web comics – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 50: Patreon, Audiobooks, and Diversifying Your Income with Abigail Hilton

October 6, 2015 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

Tonight we chatted with fantasy author Abigail Hilton about making money from Patreon, audiobooks, and web comics as well as full-length novels. She doesn’t write in the most popular subgenre of fantasy, and she creates anthropomorphized characters for her adventures, but she’s diversifying her income and making notable money from her work.

Here’s a bit of what we covered:

Supplementing your monthly income with Patreon
What Patreon is exactly and how it works
Patreon versus Kickstarter
Getting people to sign up for your Patreon page and asking for tips versus monthly payments
Choosing rewards that don’t require extra work on your part, because they’re things you would do anyway
Using Podiobooks to find an audience versus publishing audiobooks straight to Audible
The expense of doing full cast recordings for audiobooks and is it worth it?
Finding artists to illustrate your world (and to create extras for Patreon rewards)
Creating web comics as an add-on for your regular fiction series
Hiring reliable artists and whether the expense can be worth it
Facebook ads when you’re an author in a small, less popular niche
Split testing Facebook ads for covers (figuring out which is your most popular cover option before even publishing the book)

Thanks to Abigail for all of the great information. You can visit her website, where she has free ebooks and audios available, and check out her books on Amazon.