I’m building a little empire over on Patreon. Or, more honestly, I’m trying to use this Hot New Tech to scrimp up a $200 (£170) monthly income stream to keep the lights on at New Escapologist.

What it pays for is the energy, web hosting, MailChimp fees, and about 10% of the effort involved in running a four-part Web machine consisting of the main website, a reliable blog, a monthly newsletter, and an essay series.

I have dreams of reaching a $650 monthly income stream using the same Hot New Tech, which would pay me something approaching a stipend for the work I put into these essays and the New Escapologist machine, but I’m happy to park this dream for now on the grounds that (a) NE has always involved hundreds of pleasant hours in service to a labour of love, and (b) the dream is increasingly pipe-shaped since we’ve not even hit the supremely modest $200 target yet despite my gently nudging of this blog’s 2,000+ readership at the bottom of almost every entry.

I have seventy loyal subscribers on Patreon, to whom I feel genuine and heartfelt gratitude. Seventy is, however, a significantly smaller audience than when New Escapologist was in print. Some of you have emailed to say that the problem is Patreon itself: that it’s a grind to sign up for, that you don’t want to be involved in a another pesky platform with its own aesthetics and passwords and whatnot. I understand and respect such reservations.

So. If you’re interested in joining the cause and being able to read the new essays as they’re released, you can now subscribe through PayPal without fretting about Patreon at all.

I’d rather you used Patreon, frankly, because it handles the scheduling and distribution of the essays and the taking of payments quite smoothly, but I appreciate that the world would be a dull place if we all liked the same things. So here’s what to do if you’d prefer to use PayPal:

Visit our PayPal “donation” page (though what we’re talking about here is strictly a subscription, not a donation);

“Donate” £2.55 per month to be sent the monthly new essays and to get access to the new essays written so far.

“Donate” £3.70 per month to receive the above but also an old essay each month from the New Escapologist magazine days, spruced up a touch for the modern reader.

Thank you. And if you’d still like to subscribe but you hate PayPal as well, please email me and we’ll conspire together to mainline your monthly rates directly to the New Escapologist Grand Treasury without Silicon Valley ever hearing about it.

So that’s Patreon, PayPal, or email. Together we can build that empire! Or, you know, stop New Escapologist from switching itself off. Thank you, m’lovelies.

–RW. x

09 Sep 2019 No Comments