Hello, good morning, and welcome. My name is Eric Burns-White. You may remember me from such sites as "Twitter," or "Websnark," or "this one, once upon a time."
Welp, once upon a time is now. Whether or not it looks it beyond the extremely cool new logo on the page, there have been extensive back-end changes to Banter Latte, and the benefits of those changes are already beginning!
Here’s a short, incomplete list of updates and revisions, and what they mean to you, the reader:
Direct Patreon Integration:
This is the big one, obviously. This changes things significantly for Banter Latte, and doesn’t just benefit patrons, but literally everyone.
Since launching my Patreon, things have been going pretty well. However, I’ve had to maintain two different content streams, and too often Banter Latte has taken a back seat, when it should be front and center. What’s more, Patreon is a fantastic website for finding and rewarding patrons, but it’s not a good site for long form fiction content. Most of the time I’ve had to generate PDFs for readers, and (most) PDFs don’t play well with a lot of devices or situations, especially where accessibility is involved.
But! Now I can publish this content right on Banter Latte! So, serialized and other free content can be published for patrons first (where appropriate) but automatically made available for everyone else. And, it’s much easier to read and work with. That lets us keep a much more consistent stream of content coming out here on the site, and that’s a good thing.
Greatly Enhanced Series Management
For some time, the series-based controls that would let people navigate through posts in a specific serial have been manually configured. That makes them inflexible and not optimal. This has changed! We’re adding older stories into series blocks now, and newer stories are getting put in them as they happen — so you’ll be able to jump back to the beginning of a story, move back a post, see all the posts in a series on one page, or read the story from beginning to end smoothly and easily.
Wiki Integration
This hasn’t launched yet, but we’ve integrated wiki functionality into the site. What does that mean?
It means real, honest to goodness cast lists that can be kept up to date. We can even embed Patreon exclusive bits into Wiki posts that are otherwise open. And that means added accessibility for new readers and easier catching up for returning readers.
New Serialized Content
There are a bunch of unfinished stories on Banter Latte, and I want to get to them, but I also want to get a fresh stream of goodness started, to give people a reason to come back day after day.
And, as it works out, I have a pretty big backlog of novellas and short novels I’ve been producing as first drafts for Patrons. Originally those were going to then go straight to Amazon, but I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.
So, there will be new serials on Banter Latte. This has started already with a new serial starring Leather herself — Greenhorn, set in the years between the end of her Dynamo Girl career and her interview with Todd Chapman. And the thing is? Those serials are already complete, so they’re not waiting for me to finish them. They’re just waiting to be scheduled and posted.
Moving Forward
I’m in the process now of scheduling serialized posts for the site. Many of them will debut for Patreon subscribers on one day and unlock for everyone else the next day. You’ll see a banner cheerfully informing you of that fact and how soon the free version will unlock. That way, patrons get rewarded for their support, and readers get rewarded for their patience. It’s a win-win!
There’s other things in the works, but for now I’m focusing on moving old content into those systems, scheduling serialized content, and writing stories. The goal is a much more active Banter Latte for us all!
I’ve missed this. I admit it.
