So this is kind of interesting.
What is your goal for pateron ? Is it to generate a monthly income ? Or interact with the community.
This will drive what you do.
A very successful way to do this can be just have people donate to you or do a $1 / month patreon. Why would people do this ? Because you give all the product away for free. This can work but takes time to build.
You also could always release everything for free and do as above with an additional level where they can unlock design articles. If you actively share your design process people will donate more.
Whatever you do stay away from Kickstarter it is a nightmare.
Good job going to your 1st convention that is a big step. I became a full time game designer in 2003. I have always been independent it is tough to make a living. But a ton more ways today than back in 2003.
Hope this helps
The goal for Patreon is just to have some monthly income so that I can hire freelancers.
Right now my main audience is the "Oh hey, I like this!" crowd, and trying to get more of them involved, where they are able, to keep up our development schedule.
Right now I'm hitting the point where we're definitely producing more products than I can afford to get professional work done on.
For instance, there's some velotha's flock stuff that just needs a professional look before it goes fully live, and The Paradise Incident is being "illustrated" by me, in the sense that I'm making some geometric designs to fill the gaps (I have enough of skill to at least pretend I can do this, but I can't draw to save my life).
Down the road, I don't know what our future funding options will be. Hopefully when we get more titles up on DriveThruRPG we'll get increased return on investment as people check out our other titles, but PWYW is not necessarily going to be sustainable unless Patreon and other things start working.
I'm not necessarily optimistic about Kickstarter. I've seen a lot of people get wrecked by not being able to meet obligations and having to deal with all the fees and taxes while managing the project. It might be a good solution for some people, but I don't think it would necessarily work for us. Maybe if I have a fit of desperation (Hammercalled is probably still $5000 away from being finished up, and that's a conservative number; I'd need something like $8000 on Kickstarter) I'll try it, but the system just doesn't seem to be viable.