My first-hand account / experience with writing financials:
I launched my
Patreon after writing 65 chapters. At the time of launch I think I had roughly ~4k readers across both RR and SH on my singular series, a WLW romance fantasy isekai. I had been writing for 6+ months at the time.
I hit ~$2.5k a month relatively quickly but that's dropped down a little especially as I've been inconsistent with chapters.
I launched with two chapters in advance and currently have seven. That's roughly ~28k words pay-walled.
I have three tiers. a £4.95, £8.95 and a £12.95 tier. They are more or less the same with the exception that the highest tiers allows you to name something in the series. A few Patreons have taken advantage of this ^.^
Although I plan to, I haven't yet written any Patreon exclusive side stories.
I spent a lot of time building up my Discord community before hand (I think I launched it around chapter 20ish). constantly encouraging readers to pop in and say hello if they wanted to theorycraft or whatever else. I often nag readers in the announcements or notes. If you want to see an example of that look at the top of my most recent
chapter. We're now past 750 Discord members!
I probably respond to 90% of my comments, and am always happy to engage with my readers.
Patreon money has been put back into the series in the commissioning of art. Amelia Thornheart had a AI cover for a long time but now it has a cover that cost me $810. I'm still ooing and aaring about if it works as a cover, so I made sure to commission it as a 4k wallpaper and offer lower resolution versions for
free on Patreon, (and higher res for subs). I think it looks
pretty good!
I've also comissioned Discord stickers and just ordered a batch of emotes as well.
I'm not the most successful author, but I'm on the lower band of financially successful IMO. I'm making enough to fund (with a postgraduate loan) a MA in Creative Writing which I plan to start this September in the UK. When there I intend to make use of the university facilities and professional recording room to create my own audiobooks, if I can find the right student narrator.
I was approached by Podium for full distribution rights but after two meetings turned them down. Instead I was approached and signed a non-exclusive contract with Tapas, which has an interesting monetisation scheme with their wait-till-free / pay-with-ink system. I launch on the 15th Aug with them and quite excited to see how the series does over there and how much it increases my income.
I plan to avoid webnovel like the plague.
I'm a decent case study of medium success, if you want a case-study of someone climbing on a rocketship and finding top 0.1% success then take a peak at the author of
New Life As A Max Level Archmage who exploded onto RR and their Patreon hit $10k or so in
three days. But there's a different discussion there about marketability and RR in general and their love of litRPGs. While I plan to explore litRPG in the future, for now I'm happy to have Amelia Thornheart, a non-litRPG non-system series hover in the top #100.
The market is generally unfair and the
quality of writing itself it one of the least important factors when it comes to financial success. For example, I believe the author of
Rebirth of the Nephilim should be on 10x what they're earning now.
At the very least, the biggest tip I can give to authors who want to make money is at the end of the day, make sure what you're writing is
fun to read. The world sucks quite a bit at the moment, and escapism content is becoming ever popular. Now is the best time to get into writing web serials, but you should aim to satisfy that escapism desire. Create amazing worlds full of memorable characters. You might have a treatise on the human condition within you that would blow away every web series ever written with it's amazing quality and insights into the soul... but it probably won't earn you much.
