Patreon is a form of crowdfunding, like Kickstarter, that has changed my life. Support from readers like you on Patreon has allowed me to quit my day job and work on these comics full-time. That’s something I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do.

With Kickstarter, you try to raise a huge amount of money in a short period of time to finish a specific project (like printing a book), but Patreon is different. Patreon still involves a bunch of regular folks getting together to make something happen—that’s why it’s “crowdfunding”—but instead of each person pledging $25 one time, Patrons agree to pledge, like, $5/month to support a creator’s ongoing work. Patreon accepts international currency, and Patrons can pledge any amount they like and they can stop and start anytime they like.

This has the huge benefit of giving me a predictable form of income every month. Thanks to the support of my readers I can honestly say I make my living as a writer now.

And there are also lots of benefits for being one of my Patrons.

Sure, I do!

It’s easy! Just go to https://www.patreon.com/alexwoolfson or click on any of the orange Become A Patron buttons on my site. Once on patreon.com, just click on the blue Join button under the membership level you’d like.

If you are a new Patron, or if you are an existing Patron who is upgrading their pledge (e.g. from $5 to $10), you will be charged immediately and will have immediate access to all the currently posted content for that pledge level.

According to the Patreon FAQ:

The same way you read the Patreon-exclusive pages, you need to log into this site using your Patreon account.

How do you do that? It’s easy! Read the answers to the next two questions to find out what to do!

Here is something important to know: I actually post my content up at three totally different websites.

I post content at patreon.com (a Web site owned and controlled by Patreon). I post content up at my Community site which is at https://community.amwcomics.com. And of course, I also post comics up right here on my webcomics site—youngprotectors.com—where they are easiest to read.

All three sites have separate logins. Just because you are logged into one site doesn’t mean you are logged into either of the other two. You can be logged into patreon.com and not be logged into this webcomics site!

How will you know that you are logged into youngprotectors.com?

You’ll see a dark bar at the top of the page with your username like this:

You need to be logged in here at youngprotectors.com using your Patreon credentials to be able to access the Preview Pages on this site.

It’s easy!

Underneath the comic page art, at the top of the right sidebar, I’ve added a big, orange button that will let you log into my site using your Patreon credentials.

Click on that and give Patreon permission to log you in, and you should have access to all the locked pages here on youngprotectors.com.

If you have any problems, try logging out (using the dark bar at the top of the page) and logging back in (using this orange button). That should fix things. If not, then let me know and I’ll figure it out. 🙂

First, be sure to read this article from Patreon about why you might not have access to your rewards. When you first pledge, it can be surprisingly easy to skip the step of ALSO choosing a reward tier. And if you don’t deliberately do that, you won’t be able to see the rewards you pledged for. That is the most common reason for not being able to see one of my rewards, and the Patreon article explains how to fix that.

If you’ve followed the steps in that Patreon article and also followed all the steps to log into youngprotectors.com with your Patreon credentials (shown in the last question), and you’re still not able to see the page, it’s likely a browser cache issue.

One thing that seems to work is force-refreshing the page you are trying to see — hitting [Ctrl]-[F5] in most Windows browsers, or ⌘R on the Mac. If you’re having trouble, please give that a try—it almost always seems to fix the problem.

Sometimes a browser really, really wants to keep hold of its cache. If you’re on a Mac, and a simple refresh doesn’t do it, this URL gives some other easy solutions to clear your browser cache: http://osxdaily.com/2016/01/17/empty-cache-safari-mac-os-x/

If you’re on Windows, and a simple refresh doesn’t do it, this URL gives some other easy solutions to clear your browser cache: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-clear-cache-in-windows-10

And this link tells you how to force-reload mobile browsers: https://www.sleeplessmedia.com/2016/04/20/how-to-hard-refresh-on-a-mobile-device/

If, for some reason, that doesn’t work, there is an alternative way to view at least the Sneak Preview pages: they are also posted over at our Community site. So you don’t have to wait, this post explains how to get to the Preview Pages on the Community Site.

But if you are still having trouble after the force-refresh,  please let me know. I want you to be able to enjoy these pages on my webcomic site, as they were intended!