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Artist Pimp + FA Downtime, Business, and You
12 years ago
There's an artist I'd really like for you guys to check out.
mei5683
I've pimped her a few times before, but it's ok, because she's awesome. She does very nice work for affordable prices, along with pay what you want streams nearly every day. She's a huge supporter of this group (in fact, I met her through here), she donates frequently, and has even been a mod here a while back, helping me with submissions. I urge you to visit her page and give her some business! You can see her price guide here http://www.furaffinity.net/view/12190942/
______
So. About that FA "downtime". Certainly an inconvenience at best, and a financial disaster at worst. Many of you weren't able to conduct your usual business, contact clients, or get new commissions. And FA was only in read-only mode. Everything was still there, you just couldn't DO anything.
If you've been on FA for more than a few years, you know that this happens. It goes down every so often, sometimes days at a time. Many years ago it went down for a whole month.
So how do you keep your business running as smooth as possible when stuff like this happens? And it will happen again. And again. I'm not trying to talk smack about FA, because I do love this site. But it's been around for 8 years with the same code and little to no significant updates. It keeps breaking, and it will keep breaking until something better is done about it. Unfortunately, we as users of the site can't do anything about it. So we need to work around when "shit happens".
Preventative measures:
-DO NOT RELY ON FA NOTES FOR BUSINESS, DAMNIT! Use email. Put your email address in your profile, on your price guide, in your price guide description, in your journal footer/header. Put it EVERYWHERE. If a client needs to contact you about something, you'll already be in their address book most likely, or they can just reply to the last email you sent them. Same as when you'll need to contact a client. And if FA goes into read-only mode, people can still contact you for new commissions because your email address will be on EVERYTHING.
-Have at least one backup gallery on another site that is mostly up to date. There's Inkbunny, SoFurry, Weasyl, DeviantArt, Tumblr, and many others. Pick one or all of them. Keep at least one of your alternate galleries up to date for the most part. Put links to your other galleries in your FA profile/header/price guide description, etc. Likewise, link to your FA in the profiles of your other galleries as well.
Here's where I say "do as I say, and not as I do" for obvious reasons. I have other galleries, but I haven't kept them up to date. I know I SHOULD, but I don't because I'm an oxymoronic combination of lazy and busy. And because I don't, I'm going to be boned if FA goes down for a considerable amount of time. I have nearly 7000 watchers here, but only a measly few hundred across my other galleries. I am going to start 2014 with AT LEAST keeping my Weasyl and Sofurry up to date. You should too.
-Not mandatory, but recommended: Have your own website. Doesn't matter if you get your own web space and domain name, or if you get a free wordpress blog or tumblr. Put your commission info like your TOS and contact information on there too. Also doesn't hurt to have some art examples on it if you can.
These things won't cushion you completely. If your main site of business goes down completely for days, there's not really a whole lot you can do about it. So do try to build up your watcher base on other sites as well. The phrase "don't put all your eggs in one basket" is relevant.
---
Between my various work, I'm still writing the Artist's Selling Guide (and the Buyer's one too, though that one is less important). All the feedback I've gotten so far from the questionnaire that I posted a few months back has been very helpful. I am not sure when I'll be done with it, there's a LOT of information going in it, on topics from figuring out what sort of commissions to offer, to pricing, to things like setting up your workspace and staying motivated/productive. Because a lot of work is going into this guide, it won't be free, but it will be a very affordable $5 ebook. All I have to say is if you can't afford an investment that small for your business, you shouldn't be in business! That goes along with advertisement, such as getting an FA banner.
Remember when FA announced that we were no longer allowed to post multiple reminder journals for YCH/Auctions or pimp raffles, ect? Of course you do. What really baffled me is the outrage from some artists complaining about how they will lose business because they can't advertise that way anymore. And when reasonable people replied that they should just get FA adspace, there was always one of two responses:
1) I can't afford that; or
2) Everyone uses adblocker, so ads don't work.
First, if you can't afford $20 a month for an ad, you can't afford to be doing art for a living. If you even sell one commission that month for $20 (or a bunch of smaller ones to equal that), you've made your money back. If you can already draw half decently and some people have been giving you some money for artwork already, it's worth it. And it's exposure.
Which brings me to #2. On which I call bullshit. Yeah, some people use adblock. You know what kind of people use adblock? Those who won't buy your work anyway. They're not looking for new artists to commission. The people that DON'T block the ads are the ones who ARE looking for new artists. Those are the people you are targeting when you get adspace. And when I have an ad up, 10-20 new watchers per day tells me that shit works.
Their true excuse is that they're cheap. They want free exposure. But I'll let you in on a secret. Even if you pay no money for an ad, good exposure is never free. You still need to upload things. Which means you need to spend time making things to upload. Time is money. In fact, time is even more valuable than money, because you can never get that time back. That $20 worth of adspace saves you time. Plus it's always good to support a site that you use to support yourself. And as a BONUS, if your art is your home business and you make enough each year to pay taxes, all that ad money you spent is a WRITE-OFF! In the US, anyway. I don't know about elsewhere.
So yeah. Sorry for the tl;dr journal. I was supposed to be pimping mei5683.
mei5683
mei5683
mei5683
Go :V
mei5683I've pimped her a few times before, but it's ok, because she's awesome. She does very nice work for affordable prices, along with pay what you want streams nearly every day. She's a huge supporter of this group (in fact, I met her through here), she donates frequently, and has even been a mod here a while back, helping me with submissions. I urge you to visit her page and give her some business! You can see her price guide here http://www.furaffinity.net/view/12190942/
______
So. About that FA "downtime". Certainly an inconvenience at best, and a financial disaster at worst. Many of you weren't able to conduct your usual business, contact clients, or get new commissions. And FA was only in read-only mode. Everything was still there, you just couldn't DO anything.
If you've been on FA for more than a few years, you know that this happens. It goes down every so often, sometimes days at a time. Many years ago it went down for a whole month.
So how do you keep your business running as smooth as possible when stuff like this happens? And it will happen again. And again. I'm not trying to talk smack about FA, because I do love this site. But it's been around for 8 years with the same code and little to no significant updates. It keeps breaking, and it will keep breaking until something better is done about it. Unfortunately, we as users of the site can't do anything about it. So we need to work around when "shit happens".
Preventative measures:
-DO NOT RELY ON FA NOTES FOR BUSINESS, DAMNIT! Use email. Put your email address in your profile, on your price guide, in your price guide description, in your journal footer/header. Put it EVERYWHERE. If a client needs to contact you about something, you'll already be in their address book most likely, or they can just reply to the last email you sent them. Same as when you'll need to contact a client. And if FA goes into read-only mode, people can still contact you for new commissions because your email address will be on EVERYTHING.
-Have at least one backup gallery on another site that is mostly up to date. There's Inkbunny, SoFurry, Weasyl, DeviantArt, Tumblr, and many others. Pick one or all of them. Keep at least one of your alternate galleries up to date for the most part. Put links to your other galleries in your FA profile/header/price guide description, etc. Likewise, link to your FA in the profiles of your other galleries as well.
Here's where I say "do as I say, and not as I do" for obvious reasons. I have other galleries, but I haven't kept them up to date. I know I SHOULD, but I don't because I'm an oxymoronic combination of lazy and busy. And because I don't, I'm going to be boned if FA goes down for a considerable amount of time. I have nearly 7000 watchers here, but only a measly few hundred across my other galleries. I am going to start 2014 with AT LEAST keeping my Weasyl and Sofurry up to date. You should too.
-Not mandatory, but recommended: Have your own website. Doesn't matter if you get your own web space and domain name, or if you get a free wordpress blog or tumblr. Put your commission info like your TOS and contact information on there too. Also doesn't hurt to have some art examples on it if you can.
These things won't cushion you completely. If your main site of business goes down completely for days, there's not really a whole lot you can do about it. So do try to build up your watcher base on other sites as well. The phrase "don't put all your eggs in one basket" is relevant.
---
Between my various work, I'm still writing the Artist's Selling Guide (and the Buyer's one too, though that one is less important). All the feedback I've gotten so far from the questionnaire that I posted a few months back has been very helpful. I am not sure when I'll be done with it, there's a LOT of information going in it, on topics from figuring out what sort of commissions to offer, to pricing, to things like setting up your workspace and staying motivated/productive. Because a lot of work is going into this guide, it won't be free, but it will be a very affordable $5 ebook. All I have to say is if you can't afford an investment that small for your business, you shouldn't be in business! That goes along with advertisement, such as getting an FA banner.
Remember when FA announced that we were no longer allowed to post multiple reminder journals for YCH/Auctions or pimp raffles, ect? Of course you do. What really baffled me is the outrage from some artists complaining about how they will lose business because they can't advertise that way anymore. And when reasonable people replied that they should just get FA adspace, there was always one of two responses:
1) I can't afford that; or
2) Everyone uses adblocker, so ads don't work.
First, if you can't afford $20 a month for an ad, you can't afford to be doing art for a living. If you even sell one commission that month for $20 (or a bunch of smaller ones to equal that), you've made your money back. If you can already draw half decently and some people have been giving you some money for artwork already, it's worth it. And it's exposure.
Which brings me to #2. On which I call bullshit. Yeah, some people use adblock. You know what kind of people use adblock? Those who won't buy your work anyway. They're not looking for new artists to commission. The people that DON'T block the ads are the ones who ARE looking for new artists. Those are the people you are targeting when you get adspace. And when I have an ad up, 10-20 new watchers per day tells me that shit works.
Their true excuse is that they're cheap. They want free exposure. But I'll let you in on a secret. Even if you pay no money for an ad, good exposure is never free. You still need to upload things. Which means you need to spend time making things to upload. Time is money. In fact, time is even more valuable than money, because you can never get that time back. That $20 worth of adspace saves you time. Plus it's always good to support a site that you use to support yourself. And as a BONUS, if your art is your home business and you make enough each year to pay taxes, all that ad money you spent is a WRITE-OFF! In the US, anyway. I don't know about elsewhere.
So yeah. Sorry for the tl;dr journal. I was supposed to be pimping
mei5683. mei5683 mei5683 mei5683Go :V
And yeah, I click ads and follow this account when looking for artists.
do you mind if i copypasta this and put it on my secret tumblr so i can read it later?
I'm thinking of in the future just posting journals as submissions and sticking them in scraps.
So I think saying 10 - 20 per day only really seems to apply to certain levels of art. Which does baffle me slightly as some of the people I am referring to have.. some seriously amazing art quality.
So I can see where the 'ads don't work bit' would come in.. just not for the ad block reason.
That one bit aside for me personally, I wish I could fav this journal on here. XD Most of the things suggested is what i have started doing,after this last.. hit of FA issues, but I hadn't considered my own web page. o.0;;
So i will take a look into that as a place to be reached and work as well.
Also just wanted to say thanks for continuing with these journals. I have found many useful and helpful suggestions through them. ^.^
A web page is a good thing to have, if not for a whole gallery, then at least as a central place to post your TOS, queue, and other important information. That way you only need link to the page(s) on your various gallery profiles, and only need to edit one page instead of five if you need to change something. I've actually been using Trello as both a queue and an information repository (you can see here: https://trello.com/b/uM0ZQoR2/mosa-s-art-queue) and I love it. It has its down sides though. Some mobile devices don't load trello properly, which isn't a huge deal since most people have at least one normal computer, but it can sometimes be inconvenient for people to check when they're not home. It's also a somewhat foreign layout that people aren't used to, and sometimes there can be confusion about finding certain info. But I also find that people who overlook important info on the trello board also overlook important info in even a plain text page, so I think they're just really unobservant.
I'm glad you are finding my journal posts helpful! I like writing tutorials and how-to guides, but time is always an issue. If there's any particular topic you'd like me to write about, let me know! Chances are I've already planned to answer most questions in the Artist's Guide anyway, but on the off chance I haven't thought about something that people would like to know, I can certainly try to address it.
If downtimes like the last are going to be around occationally it's probably best to not just have one account on one website.
(Though I do wish they would improve the website...)
Not only is is good for business, but it's also very assuring, as a commissioner, to have multiple ways to contact the artist.
I prefer being able to contact them though email aswell and not just notes etc.
I also love seeing an artists own website, or blog even.