FA+
Shop
What I've learned after depending on comms for 2 years
2 years ago
Current queue: Medieval YCH(Nezmog, Jespe, TaurusProductions, Microcub ), Olivia, Jespe again, Edwin_at_work
I've been meaning to write about this for a while now, but PayPal charitably reminded me of the $600 reporting threshold this morning (which will no longer require you to pay taxes, but still, wasn't originally planning on assigning neurons to that today) so it's as good a time as any.
I started seriously pursuing commissions in the summer of 2021 (you may remember I'd been talking before the pandemic about automating most of my badly-paying dayjob away to free up time for other pursuits, this was the point where I finally said "I've done it!"). The failure of the 2017 opening still weighed heavily on my mind, though, so I was pretty sure simply posting "hey, I'm open" and uploading 5 "samples" a week wasn't going to work. I tried to get an art stream set up since I remembered getting followers that way in 2014, but I could never get it to work.
So instead, I took to Discord. I've always been bad at keeping up with multiple forums, but I made an effort to participate in all of them. I was very casual about my commissions (since, you know, pandemic: I kinda needed the social interaction more ...and pandemic stimuluses were keeping me afloat) and sold a grand total of 2 commissions that way in the whole year.
Here came the first hard lesson: Do not give free samples of your work. People will always say "do you have a sample?" and since I was being asked for combinations I'd never done (such as, let's say, "cell-shaded and macro"), I'd always say "no, but I can make one", and then would go off to do just that. Several things can happen in that process:
• You take so long to produce the sample, the would-be commissioner loses interest
• They judge your sample as not good enough
• The free sample satisfies their "need" and they no longer want "the paid version"
(also, commissioners, don't ask "do you have a sample", look at the artist's gallery and talk to them about that; artists love gushing about their art!)
From here, I decided to be systematic about it: I was going to create a sample of every possible combination and put them on a price sheet (I don't recommend this, by the way). I'd long planned to get "volunteers" to appear on my price sheet, but by this point, the pandemic stimuli had stopped so I decided to sell the slots in a huge YCH.
To promote it, I started using Twitter ...I mean really use it. I'd never "gotten" Twitter much, but again, I made the effort and soon went from replying to 1 or 2 tweets every few days, to replying to 20 tweets a day.
And here I learned the second lesson: The online art space is an interconnected ecosystem. I only sold 2 slots on Twitter itself (people I knew saw my retweets), but by posting the slots sold on FA, DA and Tumblr, I was able to get more attention there. Then, by making reminders for FA and DA since they don't have a retweet option (and posting those reminders on Twitter), I was able to get more attention back on Twitter ...and the feedback loop continued until I had people asking for slots when I'd run out!
I kind of already knew this, to be honest. I'd always praised EA's pre-2007 strategy of "cross pollination" (releasing the "same" game on multiple platforms to motivate people from one platform to get the other) but seeing it firsthand was just next level.
I considered myself too busy during the Winter Quarter of 2022 (we work in quarters at my school) so, though I was still brimming with ideas, I wasn't posting anything.
...Then I noticed my friends on Twitter were depressed.
I mean, a lot of them were.
They needed me.
I'd been to therapy during the pandemic (and it bankrupted me so I knew not everyone could afford it) but it had given me the tools necessary to deal with it. I could tell they didn't have them. And one of those tools (which I was underusing) was "draw something every day".
So I started the "Free Hugs" series.
From a commercial standpoint, this was a great way to get "out there", since gift art is far more visible than the average twitter reply, but that was not the main reason to do it.
So let's call this the third lesson: Gifts are good. A gift is not a free sample, it is a labor of love. You wouldn't buy a gift for someone you don't know at all, and giving the gift doesn't weigh on your conscience as a waste of time in the same way as "the prospective commissioner never got back to me" does. Sometimes the receiver only responds with a like, and that's more than enough. Sometimes they'll comment show their followers in turn. But because you're not doing it for the attention, it's always a bonus.
What really changed things was something unexpected: I reached 150 followers on Twitter! I'd always planned that, if I reached 150, I would draw the 150 pokémon. I'd kind of resigned on the idea years ago because I'd "stopped growing"... and then it happened. I now had to put that plan into action! (and no, "celebrate milestones" isn't a lesson learned, I'll come back to this later)
Turning my daily drawing into "the next pokémon on the list" was a huge boost to my productivity (so long as I kept the list handy) and it contributed to the "ecosystem" positive feedback loop.
Let's call this the fourth lesson: Always have something to do. If you're ever "out of ideas", have something you can turn to that will allow you to keep posting. Something that doesn't stress you out (drawing Pokémon is a huge comfort for me, it's literally therapeutic). Something that doesn't require a lot of effort to decide what to do next. Something that (for all practical purposes) you could do forever.
And now, having a huge roster of pokémon under my belt, came the next turning point. I'd always considered black and white sketches to be "unfinished" art, but people were quite happy with them as they were. And with Pandemic payments stopping, I offered to "finish" them... as a commission.
Approximately one out of every ten people who received a pokémon sketch were willing to pay to see it "finished", which is the exact ratio taught in marketing classes.
This brings me to the fifth lesson: Direct marketing works (ha,ha, just kidding, please don't spam your followers). The fifth lesson is: Keep in touch with your follower base.
They already made the decision to follow you, they are clearly interested in what you have to offer. Make sure you talk to them, listen to them, study them individually, and yes, give them fan service (and I mean this literally: give them what they came for, not what a stereotype says they want).
After about a year of toil, my price sheet was ready (remember I said I don't advise making them like I did?) and I sold 2. and here I learned another hard lesson: Commissioners are creative people (they just lack the time, tools, or skill to do the art themselves)
This should be a good thing; what better person to work with as a creative, than a creative? The problem is that not many people are creative, so a broad "throw anything you want at me, the only limit is your imagination", only works with people who have unlimited imaginations. Not even lowering prices helps in this situation.
If you want to reach a larger audience, you need to do what most artists do and offer donation drives, YCHs and adopts. If you need ideas for these, celebrate holidays or milestones (told you I'd come back to it) but do it with intent, not out of obligation. Try to stay away from newsbites or trending topics as these will become dated very quickly (and you want the stuff people paid for to act as an ad).
So I launched a donation drive. I'd always been planning one for Macro March. This taught me the next lesson: People want to give you money!
This may come as a shock to many of you, but it's true. Your followers do like you that much. Give them opportunities to show it on their terms. And never fail to acknowledge it!
I soon after launched another huge YCH, got only 1 response, and learned the 8th hard lesson: Some months are just dead.
If you've ever wondered why no artist ever does X in the month of Y, this is why. People just disconnect from the internet at certain times of the year (and with the pandemic ending, doubly so!). Trying to get anyone to even see what you're doing at these times is literally shouting into the void.
By this time, my mother had lost her job, and her severance pay had run out. My family was financially in trouble. I went back to my list of pokémon, and people who said they'd be interested in paying to get it finished "later". Only 2 of them still did, which taught me two new hard lessons:
9: Buying art is an emotional endeavor. Once emotions subside, the push to put money on that particular piece is gone. This also means that art should always have emotion (and probably why so many people hate AI art for non-"it was made by AI" reasons)
10: People wait for their paycheck. Even if your followers may recognize your situation on the 23rd of the month, even if they want to give you money, they won't have any money to give until the 30th. But by that point, they may have forgotten (after all, what is the internet but a myriad of things trying to get your attention?) so you need to time your announcements considering this. Use that week for a personal project or try to cut back.
Things went very well for a while... but then there came the Death of Twitter. What do I mean by that? I track "views per followers" on my art tweets. I normally get 1 view for every follower, thanks to my carefully scheduled retweets. However, I've noticed a steady decline in that number since July (when the "rate limited" debacle happened). Starting at about the last week of September, it's been stuck at about 0.2 views for every follower. I doubt this is a matter of algorithm suppression, though, since I'm also seeing people I follow, post less. I conclude people really are spending less time on Twitter, which brings me to the final hard lesson: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, don't even put the majority of your eggs in one basket!
From the beginning, having many more followers on Twitter than on any other platform set off alarm bells in my head (and if it's been your situation, it should do so, for you, too!) The fear was not that Twitter, as a whole, would fail, it was that I could lose my account! I am happy with the fact that I currently only have about 50% more followers on Twitter than I do on FA (ideally the numbers would be equal, but since FA relies on people using "browse" and "search", that number is really hard to raise!)
To bring it full circle, cross-pollinate! Link your other accounts constantly. Anyone who's finding you for the first time in one platform should quickly be able to know if you're in any of the other platforms they use. This is how I've managed to survive the Twitter-pocalypse.
So those are my 12 hard lessons:
1. Do not give free samples of your work
2. The online art space is an interconnected ecosystem
3. Gifts are good
4. Always have something to do
5. Keep in touch with your follower base
6. Commissioners are creative people
7. People want to give you money!
8. Some months are just dead
9. Buying art is an emotional endeavor
10. People wait for their paycheck
11. Don't put all your eggs in one basket
12. Cross-pollinate!
They're all "easier said than done", but don't let anyone tell you that artists hate sharing their secrets!
And Merry Christmas.
Posted using PostyBirb
I started seriously pursuing commissions in the summer of 2021 (you may remember I'd been talking before the pandemic about automating most of my badly-paying dayjob away to free up time for other pursuits, this was the point where I finally said "I've done it!"). The failure of the 2017 opening still weighed heavily on my mind, though, so I was pretty sure simply posting "hey, I'm open" and uploading 5 "samples" a week wasn't going to work. I tried to get an art stream set up since I remembered getting followers that way in 2014, but I could never get it to work.
So instead, I took to Discord. I've always been bad at keeping up with multiple forums, but I made an effort to participate in all of them. I was very casual about my commissions (since, you know, pandemic: I kinda needed the social interaction more ...and pandemic stimuluses were keeping me afloat) and sold a grand total of 2 commissions that way in the whole year.
Here came the first hard lesson: Do not give free samples of your work. People will always say "do you have a sample?" and since I was being asked for combinations I'd never done (such as, let's say, "cell-shaded and macro"), I'd always say "no, but I can make one", and then would go off to do just that. Several things can happen in that process:
• You take so long to produce the sample, the would-be commissioner loses interest
• They judge your sample as not good enough
• The free sample satisfies their "need" and they no longer want "the paid version"
(also, commissioners, don't ask "do you have a sample", look at the artist's gallery and talk to them about that; artists love gushing about their art!)
From here, I decided to be systematic about it: I was going to create a sample of every possible combination and put them on a price sheet (I don't recommend this, by the way). I'd long planned to get "volunteers" to appear on my price sheet, but by this point, the pandemic stimuli had stopped so I decided to sell the slots in a huge YCH.
To promote it, I started using Twitter ...I mean really use it. I'd never "gotten" Twitter much, but again, I made the effort and soon went from replying to 1 or 2 tweets every few days, to replying to 20 tweets a day.
And here I learned the second lesson: The online art space is an interconnected ecosystem. I only sold 2 slots on Twitter itself (people I knew saw my retweets), but by posting the slots sold on FA, DA and Tumblr, I was able to get more attention there. Then, by making reminders for FA and DA since they don't have a retweet option (and posting those reminders on Twitter), I was able to get more attention back on Twitter ...and the feedback loop continued until I had people asking for slots when I'd run out!
I kind of already knew this, to be honest. I'd always praised EA's pre-2007 strategy of "cross pollination" (releasing the "same" game on multiple platforms to motivate people from one platform to get the other) but seeing it firsthand was just next level.
I considered myself too busy during the Winter Quarter of 2022 (we work in quarters at my school) so, though I was still brimming with ideas, I wasn't posting anything.
...Then I noticed my friends on Twitter were depressed.
I mean, a lot of them were.
They needed me.
I'd been to therapy during the pandemic (and it bankrupted me so I knew not everyone could afford it) but it had given me the tools necessary to deal with it. I could tell they didn't have them. And one of those tools (which I was underusing) was "draw something every day".
So I started the "Free Hugs" series.
From a commercial standpoint, this was a great way to get "out there", since gift art is far more visible than the average twitter reply, but that was not the main reason to do it.
So let's call this the third lesson: Gifts are good. A gift is not a free sample, it is a labor of love. You wouldn't buy a gift for someone you don't know at all, and giving the gift doesn't weigh on your conscience as a waste of time in the same way as "the prospective commissioner never got back to me" does. Sometimes the receiver only responds with a like, and that's more than enough. Sometimes they'll comment show their followers in turn. But because you're not doing it for the attention, it's always a bonus.
What really changed things was something unexpected: I reached 150 followers on Twitter! I'd always planned that, if I reached 150, I would draw the 150 pokémon. I'd kind of resigned on the idea years ago because I'd "stopped growing"... and then it happened. I now had to put that plan into action! (and no, "celebrate milestones" isn't a lesson learned, I'll come back to this later)
Turning my daily drawing into "the next pokémon on the list" was a huge boost to my productivity (so long as I kept the list handy) and it contributed to the "ecosystem" positive feedback loop.
Let's call this the fourth lesson: Always have something to do. If you're ever "out of ideas", have something you can turn to that will allow you to keep posting. Something that doesn't stress you out (drawing Pokémon is a huge comfort for me, it's literally therapeutic). Something that doesn't require a lot of effort to decide what to do next. Something that (for all practical purposes) you could do forever.
And now, having a huge roster of pokémon under my belt, came the next turning point. I'd always considered black and white sketches to be "unfinished" art, but people were quite happy with them as they were. And with Pandemic payments stopping, I offered to "finish" them... as a commission.
Approximately one out of every ten people who received a pokémon sketch were willing to pay to see it "finished", which is the exact ratio taught in marketing classes.
This brings me to the fifth lesson: Direct marketing works (ha,ha, just kidding, please don't spam your followers). The fifth lesson is: Keep in touch with your follower base.
They already made the decision to follow you, they are clearly interested in what you have to offer. Make sure you talk to them, listen to them, study them individually, and yes, give them fan service (and I mean this literally: give them what they came for, not what a stereotype says they want).
After about a year of toil, my price sheet was ready (remember I said I don't advise making them like I did?) and I sold 2. and here I learned another hard lesson: Commissioners are creative people (they just lack the time, tools, or skill to do the art themselves)
This should be a good thing; what better person to work with as a creative, than a creative? The problem is that not many people are creative, so a broad "throw anything you want at me, the only limit is your imagination", only works with people who have unlimited imaginations. Not even lowering prices helps in this situation.
If you want to reach a larger audience, you need to do what most artists do and offer donation drives, YCHs and adopts. If you need ideas for these, celebrate holidays or milestones (told you I'd come back to it) but do it with intent, not out of obligation. Try to stay away from newsbites or trending topics as these will become dated very quickly (and you want the stuff people paid for to act as an ad).
So I launched a donation drive. I'd always been planning one for Macro March. This taught me the next lesson: People want to give you money!
This may come as a shock to many of you, but it's true. Your followers do like you that much. Give them opportunities to show it on their terms. And never fail to acknowledge it!
I soon after launched another huge YCH, got only 1 response, and learned the 8th hard lesson: Some months are just dead.
If you've ever wondered why no artist ever does X in the month of Y, this is why. People just disconnect from the internet at certain times of the year (and with the pandemic ending, doubly so!). Trying to get anyone to even see what you're doing at these times is literally shouting into the void.
By this time, my mother had lost her job, and her severance pay had run out. My family was financially in trouble. I went back to my list of pokémon, and people who said they'd be interested in paying to get it finished "later". Only 2 of them still did, which taught me two new hard lessons:
9: Buying art is an emotional endeavor. Once emotions subside, the push to put money on that particular piece is gone. This also means that art should always have emotion (and probably why so many people hate AI art for non-"it was made by AI" reasons)
10: People wait for their paycheck. Even if your followers may recognize your situation on the 23rd of the month, even if they want to give you money, they won't have any money to give until the 30th. But by that point, they may have forgotten (after all, what is the internet but a myriad of things trying to get your attention?) so you need to time your announcements considering this. Use that week for a personal project or try to cut back.
Things went very well for a while... but then there came the Death of Twitter. What do I mean by that? I track "views per followers" on my art tweets. I normally get 1 view for every follower, thanks to my carefully scheduled retweets. However, I've noticed a steady decline in that number since July (when the "rate limited" debacle happened). Starting at about the last week of September, it's been stuck at about 0.2 views for every follower. I doubt this is a matter of algorithm suppression, though, since I'm also seeing people I follow, post less. I conclude people really are spending less time on Twitter, which brings me to the final hard lesson: Don't put all your eggs in one basket, don't even put the majority of your eggs in one basket!
From the beginning, having many more followers on Twitter than on any other platform set off alarm bells in my head (and if it's been your situation, it should do so, for you, too!) The fear was not that Twitter, as a whole, would fail, it was that I could lose my account! I am happy with the fact that I currently only have about 50% more followers on Twitter than I do on FA (ideally the numbers would be equal, but since FA relies on people using "browse" and "search", that number is really hard to raise!)
To bring it full circle, cross-pollinate! Link your other accounts constantly. Anyone who's finding you for the first time in one platform should quickly be able to know if you're in any of the other platforms they use. This is how I've managed to survive the Twitter-pocalypse.
So those are my 12 hard lessons:
1. Do not give free samples of your work
2. The online art space is an interconnected ecosystem
3. Gifts are good
4. Always have something to do
5. Keep in touch with your follower base
6. Commissioners are creative people
7. People want to give you money!
8. Some months are just dead
9. Buying art is an emotional endeavor
10. People wait for their paycheck
11. Don't put all your eggs in one basket
12. Cross-pollinate!
They're all "easier said than done", but don't let anyone tell you that artists hate sharing their secrets!
And Merry Christmas.
Posted using PostyBirb
Definitely realizing now on the #10, I have periods where 'yes I have money let me throw them at you' and then being and feeling miserly once I'm down to my monthly expenditures. Also admittedly, me saying 'yes we'll do this in the future' I think is going to bite me in the rear sometime soon x: .
Also on 12/twitter, yep I actually deleted my twitter account at some point, moved to bsky and mastadon but to be honest I no longer feel that I need them after the move. The lack of scrolling infinitely helps a lot with the toothing, so yep I only see your art on fa now.
As for sketches, yes. When I commission, it's because I want to see my character drawn in that person's style. If money is short (eg: exchange rates), I'm quite happy to pay less for no colors because I still get the style.
Admittedly a bit reason I commished was because I saw your fa journal on how you were feeling that time, which also acted as a reminder.
Another quirk of mine is... I tend to think of which of my character an artist is allowed to draw (paid or not) since style is an important aspect to me. It's.. strange to see my characters drawn in ways not envisioned. Especially cort not being drawn in a cute way. It's happened twice or thrice now 3:< and no you pass on drawing her uwu. But carrying on with what I was trying to say, commissioning or getting a particular character drawn by an artist the first time is quite a mental barrier, a gamble to me. The money/permission is either spent well or wasted. I think even from there, I think I tend to just... keep the art (the nice ones) like a card collection.. I haven't felt the need to pay more for the same style from the same artist, though they are kept in the 'yes they may draw this 'sona in the future' list.
I'm rambling, anyway Merry Christmas o:
Take style for instance. Though oft repeated, it's something that takes starting-out artists a long time to understand, but is often the defining factor.
And Merry Christmas right back at you!