⚠️ Writing Site Shutdown, Pending Forum Closure ⚠️

Oh goodness thank you! I think the more Twitter writing community people we can get here the better: they’re all looking for alternatives right now.

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I like that idea. I don’t have anything for sale yet but a few authors around here do. They could get some exposure in exchange for a donation.

Have you considered sponsors yet? I’ve been an active member in Campfire community, I’m their discord mod too, so I can talk to the founder directly about it if they’d like to advertise on Wacky if you’re open to that.

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:sob: Seeing this thread gave me a mini-heart attack, but I understand how expensive running a site can be. I had to downgrade a personal site of mine this year for the same reason because hosting is ridiculous especially now with inflation, it’s tough. This forum has helped me SO much. I think if I hadn’t found it, I would’ve quit writing a long time ago, and with the moral support I’ve gotten here, I was able to finish a draft of an original story for the first time! Now working on a second novel, and a novella too. I never would’ve imagined it, but this is such a great place to learn from each other, vent, find resources. I truly love it. :heart: I don’t have anything to spare for February, but will def donate in March. :crossed_fingers: I truly hope we can keep this going. :pray:

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That’s amazing! Glad we could help you and thank you so much!!

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I have spread the word to close friends and some have joined to help out! I noticed CJ said you guys are open to new mod/team members and I was wondering if there’s any sort of application or?

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Yay, new people! :blush:

And here you go! It's That Time Again - We're Looking for New Team Members!

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We should probably refresh some of that info lol but the mod application form should be good to go (unless y’all encounter technical difficulties, if so, let us know).

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Sorry, missed this with all the ONC stuff going on. Donated a bit, hopefully it will keep the forum up a little longer and smooth transition to Discord.

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Thanks for your donation! :purple_heart:

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Well, it really doesn’t help that most the platform space is owned by subsidiaries of Amazon (last I checked). That means it’s not just inflation, it’s a monopoly, which is not good for competitive costs.

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Holy cow Domi, thank you for that donation! That was so incredibly generous!

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Sorry if someone has already mentioned/elaborated on it, but my immediate thought was also Patreon. AFAIK, the main difference is that Patreon allows people to donate to you monthly and they only need to sign up once (whereas Ko-Fi is more like a tip jar). You as the account holder can set up donation tiers anywhere from I believe $1 upwards. Patrons can also easily cancel their monthly donations at any time should our circumstances change. Since the forum requires a monthly fee, having a number of people contribute to that each month might help significantly.

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Yup, we’ve looked into it a little bit, but honestly we’d probably need at least a $5 dollar donation for it to count towards anything after fees and we would probably have a difficult time keeping up with monthly rewards. Not sure if those are mandatory tbh, but I think you need to provide some form of content for the subscription to be valid. We haven’t completely scrapped the idea, we just don’t have a big enough following at the moment for that to pay off.

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You can offer rewards, but it’s not mandatory… Just make sure it’s clear in the tier description that it doesn’t come with any rewards. Or you’re rewarded with something like boasting rights for being a patron (lol), or even just a patron sticker on whackys or something like that. There is no internal checking from Patreon or something that you’re dishing out rewards. In my experience, some people are just super kind and want to donate. My upper tier patrons haven’t even claimed any of their rewards, even though the offer is there every single month.

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Oh, I see…that’s good to know! It’s definitely one of the more sustainable long-term options, just having people sign up once on a platform they’re already familiar with.

And how do you find it in terms of admin fees? Do you still make a reasonable “profit”? That’s what put me off when I went poking around, because having something like 50 people donate $2 every month would be ideal, I’m just not sure how much we could actually cash in from that.

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Yeah, that’s the thing… for me I set up Patreon with no specific targets or goals (and definitely not so I can quit my day job and rely on patrons, lol), so anything I get from there is a profit. They charge a fee per patron; I believe 5% payment fee + 10 cents platform fee for anyone pledging below $3, and 2.9% payment fee + 30 cents platform fee for pledges above that.

Just to give a rough idea, I see in my PayPal account about 82% of all the total monthly pledges after all fees (payment, platform, and transfer costs). But of course this would fluctuate with how many patrons you have, their pledges, etc.

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Also keep in mind I’m a really low-profile writer on Wattpad with no marketing, very niche audience… so getting 50 patrons at the same time each month would be practically impossible for me. I don’t know how big the Wackys community is, their age range (and hence ability to pledge), so I’m not sure how likely or how soon such a target will be met. That’s not to dissuade you, but just to keep it honest, since I don’t know too many small-time creators making the big bucks there.

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Yeah, of course, that’s why I was just gonna say we might need to still hold off on that until we build a semblance of a following, if we can pull it off :laughing: 50 or so patrons would be the ideal, and I think we’d need to make at least $15-20 for it to make a difference. Not sure how easy that is to make.

But thank you for taking the time to explain things! It really helps us figure out options :blush:

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No worries! You can tag me any time if you have any more questions (not that I’m a Patreon expert or anything, lol). But just one last thing; you might be surprised! I hit a monthly pledge of over $15 within my first… was it 3 or 4 months… of opening my Patreon account (God bless that one person who’s donating at an upper tier—I still don’t even know who they are to this day!) (edited to add: no, wtf was that, God bless ALL my patrons, lol) so if I can hit that as a nobody wattpad writer, I’m sure a big community like WW can meet it, too.

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Thank you!! That’s really great news :grin:

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