'll run out of steam, as I don't think I'm invested in modern superheroes comics (by which I mean since the mid-90s!) enough to keep putting raw material into the creative hopper. But if the blog is stated up-front to be finite, associated with the Patreon, then that's not so bad.

Alternately, if I like it a lot, if the posts about playtesting the game do well, if the game itself develops a nice customer base (it's a crowd-pleaser), and if the discussion community develops topics-creating power of its own, then I may carry the blog into the future as a feature of the game, with comics topics being a component.

For the Patreon, my idea is that anyone can read the latest post. But you can't read the older posts and you can't comment unless you've paid into the current art installment at a certain level. Technically, a person could just read the blog for free post by post, but the posts come faster than the installments, so they'd easily miss stuff, and they couldn't comment. I'd be especially happy if you couldn't even read the comments unless you were authorized via pledge - that'd do it, given how provocative some of my posts are intended to be.

[Eero Tuovinen]

That all sounds quite exciting - for somebody like me that blog seems like more interesting of a Patreon target than getting the game illustrated, so I'd expect that this would work well for increasing the interest in the Patreon; having parallel types of content that appeal to different sorts of people, yet clearly synergize as well, seems like a good bet. I can't be the only one out there who'd find it an entirely serious proposition to pay you to write a blog :D

You'll need to figure out the tech for implementing the blog in a way that makes it easy to control access rights on the basis of patronage in real time - you don't want to end up with a clumsy system that causes excess paperwork for you as people commit and withdraw pledges. Probably the best approach is to ask your website designer to set it up at your own site, and make it as automated as feasible. Patreon itself already includes a Patrons-only blog-like feature, but it's on their platform and limited in capabilities. (As a technical detail, I wonder if Patreon offers an API that could be used directly by another site to query somebody's patron status.)

I like the public element of the blog, and unlike many culture projects, I think this one might benefit greatly from limiting public participation; by making commenting a patron privilege you do much to reduce Internet noise. It is fair to expect that the comment threads on your posts might become as important, or even more so, as the posts themselves - it just takes a few interesting patrons to react in an interesting manner to your thoughts.

Regarding the activity cycle of the blog, I would expect as sparse as a post per week to still serve the purpose rather well, so it shouldn't be too onerous once everything is set up. You could also tie your blogging schedule to patronage (as in, "once we get up to $300 a month I'll start blogging thrive weekly"), although I suppose you'll want to maintain the focus on paying the artist rather than paying you to write.

[Moreno R.]

So, Ron... reading you will be free, but people who will want to argue, debate, throw fit or even insult you will have to pay?  :-)

[Ron Edwards]

Fucking well right. Or go do it on their own stupid, beknighted, deluded, co-opted, and generally worthless pop-culture consensus blogs.