The Patreon About Section #JoysOfPatreon 2

[beren_writes]

This is the second repost from my Tasha's Thinkings blog, the original went out today.

The Patreon About Section

The Joys of Patreon #2

So I spent all of Monday afternoon on this. Wow, it is hard.

 

The about section is where you sell yourself, and we all know how good at doing that we Brits are.

The first stop is Pateron's "How to Sell Your Page" in the learn more col on the edit page - which is actually titled "How to Sell Your Page in Your About Section" when you actually get there, which makes a lot more sense.

Main Ideas

The 3 main tips I took away from this page are:

1. Make sure everyone reading knows who you are and what you're doing on Patreon, so introduce yourself properly.
2. Don't make it sound like you are a charity case, you're asking for patrons and you are giving them value in return, this is important. The section called "Don't use needy language" is very eye opening.
3. Keep it concise - get the message across completely, but quickly - readers have a limited attention span.

Techniques

 

For point #3 above I used the age old technique that comes into play with all blurbs, synopsis and descriptions:

Write long, edit short.

A huge amount of what I was doing what taking out words and phrases and whole sentences that were entirely unnecessary. Most of us writers are wordy creatures, it's in our nature, and so one thing is nearly always true: it is easier to edit out words than to force our brains not to produce them in the first place.

 

Hence I started with a brain dump of everything I thought prospective patrons might need to know. It was long and repetitive and full of a whole load of information that was entirely unnecessary.

For example, my intro paragraph started off at 80 words - by the time I was done, it was at 35.

Another very useful device is bullet points. Readers skip over the end of long paragraphs, but break that paragraph down into each bullet point and they are much more likely to see what you want them to. It is also another great way of spotting duplication and unnecessary information that can be cut out.

 

Final Format

In the end I broke the whole thing down into 4 sections:

1. Hello, this is me (1 line of greeting, and 1 paragraph [35 wds])
2. This is why I am here with preemptive thank you (1 paragraph [55 wds])
3. This is what I am offering (1 section of bullet points) - this section doesn't need to be too detailed, because that's what the tiers are for (which will be a whole other post).
4. Thank you (1 line)

I also added a footnote credit for the photos I used in my cover image, because they might be royalty free, free to use, no credit demanded photos, but they are someone's hard work and they deserve to be thanked.

One thing I always do on projects like this, just in case, is copy everything to a Google doc. We never can tell when something might go tits up and accidentally delete all our hard work, so never forget a backup.

 

And that's that! No doubt I will make tweaks after leaving it for a while, but I think I am almost there. I look forward to showing it to everyone when I am ready to launch. Still thinking about how to do an intro vid to go with it.

 

Anyone have any tips for the about section? How would you go about selling your skills?

Comments

[moth2fic]

Being a fellow Brit, I have zero self-marketing skills. Therefore, I have so far steered clear of Patreon. However, I am following David Gaughran on Wordpress and hoping to learn at least a little about how to sell novels. The writing bit is comparatively easy... I don't even manage my profile pages for Smashwords and Amazon.