Welcome to January (a day too late 😁)
Hello, you lovely people,
this is the first welcome ever to actually miss the month it is meant for and there is a good reason for it. Hold on to your seats, I have a few things coming up that I would love to share and explain to you.
Drum roll...
The Tolkienist is moving to Steady
"What? How, why, where, what is going on?"
Yup. After almost three years on Patreon and close to two hundred posts - 159 exlusive to you wonderful people out there - I have decided to move this project to a new home by March 25th.
What to do next for me?
I will try and explain these things in five steps and I do hope you will consider joining me on Steady as well. However, if you do not wish to do that you can simply jump to the bottom of this long - but informative and insightful! - post or simply cancel your membership (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and all that would be left for me to say in this case is:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your willingness to join me in my adventure - it truly means the world to me!
If you are still interested, if I may try to convince you why it will be worth the time reading all of this... please read on! It is a rather long read, but feel free to jump to any of these points!
1. Why?
2. What is the timeline and what will be happening until March 25th?
3. What is Steady anyway?
4. If I am interested in joining you over at Steady - what do I do?
5. I am not interested in joining you over at Steady - what do I do?
Why?
There are a number of reasons why I am changing the host and not a single one of them convinced me to do this but all of them put together made me decide to leave - and yes, Elon Musk, finally tipped the scales, please bear with me.
i. As you may know I am also doing the Roving Ranger (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) newsletter and due to the media onslaught of the Amazon series it went on a six month hiatus. During that time I considered moving it away to a better provider.
The one I have been using - Tinyletter - is part of Mailchimp (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) which in itself is a division of Intuit (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), a NASDAQ-listed business software company. I had worked with Mailchimp before but it is a tool for email marketing professionals; I chose the simpler version Tinyletter because it felt right at the time.
Smaller backend issues such as no proper automated saving across tabs in my browser or a very clunky editor were minor issues I could have probably ignored but it is a fact:
US tech companies get sold at a drop of a hat.
ii. Patreon's editor and its many limitations were a pain in my backside ever since day one. I felt I could live with this because this project, these many posts made it all worthwhile but can you imagine the editor did not have automated saving until recently? It only happened to me once but I basically lost the work of many hours and that was not a 2021 issue - it is sloppy programming.
Now, of course, that was my fault - to a degree... I could have simply written the post elsewhere, copy & pasted it and make it work. Sure, but that is not how blogging works or has been working for 10+ years.
If you happen to have a Wordpress blog or even a tumblr or any other of the many online blogging options this is not how you do it. All in all, writing a post on Patreon always felt like walking through mud, not happily swimming beside a Mauritius beach (and I know, I've done both!)
Also, I may have realised recently thanks to my accountant that Patreon is not, in fact, taking care of all of my payments' questions. (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) You do not need to worry about any of this but the German tax authority definitely does and Patreon does not fully support European creators in all of their financial issues. Yup. Awesome!
Worst of all, though, is that the integration of my Patreon site into my blog, thetolkienist.com, only works via a plugin that I would love to call abominable but it is even worse.
I have spent days - literally - on correcting content in those post transfers etc. and it really is not getting any better without me being willing to pay a substantial amount for it. It goes without saying that even when paying for it this plugin (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) will not guarantee a smooth transition of anything.
Oh, and I will not bore you with a comparison on the fees Patreon takes in comparison to other options, the extra fees for fund transferals, etc. etc.
Also: US tech companies get sold at a drop of a hat.
iii. You may also know that I work as a freelance translator and let us face the facts - it is one of those jobs that was never well payed - I seriously love it and I have always enjoyed doing it but it will now quickly be replaced by a combination of Deepl (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and an in-house editor with major publishing houses. Very soon, indeed.
The pandemic only hastened the process, with many changes in the publishing industry but mostly in all fields of tech that have made all of this happen.
I truly need to reinvent myself and I would love to seriously give this whole Tolkienist thing a try and become self-sufficient as a writer, an independent scholar, a Middle-earth traveller.
For that I need a partner that truly helps me in answering the questions that need answering, that supports me in my decision-making, and really takes all of the pesky background things off my hands. [Patreon support is nothing in comparison to Steady.]
Where I could do a newsletter, a blog, a podcast, all of it together, without any issues, with personal contacts to actual living people - I already had two zoom calls with Johannes, the guy at Steady responsible for me, and two other colleagues mailed me with suggestions and advice on how to proceed further. I can set up a call or even visit them basically anytime 🥰
It is a fact: Steady is a German crowdfunding platform for creators by creators - and it will not be sold at a drop of a hat, never.
Their origins are in developing tools for freelance journalism - the team of Krautreporter (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) decided they needed it, now they have 16,481 members - and many projects by people from all over the world (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) have found a new home with them. And trust me, there are many more reasons why I am happy to move there.
iv. Yup, Elon Musk. For anyone, from small publishers to writers to anyone using social media to promote themselves, a great cause, volunteer work, their art, whatever you can possibly imagine, last year was a nightmare and it has not really been much better since then - Twitter may be still there but it certainly is not going to be better anytime soon.
And we do have a situation now when this particular service may become unusable in the near future, will change to a subscription service etc. etc. It has effectively become a liability and I do want to be independent of all of this so this was the last straw, so to speak.
It came as no surprise to me today that the Bodleian Libraries are archiving my Twitter account as being of lasting research value and worthy of permanent preservation. If it is not archived now it may be gone soon.
v. Now, to be absolutely clear about this:
Starting this Patreon site was one of the best things I could have done at a truly dark moment in my life and I would again thank all of you for being here with me.
It has really given me so much inspiration and, let me tell you!, a financial contribution that has made me survive on many occasions in the last two+ years. And yes, there is a rather personal link to all of this: I started this site on May 18th, 2020, and May 18th is my wedding day - which I needed to fill with positive energy again going through my divorce.
So it all made sense, Patreon felt like the right place at the time, and I wanted to do something instead of sitting at home through the pandemic doing nothing.
Having said that, the circumstances have changed massively since 2020.
I am planning on doing a podcast soon. And another one. Also, a semi-regular digital publication. I have the beginnings of a book on Tolkien. I could possibly edit one already finished by an amazing scholar and I might be part of a Tolkien documentary series. There are #NotTolkien quotes out there that need at least week of research but trust me - they are worth doing that. And everyone joining me on Steady will get glimpses or full-fledged reports on these projects; both podcasts will be freely available but you'll get to hear the outtakes, the reasoning behind the episodes, special and advance info etc. etc. I am 50 now & I am going on an adventure 🤩 Be part of it (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
What is the timeline?
On Feb 10, I will pause billing on Patreon so you will no longer pay for it. I have thought long and hard on what to do next but there is basically only one viable option - unlaunch it (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), taking it off the net effectively. Everything else would be an absolute hassle and might lead to double chargings etc.
Do not forget to cancel your subscription by March 25th on Patreon! Should there be any case of double charging I will issue you a refund, of course! I will also take care of this for everyone who may forget about this by simply blocking you as a patron on March 25th which will effectively end your membership.
I will still be writing new posts for you until March 25th and up until the unlaunching of the page, no worries!
On March 25th - guess why? 🤓 - I will have moved over all of the posts here on Patreon to Steady - and will unlaunch this page.
My new home with Steady will effectively become a working archive of everything I have written here.
What is Steady anyway?
Why Steady? This is what the company has to say in a few quick points:
⏩ One home for all your content
⏩ You retain rights to your content / audience
⏩ Human support
⏩ 12 currencies & 10 languages
⏩ EU Tax & GDPR compliance
And if you happen to be interested in the nitty-gritty of comparisons - here is one on Steady vs. Substack vs. Patreon (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
P.S. I seriously felt at home the first day I opened my Steady account. 🥳
If I am interested in joining you over at Steady - what do I do?
Cancel your membership (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) with me here on Patreon by March 25th.
Join me in my Steady adventure (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) at this page ... Please note: there are monthly and annual options (saving 10%) ... You can gift any of these plans (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) ... You can have INDIVIDUAL PLANS - please write to me at marcel@thetolkienist.com for such a plan! If the three plans on offer are not to your liking you will get an One Ring Plan 😄, meaning, it is invisible on the public page and nobody else will ever know about it. You can choose freely what amount you would like to give to get access to all sorts of awesome things! Please note that no plan below 5€/ month will be available, though.
And that's it!
I am not interested in joining you over at Steady - what do I do?
First of all, again, my thanks for being part of my adventure here on Patreon. It has been an exciting time but there are even better times to come.
Second, you always meet twice in life and I am sure our paths will cross, rather sooner than later, if possible, and then I will invite you to a cup of tea or coffee or a pint - and I am looking forward to having a chat with you about all things Tolkien, life, and everything else.
See you soon! 👋
This post was originally published (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) on February 1, 2023.
