In our last issue, we ran an item about Curious Fictions, which is a Patreon-like platform devoted to fiction writing. The site’s cut of subscriptions is 25 percent, which may look high if you’re comparing it to Patreon’s cut of 5 or 8 percent. However, with most platforms, creators have to shoulder the payment processing fees. That isn’t true, however, of Curious Fictions. Here’s how payments to creators play out on small transactions for Curious Fictions and Patreon. (Patreon has several membership tiers; we’ve chosen to show the first two tiers.)
| Patreon (5% + fees) | Patreon (8% + fees) | Curious Fictions (25% flat rate) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1 pledge | $0.80 (80%) | $0.77 (77%) | $0.75 (75%) |
| $2 pledge | $1.70 (85%) | $1.64 (82%) | $1.50 (75%) |
| $3 pledge | $2.60 (87%) | $2.51 (84%) | $2.25 (75%) |
| $4 pledge | $3.38 (85%) | $3.26 (82%) | $3.00 (75%) |
On Patreon, for all pledges $3 or less, payment processing fees are 5 percent plus 10 cents. For all pledges over $3, payment processing fees are 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. (And these fees are in addition to Patreon’s cut.) However, costs can vary depending on whether someone pays by PayPal or credit card and whether you share patrons with other creators, which reduces the payment processing fees. Bottom line: if you have a lot of micropayments from your subscribers, processing fees will take a larger percentage of your earnings.
Curious Fictions founder Tanya Breshears told us, “When I first started the business and ran the numbers, I chose a higher take rate overall with the intention of creating a sustainable, non-VC-funding-dependent business and set out to create a place dedicated to fiction that could provide more value to authors than a more generic funding tool.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
