So, interestingly, from being on the readers side and seeing how authors promote their works, and from actually brainstorming this with one of the above authors for a bit when they were first starting out, there's a clear path that can work if there's a ready audience to hook with your work for free.
1) Publish your work for free, either on a site dedicated to that genre like royalroad.com or some other way as long as you can get people invested and checking regularly for your work.
2) Be consistent and frequent in your output. More than once a week is good, but if you only publish something once a week, make sure you always have something to publish and don't skip ever. Buffered content is your friend.
3) A lot of the free readers (or even Patreon subscribers) don't expect book publisher quality editing. In fact, many will jump at the option to help you by being a proof-reader and let you know of typos, or weird sounding phrases, etc. I suspect many would prefer more often releases/more content as a trade for slightly worse editing. Some of those I posted above release 5-6 chapters a week, and typos are common. Nobody seems to mind.
4) I'm convinced as a reader the biggest thing that gets people to subscribe/be a patron is advance chapters. From my experience, you get to a really exciting part of the story, and want to know what happens, and from author blurbs letting people know there at 10-20 future chapters available from subscribers, it's hard to resist dropping $5-$10 to know there's a significant chunk of story you immediately get. It's also very hard to stop paying knowing you have a few weeks to wait before the free chapters catch up to where you were just reading.
5) Some authors take chunks past chapters off free sites a while after so they can publish on Amazon as a book (after editing passes, etc, so usually there's at least a few weeks past the current chapter). This probably synergizes well with people that find the author from their books and subscribe to read the latest one as it's written (e.g. Matt Dinniman for me). I'm not sure if you lose a lot of organic free reader growth though, and whether it's better or worse probably depends on how well your books do on Amazon (whether traditional or Kindle Unlimited).
Finally, I'm pretty sure there's a subreddit for authors that covers a lot of this and you can mine people there for information. I'm not sure what fiction genre's this extends to well, but I imagine most pulpy things which people like to consume in large quantities qualify. For example, I'm not sure of a romance webnovel site like royalroad.com, but I bet it exists, and I bet there are people on Patreon making good money from patrons because of it.
1) Publish your work for free, either on a site dedicated to that genre like royalroad.com or some other way as long as you can get people invested and checking regularly for your work.
2) Be consistent and frequent in your output. More than once a week is good, but if you only publish something once a week, make sure you always have something to publish and don't skip ever. Buffered content is your friend.
3) A lot of the free readers (or even Patreon subscribers) don't expect book publisher quality editing. In fact, many will jump at the option to help you by being a proof-reader and let you know of typos, or weird sounding phrases, etc. I suspect many would prefer more often releases/more content as a trade for slightly worse editing. Some of those I posted above release 5-6 chapters a week, and typos are common. Nobody seems to mind.
4) I'm convinced as a reader the biggest thing that gets people to subscribe/be a patron is advance chapters. From my experience, you get to a really exciting part of the story, and want to know what happens, and from author blurbs letting people know there at 10-20 future chapters available from subscribers, it's hard to resist dropping $5-$10 to know there's a significant chunk of story you immediately get. It's also very hard to stop paying knowing you have a few weeks to wait before the free chapters catch up to where you were just reading.
5) Some authors take chunks past chapters off free sites a while after so they can publish on Amazon as a book (after editing passes, etc, so usually there's at least a few weeks past the current chapter). This probably synergizes well with people that find the author from their books and subscribe to read the latest one as it's written (e.g. Matt Dinniman for me). I'm not sure if you lose a lot of organic free reader growth though, and whether it's better or worse probably depends on how well your books do on Amazon (whether traditional or Kindle Unlimited).
Finally, I'm pretty sure there's a subreddit for authors that covers a lot of this and you can mine people there for information. I'm not sure what fiction genre's this extends to well, but I imagine most pulpy things which people like to consume in large quantities qualify. For example, I'm not sure of a romance webnovel site like royalroad.com, but I bet it exists, and I bet there are people on Patreon making good money from patrons because of it.