I know this is a dream for you, but I don't think you should quit your job for any reason, even if it's for something you wanna do. I mean, I'd love nothing more than to quit my job to become a full-time guitarist, but the odds of that happening are so slim. You can still draw pieces every now and then, but don't quit your job for that....

You cannot stop me from trying.

I can't, but you can. I just don't want you to regret it if anything goes wrong :(.

I already regret letting my imagination die as I sit at a desk at a job I don't like. So it won't be unfamiliar territory.

If you enjoy reading the comic, please consider helping me reach my goal so that you can read more of it faster. I stand a better chance at succeeding if I have your support.

I understand what you mean. Working at a retail store for 10 months has given me enough stress, but I know I need money for my car (not for anything else yet; still live with the folks bein a minor :P), so I can't just quit. However, if you really feel you can do this, it's your life.

I also have not read your comic yet, but I will soon ;), but I don't I'll be able to donate because I never have money and I don't have a Paypal or anything else like the sort :(.

Well some say that you haven't really lived your life if you have no regrets. I see this as people taking risks. This is serious though. Just living by donations most likely won't work unless you have a really loyal fan group. If you can, try to get a job where you can sneak drawing in. Heck I know someone who spends all day watching TV shows while answering emails. Then again drawing is different with the hands on work.....

So far, this sounds like Office Space, but about switching to erotic comics...

I understand what you mean, I didn't drew anything from the time I started working, even as a student, (don't try to find my arts, I published them under an other pseudo and it's not Furry nor adult materiel, moreover some jackass seems to find funny to use the same pseudo as me on some strange sites...) work kills imagination, that's a fact, but sometime you have to make a choice, wether to have fun or have enough money to eat, I wish you good luck, I won't be able to help you myself because I already lack of money but I support you in trying to live from your passion and I understand why you want to do it.

Good luck dude, I wish you a lot of success!

I see it another way... If you can find a way to reduce expenses and have steady income, money to keep your comfortable gives you the ability to use your personal time without worrying as much. The problem is that people get stuck with 2 deadend jobs or some c**p and then don't have a life, nor time to create, even if in the mood...

I can see the logic behind going 'all the way' and dedicating your working hours to learning. Practice is to an artist what savings are to retirement. ;) Gotta draw, draw, draw some more! This should become a pretty obvious trend to people who've had to do any kinds of advanced learning. Want to be a good musician? PRACTICE! Want to be a good writer? Read, write, and take turns editing other people's manuscripts. Want to understand math? Yeah, I know it sucks but guess what... Vigor is to math what clay is to pottery. Art? Gonna suck at everything until you spend a lot of time drawing different things. Oh and physics? Well you better be good at math and at intuition. This means a lot of time learning meditation, loci method(memorization), lucid dreaming(problem solving), practical (sometimes reverse)engineering... Dirty little secret some of the best physicists have is their time spent outside books just to learn to think the right way for a specific class of problems. Like: Why is there all this matter and no antimatter? Well that question makes about the same sense as asking why all the functioning compasses in a city point the same way. Another was: If a battery hooked up to a coil makes the compass or other magnet move, what happens if you move a magnet near a coil? That question lead to a very rich Edison once scientists figured out the answer. ;)

I guess once you get going, it makes sense to be an artist full-time. Good luck getting there! Oh, and not trying to be mean but knowing your audiences and making different 'brands' for each of them is a good idea in the long run. I've seen some artists who do gore 'n' vore as side projects because it might drive away some/a lot of otherwise paying customers. Paradox of artistic freedom: People want uniqueness but also have comfort zones. :/

I the work you put into the comic and thanks for sharing it with us!

Also I think this faux Soviet picture is awesome :D.

As soon as I find a job I would be more than inclined to start making regular donations to support your webcomic! Truth be told however as far as the new series are concerned? I'm more of a believer that you should just stick with ♥.

I think if you have at least weekly, you'll garner more support with start. I'll spread word a bit, but regular if slow updates will help me make recommendations. 3/4 views to watchers ratio is pretty nice, and I might have a small donation for you when you start up again.

Now that I have my proposal done I'm going to get back to work on pages. I'll have new things posted as soon as I can.

dont quit your job and i cant decide which comic id vote for *shrugs*

It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this. I'll see about spreading the word via one of my journals, and I'll send you a small donation to starts things out as well. Good luck, I hope this will work in your favor in the long run with what you have planned. :)

Also, as for new comic ideas, I think "Hussy" and "27 Laws" look promising to me in my opinion!

Thank you very much!

Just made my donation and posted a journal to spread the word. Hope this will help, even if it's only a little bit.

A. I vote for Hussy
B. Become a school janitor, they dont do shit anyways. You would have plenty of time to do drawing durring work time :D

You need to put that design on a t shirt and sell it!

DAMN ME AND NOT HAVING MONEY! You would so get it. Love you work, man.

The comic you reluctantly update and insult with every new page? Hell yeah I'll throw my money at that.

I wouldn't go for quitting your source of income unless you have a sure way to pay all bills and any other expenses that would arise without the need to be employed. If you're a closet quadjillionare, then by all means go for it and would you be on the look for someone who can cook, drive you around and other stuff? :)

I'm with Killthetsar & Bishopcorva on this one,
don't leave your day job, until a solid and steady income is secured.
Especially in the current economic climate.

Oh, um, I'm a foreigner.
My country isn't in a recession.

And yeah, the point of this drive is to try to secure money enough to last me all summer so that I am set to leave my job. And I have savings enough to support me if donations are thin for up to 6 months. And if after a year it isn't working out I can easily get another job, or get my old one back.

Donated fifty. I love ♥ and really want to see it continued/completed.

Once it's finished, I'd like to see ☆, although all ideas sound solid.

Is there any way for us to see where the donation level is at?

Oh wow, thank you! Send me a note with the details for the thank-you picture I'd like to draw for you.

I will start making posts about the donations once it has been at least 24 hours. I'm surprised at the level of support so far, I hope it keeps up.

I'll donate to you. But I suspect you'll be lucky if 10% of your watchers donate at all. I am not speaking against your watchers or your work, I am just pretty sure many fans (and artists) either have different expenses or no money to expense.
I'd suggest testing out this donation thing before quitting your job. Of course if your job is numbing you down I'd say its reasonable to quit it.
But maybe there are alternatives that will nurture your creativity.

I am testing the donation thing before quitting, as I said in my post. My work contract doesn't expire for another month and I want to try to reach my goal of 2(ish) chapters funded by then before I commit to this decision.

My mistake

hi
i also think you should stay at your work and test this for some months. it is easy to get some donations in the beginning, but
as you know, if you need it for living, you need donations every months. i shall test a donation button on my own homepage, but
the page will not fall if the donations will not be any success. also i dont need the donations for my real life... as i have a work.
but i wish you luck.

Hi,

I love your comic and wish I could see more. However it is a bit of a niche market (ie furry erotica with lots of other fetishes, some extreme) and it's had to see you making enough to pay your bills. Only the few most popular furry artists can manage that!

Perhaps there is some half way step, like just cutting back your hours to leave more time for art? That way you keep your skills up in the mundane workforce too...

Heck yes, I will donate once I've some spare!

I imagine a number of people are interested in the variety of fetishes brought up across the story line, but it's pretty much just intriguing fantasy to me. Would prolly even make an interesting pen & paper setting too, to boot.

I'd go with 27 laws, since you both seem to really like it and have a lot of planning done for it, and also, as you said, it could probably be published for real

I VOTE FOR ♥ IT IS A AWESOME COMIC AND IT NEEDS TO BE FINISHED ONE OF THE BEST I HAVE SEEN AND I CANT STAND CLIFF HANGERS D:

The intention is for <3 to be finished and for an *additional* project to be done as well. Votes are being collected for what the additional project will be. <3 is not in any jeopardy, here.

-bows bows bows- awesomeness then by all rights i vote for ☆

This is a high-risk gamble. I urge you at least not to make ♥ your only such work, because it is not destined to the broadest of audiences.

Doing it in addition to 27 laws sounds like your best option.

Fuck the people that say "don't quit your job for a dream." That's horse shit, and comes from people who have given up on their dreams, and don't want you to succeed.

Do it, take the risk and see where it leads. You will regret not doing it more than doing it.

I personally would not quit my day job for a insecure business adventure. But I have a family to feed.
Do what you think is best.
Oh, and I just donated. It was absolutely worth the fun I had so far with ♥!

I wish you luck, but please reconsider the idea of quitting your job to become a full-time artist. While it's possible to make a career as an illustrator, it is very difficult and for every one person who makes it happen, there are literally hundreds who don't achieve their goals and are left worse off for it. It can also take years to assemble an art career and get it off the ground, and that means going a long time without steady income, health insurance, or any kind of savings.

I do encourage you to keep drawing though, but remember to plan ahead and be careful.

it is said that true art is borne of hardship pain and despair. so yes you should at least become part time so you barely have enough to live on and most importantly you still have a cultivated hatred for the day job your in and not the passion that you thought you loved, i have read a lot of your comics/graphic novels and i like them, but would i pay for it? hard to say...... if your stories went the filthy way that i liked more oftin, i probably would.

You should certainly try a kickstarter project!

I had wanted to, but the nature of this experiment seemed to go against Kickstarter's policies; new projects only and no porn please.

If this donation drive fails, one of the options I will entertain instead is devoting my drawing time to 27 Laws, putting up the first chapter as a kickstarter for 'help me get this new thing published', and then coming back to ♥ only after that succeeds.

Love you comic but I'm worried about you leaving your job. If your sure you can get work afterwards then it sounds like it's worth the risk however the struggling artist is not just a cliche. Very best of luck which ever way you choose to go.

I could donate if you'd create a WebMoney purse.
Hell, Dranz has the same secret fetish as me, so I'd gladly donate some money to see the story progress :D

I'm not too generous, but I donated.
I'm going to say here again-- Hussy all the way. :D Although all three are spectacularly interesting. I wish we could pay you to draw them ALL

Send me a reminder about this in a couple of days, I'll donate when my base comes in, it's commissions time anyway, so I've got some extra to see someone achieve a dream.

sounds like you gave this some thought.
i like your comic a lot and i wanna see more, but sadly i cant donate, no moniez on my end. however if i can come by some, you may be able to see some.

From my perspective, I have had my comic 'on a website' for three years now. A couple, actually, as it has been reposted in several places like e621. It's already generated a fanbase that goes outside of my ability to measure it. The entire point of this donation drive is to see if that fanbase is willing to support daily updates. If they do, THEN I spend the cash to register a domain and the effort to round up advertisers. If they don't, then I refund all the donations and life continues as normal. I don't know why this plan is stressing so many people out.

you've really given us an embarrassment of riches here. my vote goes to Hussy, but i hope working on that won't delay 27 Laws too much. i'm super excited about all three choices, plus more ♥, and i've provided a meager but well-meaning donation to help you along, with hopefully more where that came from. good luck!

Thank you very much! I'd love to tell all of those stories, and more that I didn't even put up for the vote.

Augh! Now I'm forced into action. Haven't used paypal in years, have to sort that out. If you try and fail there is some satisfaction in it. But to have a dream and not make the attempt would be a devilish haunt. I think you have every chance for success. Will you starve for your art? I hope not. Plan for a soft landing and hope for the best. One of the worst regrets is having set your sights too low and fallen short of what you later realize you might have achieved.

Just sent a $10 donation. really hope you can get what you need Reiger

Did you get that thing I sent you?

Ha ha ha

Shame it seems like you've barely gotten to a 4th. :/

i wouldnt recommend that, you cant live of the comic, you gotta have more proyects, also instead of quitting ur job, u should find another one that u like so u dont have to work
oh and i love ur comic

Hi, Reiger, I sent you $40. :)

I hadn't logged into FA for a while, but I came back to see if you had drawn any new pages. I would like to see both ☆ and 27 Laws, whatever order you choose to do them in.

If you find some good ads to run on a porn comic site, I'd be interested to see who they are. I tried it a while back, and Project Wonderful was all 'omg, noez, porn!' and Black Label or whatever they were called *who actually run porn ads* was all "omg, noez, bestiality!" (drawings of a human and a wolfman having sex, for those who were wondering!) So that one had me stumped!

Thank you! and I hope finding advertisers won't be too hard, but I have a guy helping me with it. Maybe we can ask FA who they use.

Best bet is direct sales, actually.

Oh, just having people pay you for a given time period and send in their ads to be manually added to your site? You'd need to keep some stats for potential advertisers to refer to, presumably...

Yeah. It's not easy, but it's doable using google analytics and making plenty of cold-calls to advertising agencies and the like.

Omega LTD and me had this same discussion which I won't go into specific details of since it was private. Suffice it say, this seems to be the current state of affairs:

It's a royal pain to find a way to get paid drawing these kinds of stories and REALLY hard if there's even one damn human(oid) in it. No elves, no standard humans, no dwarves, nothing remotely human-looking. Often doesn't matter if the humans are in the sex scenes. PayPal? Sorry, no porn. Pay Alert? Sorry, credit-card-issuing banks hate them (and now pretty much PayPal's policies since merger). DLSite? Ugh, very limited regions (of buyers) accepted and scares them off with weird (DRM) plugins you have to convince them to let you install (that also break things outside the site so... I wouldn't do that to anyone I liked - such as a paying customer!). Thanks to trojan horses, many will refuse. And they take something like half of the payment for the privilege so :artist rage:.

The biggest problem isn't piracy but that people have to jump through hoops, even if they want to straight up buy your comics. Club Stripes or PalComix or something like them works for some artists/readers. The erotic comic industry is in roughly the same state as the online music industry was back when the original Napster had been shutdown. It'll eventually be fixed but take a lot of work, time, money, and mostly patience on the part of authors/readers, heh. Water marks that are invisible to the human eye will probably become standard in a few years... Having a visible watermark is an option for 'samples' but invisible watermarks can hurt 'art thieves' in more subtle ways. They also are just as hard to remove as a repeating logo-style/copyright notice watermark, assuming you use a good one. Best part is that they can be automated and can carry the purchaser's name. In theory, a DNP list could check for this as a type of metadata, but that doesn't seem practical ATM.

We'll just have to keep pushing forward, to borrow a pun from our favorite erotic stories.

Good luck, man.

Sent you something, no need to tell others how much.

I don't have a vote aside from 'what you want'.

... .well that's silly of you

DAMIT!

Well wasn't my fault. I donated...

Unfortunate that it did not pan out.

Good luck in the future.

Thank you very much.

You should consider a Patreon. Patreon offers a way that this might work if re-attempted.

I know I'd support it.

Crap. Really hoped you'd get this. Was even planning on tossing some money in myself, but I only really had the money available starting today, which meant that I couldn't. Really wish I could've helped, and that you could have done it... any chance you'll try again in the future?

Damn. I don't want a refund. I wanted to see this story completed before I'm old and grey. Too bad you couldn't time this to when a lot of people would have had tax refund money to burn several weeks from now.

The people who wouldn't cough up one lousy buck will no doubt kvetch as usual over the comic.

The timing wasn't ideal I know, but it was tied to an opportunity to get out of my actual job without outright quitting (my contract expiring) so it was basically an attack of opportunity.

I have some alternate plans that I might give a shot, this was just an experiment to test things out. Thanks for your donation, even though I ended up refunding it I do appreciate it.

I would have been content with you keeping the money toward more comics, but alas.

I adore your stuff, Reiger. I find so much of it sexy as hell, but I'm going to level with you...

This didn't work for a few reasons:

1. Your audience is too small to meet the sizable donation marks you set up.
We, your loyal fans, are, I would guess, a pretty small bunch compared to some other furry artists. I think that this comes from your comic's focus on sometimes very disturbing and out-there fetishes and the fact that you don't update very often.

2. You haven't sufficiently proven that you can meet the goals promised.
You made the promise that, if your fans were to raise enough money, they would get "daily updates." That is a tall order even for someone who does simple, three-panel comics for a living. How could anyone expect you to meet that lofty promise when you normally only update once every 2-3 months?

If you are able to make one comic a day without your job, you should be able to make at least one comic a week WITH your job. And I really wish that you would.

So, in conclusion, the problem is that you just don't update frequently enough. If it's as easy as you make it sound by your promises, you should be able to deliver more frequent updates. By doing so, you will build up the trust of your fans / gain more fans, and thus have a larger donation pool. Please consider.

Some people in this fandom seem to have a lot of money to spend on "out-there" pron though. And I've seen artists whose work makes this comic seem tame by comparison.

Unless you know the exact number of hours someone works in a week, plus what gets eaten up by errands and other obligations on the weekend, you're making blind guesses at how much free time they actually have to draw. Provided they aren't dead tired by then. I've known people who gave up on their creative ambitions due to that weekly work grind wearing them down.

I'm not master artist, but I'd estimate that his pages could be completed in 6-8 hours. 2-3 hours in sketches, 2 or so in inking, and 2 or so in coloring. The colors are very simple and there is not a lot of detail shading or other time-consuming things like that. He basically has an inked sketch that he adds simple color to. I don't mean that dismissively, mind you; I think the style works great for this. But it really shouldn't take 3 months to complete unless your job literally keeps you working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, and if that is the case, you need a new job.

For the record, yes. Each page takes me about 8-10 hours; 2-3 hours for linework, 0 for inking (I just up the contrast of my pencil drawings, maybe spend 20 minutes doing cleanup if I need to), and 4-8 hours for colouring depending on the number of characters on the page and level of background detail. The colouring is very basic by design, and I try to use a restrictive palette, but most pages still require a minimum of 10 passes (most characters have 4 colours in their individual palettes but some are shared; Dranz's top, Ione's skin, and Balbaros's scalemail all use the same two shades of grey, plus Dranz's hair is also the darker shade and Balbaros's platemail is the lighter shade. as a result, I usually start colouring by putting in those two passes first as a groundwork.)

I do work 10 hour days, and my schedule affords me 4 hours of free time per evening. This is enough time to do two pages per week, and i tried to aim for that goal origionally but I found that after working hard all day I had so little energy left to continue working all night too that I couldn't keep it up. I also have lots of other projects that have crept up and taken over my time lately which is why there have been so few updates for the past year. 100% of my weekends are pre-booked for other things and I do not have time to work on the comic then.

The reason that I promised daily updates is because not having to work my job would let me swap the 10 hours I usually spend there towards the 10 hours it takes to make a page. And then after the fact that affords me the rest of the evening to rest and recharge and work on those other projects without so much guilt.

Lastly, I knew that my audience was too small for this to succeed. I wanted to accumulate a viewership of 10k followers before I tried any sort of lowly panhandling scheme. But the way things worked out was I had the perfect opportunity to test things out when my work contract was expiring. I figured it would be worth a shot to at least give it a try and see if demand was there, even though I went into it expecting it to fail (and my calculations prooved pretty acurate). It was a gamble, but a safe one, where I got to test demand for my product, willingness of readers to pay for it, and a chance to make a smooth transition into that workstyle on the off chance it actually succeeded. In the end my contract was renegotiated, all the money was refunded, and nothing of value was lost.

Furthermore there was no reason to 'keep the money to make more comics' because money doesn't buy comics, time does. without the time, the money is pointless, I don't have a use for it. But I did learn that a donation based route wouldn't work, and I developed three contingency plans to try for next time. So I'll be giving those a shot later on.



TL/DR: your estimates were right; it takes about that long to make a page, but work also takes up that much time that you sarcastically guessed. yeah, I should 'get a new job'... that's what I was trying to do.

Hm, I see how the numbers work, now. I did not mean to sound as wry as I came off; I really do respect you and your art and I would love to see more of this comic, but I can see how working 10 hour days would leave you dead.

I guess the best I can offer is well wishes, then. Hope things turn out to give you more free time that you have the energy to spend on the comics.