I was using Patreon.com as the Cerberus Pup platform. I gave them a good trial run. I quickly learned they were a complete and utter time eater.
I mean, putting aside the fact that Heavenly Bride readers are 99% the stoic, silent type, I just don’t have enough hours in the day. In the end? I spent so much time trying to make the Pup forum a great place for people who were never going to use it, I lost valuable work time and hurt my wallet. And don’t get me started on their jumble of a search platform, their Facebook like feed (how horrible for webcomics!!), their lack of categories, and just their overall… mess.
Let me list some good things. They’re customer service is speedy and fabulous. They really worked to get us away from the Paypal drama quickly. Their website is pretty. They’re polite and friendly. They’re always working to improve the website (just not in the direction that I need). They do the Kickstarter “these are the folks we’ll promote” thing. They have a really good idea and have implemented it with ambition and drive.
But it just isn’t working out. You know, sometimes a couple just isn’t meant to be and you realize you have to let them down gently. So today I have sent Patreon an email and asked them to permanently delete my account. You will note the buttons are also taken down from this website.
I have looked into adding a membership platform to the main website, here, but nothing I find makes sense or can be worked with. I’m using Comic Easel to bring your comic pages to you. Boy do I miss Comic CMS right now… because Comic Easel doesn’t appear to be compatible with much else unless you can code. And if I could code, I simply would have picked Comic CMS back up and kept working with it. And I would have coded a membership platform to go with it. So I’m a little frustrated that I was pushed into using WordPress for Heavenly Bride over a coding issue and now I can’t enhance it because of a coding issue. It’s enough to make me quit the biz, I swear.
If I could afford to, I’d simply pay someone to set things up. But I have done the next best thing. I emailed whiny whine whines of email whines to the Comic Easel developer. :-p
So as of today we’ll just go back to the old-fashioned way of supporting webcomicks. I hope you guys are onboard with that.
On a good note I can now officially increase the readership count from 7 to 8! Woo hoo! 😉
