New Rewards for Patreon Subscribers!
That’s right! Starting this Sunday (September 4th) my Patreon subscribers will be able to view Bug Martini Sunday comics! A new one every Sunday.
I’m drawing them just how they would appear if they were in your newspaper (older people: please explain to younger people what newspapers are). I’ve already drawn two of these and I absolutely love how they look.
These will be a new reward tier for $5 per month on Patreon. If you’re not a subscriber, now is a great time to start! Click here or on the image above to go to my Patreon page.
[Update] I originally offered this reward at $10.00 per month but some people thought that was a bit too high and I’ve lowered it to $5.00. Call me Crazy Adam because my prices are INSANE!!!
You mean you like us to pay you $10 per month to get 4 pages of comics? If every comic artist I want to support this way would ask for that much, I’d end up spending $100s per month. That’s out of proportion, don’t you think?
I think $10 a bit out of proportion. Don’t you think this will deter many more people from even using Patreon than if you’d say, take $2 per month but get more than 5x supporters that way? There’s always a breaking point where a high price kills the “product”. I think you’ve reached that with $10.
I may be wrong, though – you know your numbers better than I do 🙂
Either way, I enjoy your comic very much. For free, I must admit.
(I’m currently not a Patreon supporter for Bug, but I’m not totally cheap either – I’ve sent quite a few bucks to comic artists in the past if they accept Paypal or other ways that are not as pushy and annoying as Patreon is to me).
These are extra comics for people who want to support Adam at the $10 level. You can support people on Patreon for less than a dollar if you want. You’d go broke if you bought every t shirt and book sold by webcomic artists too, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t sell them to people who want to buy them.
Well said.
I can understand your hesitation, but these are full color comics that are a lot more work to both write and draw. They are much larger and take over twice as long to comlete. I need to make these worth my while to do.
I’ve always wondered whether you simply turn off your creativity on weekends. It’s seems you don’t, and now you found you need to vent those ideas before too much of them build up inside your mind? Well then, go ahead! 😀
I thought that this would be my incentive to be your patron, but I’m sorry. 10$ is too much 🙁 But I understand and I am not salty about that. I get daily free piece of entertainment anyway.
I have my Adblock switched off on your site. That has to count for something, right?
That’s been exactly my point as well – all the other “incentives” are not interesting to me at all. I have no interest in watching someone draw, nor do I want to print them. But I’d like to see more comics. But not for $10. $1 would be something I’d be happy to spend every month, even $2, just as a regular fee. But I find getting baited with a few extra comics to pay $120 year is a bit too much. But if Adam gets enough (say, one hundred) supporters each paying him $10 a month, that’d be a good thing for him, and I’d applaud those who are so generous. I just can’t.
I agree. I support him on Patreon with $3 already for over two years now (since June 30th, 2014 to be exact, aka the very first day) even though I never used the “benefit” associated with that tier.
But even I think that $10 is too high though I’d be willing to pay $5-6 for the Sunday comics.
I mean, I am not salty, since it’s up to him to decide how much he values his work. It’s just that just like you I have no interest in lower perks (although I would like to support Adam, since his comics are always a bright moment in my day), but 10$ is a bit too much.
Alright, due to concerns that $10.00 per month for Sunday comics was too high. I have lowered it to $5.00 per month. I better see you guys there! 😉
You just need 834 people to sign up for this project to make it all worthwhile.
That’s a brilliant way to get subscribers. Any Bug Martini fan that doesn’t think 52 Sunday-length comics is worth $5…
Signing up! Because LUVS Bug Martini.
Sign of the butt. Bwaahahhaaaa…
Ooops I misreaded. That’s $5 a month. /me checking my wallet… sees moths. Checks deeper…
I don’t expect this to be posted, but a friendly feedback thought in this:
Even $5 a month is $60 a year. For 52 comics.
How much does a comic strip compilation sell for at a book store?
I think folks might pay $5 or $10 a year, because it’s BUG MARTINI. But per month, there’s a “how much is that per year?” value drop-off. Some folks that love this strip are on retirement income. $60 a year for the equivalent of about 1/2 a compilation is a bit much.
Please consider: I can buy a hard-bound, full color printed copy of Stand Still, Stay Silent for about $35 to $40. With author’s signature. Can go down to a book store and buy a printed, full-color graphic novel for about $25.
Just some things to consider. Bug Martini is great, but might want to re-think the pricing.
Thanks for the input, and I can appreciate being strapped for cash – Heck, it’s the reason why I’m doing this. However, five bucks a month is as low as I could go and still justify the additional work these Sunday strips require.
I surely understand. But in my (mumblety mumble) years I’ve learned that sometimes less is more. A person may not be able to sell a hand-made widget at $2,500… but he might be able to sell 1,000 of them at $2.50 apiece. If you could get say, 500 people to pay $10 a year for Bug Martini… that’s $5 grand. Is that worth 52 comics?
Just food for thought. : )
I think a lot of Bug Martini fans would go for that. $10 is movie money. I get a lot more fun out of Bug than a movie. 😀
Your calculation does not take into account that the $5/m also help Adam create those Mo-Fr strips regularly, so you are actually paying to get over 300 strips a year which means each strip is just ~$0.20 😉
You’re right Aze. I hadn’t taken the dailies into consideration. And I love Bug Martini. Still, $60 a year to read a web-based comic strip (far less publishing costs than a printed book– and thus more profit for the author) seems a little steep. Still, I hope he gets it. It’s one of the best strips on the Net.
Exactly.
Creep-o cheap-o alert!
Now Adam has been giving free (yes, FREE) material to all of us for the last however many years. Then he asks for $10/month, and this is the reaction he gets? Everyone knows ads don’t pay squat nowadays, so how do you expect him to keep doing this?
For 6 days (!!) of web comics, I’d gladly pay $10. I know it’s been lowered, but I’m stickin’ to my ethical guns (6x/week of drawing should be worth AT LEAST what a fast food employee gets paid).
Preach on, brother!
Calm down. We’re not complaining nor bashing, and I think we’ve all been quite respectful towards him so far. I am just giving him feedback why I (and obviously others) won’t jump on it, while we’d glad do so if the fee were lower. After seeing our points, he’s free to decide whatever he likes, but should we’d just be silent so he has not feedback, leaving him in the dark why it’s not turning out as he had hoped, in case that happens? And several of us have already pointed out that less may be more. If everyone here would pay $2 for the same incentive, he might well end up getting everyone on board, and in the end get more out of it. He may not believe it, but it’s our belief that it could, and what we do here is trying to show him our point. That’s all.
While I’m sure he appreciates the feedback, only asking for $2/person is way undervaluing what he’s offering. Think about the color comics in a Sunday paper, which costs over $2.00/week (and yes, I realize you get more content than 1 comic strip).
Also, there are clearly people willing and able to pay $5/month. I’m pretty damn broke, but that’s the cost of 1 cup of coffee. I can forgo that cup of coffee for a cartoonist trying to keep doing what he’s doing, whose work I enjoy.
5 bucks is OK with me so I upped my Patreon support to that tonight!
Same here, already updated.
Thanks to both of you!
I wanna say I think it’s to Adam’s credit that he’s allowed posting of views on both sides of the issue. I told him he didn’t have to post mine, it was just friendly feedback. But he realizes it’s research gold, and he’s mining it.
For myself, even if I can’t handle $60 a year (some of us are on retirement income) I can still send him what I can via PayPal. He does deserve whatever we can manage. His comic is very entertaining and at times even enlightening. : )
* Sign of the butt. Bwahahhahahhaaa* Cracks me up every time I think about it.
Seriously… “cracks me up” was totally unintended. Honest.
Rosy, what many artists do is offer multi-level patronage in recognition folks have different financial levels. If he asks $60 a year, he’ll only get those willing to pay $60 a year. If he asks say, $10 a year, he’ll get people with lower incomes as well… and he can offer perks for those who pay more– such as a signed Bug portrait, Bug Martini “Fart in a Can” (can get those from novelty suppliers), or even a custom hand-drawn comic for a high-level patron.
People who don’t go for the $60 a year aren’t taking that stand because they de-value Bug Martini; it’s because they can’t afford it. Go to Wally World and you’ll see high price butter and low price butter, both probably identical products and probably produced by the same company, because they know some will buy brand name and others will buy low cost.
So provide the Sundays at an entry-level patronage… with perks the higher the patrons go. Catch ALL da fish in the same net. : )
$5 a month sounds pretty “entry level” to me.
Greetings Adam!
How exactly are these going to be posted? Will I get updates from Patreon? Will there be an RSS feed?
I hope this doesn’t sound snarky as I am truly just curious. But I’ve gotten a response from you once via Patreon. I’ve been a 5$ supporter for quite some time (actually the only creator I support) and yet Patreon’s “Recent Posts from Adam” shows the last post “Jul 3, 2014 at 12:24pm”. Heck, the latest “Community Post” shows “Apr 23, 2015 at 3:56pm” well over a year ago!
I guess the point I am making is, it doesn’t seem that the Patreon site is well used by the Bug Martini community so I am really curious if this is an attempt to make it an active community? Will it really be used for a Weekly Sunday comic or do you have an alt method of delivery planned?
Thanks!
No worries! Those are totally valid questions and concerns.
Patreon has a way for creators to upload images and then decide what pledge level of Patreons can see them, so everyone who pledges $5 or more will be able to view them on the Patreon site. I’ll definitely email all those folks and let them know to check the site for their Sunday comic.
And you’re right – I haven’t taken advantage of Patreon and made it a real community, but I’m going to change that and these Sunday strips are just the first step.
Awesome. Thanks Adam!
I’m already a $5 patreon and has been for a while, not because I want benefits but because I like this comic and I have $5 to spare and your comic cracks me up – well worth it!
I love that your comic is free and I get to sponsor you purely because I feel like it. I love that you’ve been very low key about the whole patreon thing, not being obnoxious about “tricking” people into paying and stuff like that.
I understand the need to draw attention (get that, “draw” attention, wink, wink) to your patreon thing, but rather than separate us into “those who pay” and “those who don’t” I really prefer it to stay free for all or us.
It’s been 2 years since your last, first and only “commercial” for the patreon thing, it’s perfectly fine to bring attention to it again.
Suggestion if I may, you’re currently at 80 patreons and $600, how about offering all of us the colored sunday strip if you get to 100 patreons or $800 or both?
Don’t turn us in to A-bugs and B-bugs, let us all be equal brother and sister bugs and excite all of us to pull together for the common goal of a sunday strip.
I think the whole depending-on-fans-to-just-donate-enough-money-out-of-the-goodness-of-their-hearts-while-offering-totally-free-content thing has barely yielded enough for Adam to maintain his website, let alone make any kind of a living. Does it make you happy to think about cartoonists drawing from a cardboard box on the side of the road? There are much lesser comics making $10 grand a month on Patreon, and you think Adam should aspire to $800 while giving out content 6 days/weeks? Crazy, I tell you.
You make a good point Rosy. But let me point to a company I used to d business with. They charged people $20 a year for their service, and had a LOT of very loyal customers. Then they decided they were “professionals” (and Adam certainly IS that)… so started charging $20 a MONTH instead. Fortunately for them they gave their customers lead-notice, which allowed their customers to give THEM notice, and they realized they were going to lose so many customers it would financially harm them. So they “grandfathered in” existing customers and all went well… until they got big-pants greedy and lost even those. Now instead of loyal customers they have angry ex-customers.
Adam’s case is different, but the point is valid. Sometimes one makes MORE money by charging less. Many comics I enjoy ask pledges of as little as $1 a month, or $10 a year. Anyone can afford that. If you get 500 customers at $10 a year, that’s $5 grand. 1,000 customers is $10 grand.
The Sunday Comics concept is a brilliant one. It should draw in lots and lots of patrons… if we can afford it. No matter how much people say Bug Martini is worth it (and it is a terrific comic), if people can’t afford it, they can’t afford it.
Sure $10 is “coffee money”… but people still need coffee. Sure it’s “movie money”. A lot of people home-bound, disabled, on retirement funds, have the Internet as their basic entertainment; they don’t go to movies because they can’t afford it. No amount of “it’s worth it” is going to provide them that extra money to throw this way.
Ask $60 a year, you’ll get a few patrons out of it. Ask $10 a year you’ll get a LOT of patrons… especially with Sunday comics as a lure. That is… if the comic is popular. How many readers does Bug Martini have? Count that number of readers and ask, “What if 50% of them forked out $10 a year?” What does that come to?
Just something to think about. It’s not like “it’s either $60 a year or the work isn’t worth it”. It’s a matter of, “What will satisfy the most number of people and bring in the most cash in the end game?”
I may be wrong, I may be right. Hard t tell. I don’t have the stats, don’t have any trendlines, can’t perform a professional analysis (yes, I did so during my career days). But I know fast food restaurants don’t charge expensive restaurant prices– and they rake in the cash.
aw great! now every week there’s gonna be a bunch of snotty jerks that are gonna make in-jokes about the sunday strips that the rest of the bug fandom won’t get!
at least put up a preview of one of the comics!
Pledge upped.
Worth it! 😀
Keep up the good work! Still waiting for a book… 😉
I’m not sure Patreon works this way, but you might have another option still. What about offering a tier for getting last month’s Sunday comics all at once each month, and another for getting each Sunday strip on the nose that Sunday? I know it kills some of the natural appeal of the Sunday strip concept, but it gives you more fine-gained control over “secondhand” options. Giving people a special reason to pay more, but still providing another option for people who can’t afford that to still directly pay for your work.
I won’t tell you how much those values should be though. I’m afraid to say I’m unlikely to pay either way. Right now as soon as I have money for more things it’s going straight into classes, ‘cuz my brain needs that now more than comics. Just being honest here, to maybe improve your signal:noise ratio here? 😛
Oh and for the record, from a community development perspective, I think Bug Wiki Guy makes a good point. You might have to manage fan elitism to keep the conversation from becoming uninviting and causing community stagnation. That stuff can really hurt, and I know I love the vibrant comment section you have here, and I’m not alone in that — even as a lurker. I’m not sure what you should do, but I appreciate your stuff, so I’ll be following your decisions on this. It’s gonna be a turning point one way or another, and I wish you the best.
It’s been a few days since the first Sunday comic, and no one has made reference to it in the comments. The fans are pretty good here.
“Elitism” may be too strong a word, but I think you get my drift. It can certainly devolve into that, but it can harm communities well before reaching that stage. What you’ve got here is vibrant enough that IMO It will be pretty resilient and may even add something nice, but that’s still a tricky balancing act. Mixing up money, status, and partially hidden information into these things and creating two classes of reader (who can come to resent another) basically raises the tightrope when it comes to managing strife and long term community tensions. On one hand you have your core fans, the lifeblood of your work, who actively help you to make it with your work. On the other you have the plebs, your best advertising and literally your only source to replenish and grow that core. Make sure you’re ready. I’ve seen too many nice things go downhill badly from this point. Basically, do more research on what this process is and means for everything you have here…. What some of your bugs are telling you is that your community is important to them, so look into how other people have managed that through what you’re doing.
Also, this thought process led me just now to support you for $2/mo on Patreon. Maybe if my finances improve I’ll move for Sunday strips. But I feel like $2 is the least I can offer alongside this kind of critique and expect to be taken seriously. I offer it with love, my man.
Every little bit helps! Thanks for your support!
Wanted to pop in and say this is by far the most fair way I’ve seen of giving the paying customers something more and special without at all seeming like you’re chintzing your broke fans.
Applause for artist!
Thanks!
As a $1/month supporter – I’d love to have Sunday comics too — but I set that pace only to get the current output, so I had no expectations to get the extra perks. There’s always the book option too — maybe a package of Sunday comics in PDF file for $20 or something once it’s been a year (unless that would make the $5+ crowd feel ungood).
Tricky conversations for sure but definately appreciate the comic and also Adam wanting to do this full time though Adam — how would you get your co-worker material if you quit your job 🙂 Especially if you get so far out of wack like Scott Adams that you don’t even know how the world works anymore! Maybe take some temp jobs 😉
I’m interested in dropping real money on Adam when he kickstarts some Bug Martini books.
Thanks!
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