Hey so last year on my patreon I did behind the scene business posts that didn’t do well behind a pay wall so I’m posting them publicly now.
The first post was a break down of where my money comes from and my goals for the year. So I’m gonna go over that post from last year and talk about if I achieved those goals and then compare them to how I did in 2017.
Here’s my money break down for 2016:
Here is the break down for 2017:
Conventions
In 2016 most of my money came from selling at conventions. It was like 1/3 of my income because I go to so many of them and do my best to make them profitable. I do between 10-15 a year. But travel is very tiring so I’ve been trying to not be as reliant on cons. As you can see from the 2017 graph, I didn’t really succeed at that. It’s partly because on average my conventions were more profitable in 2017 compared to 2016 and it was also partly because my other goals didn’t work out so well. So for 2018, I still wanna push the other categories and make that pie piece smaller while still making more or the same.
Freelance
So freelance is maybe a misnomer for this category. This is really just money from companies. So for 2016 that is a guest comics for Harrow County, my Misfits of Avalon advance, and the Buffy the High School Years books I wrote. I was trying to grow that but it didn’t work out so well. One of the work for hire gigs I had got canceled part way through. But I did get a pitch picked up and contract signed in 2017, just the advance didn’t hit my bank account until this week. So next year that will be a bigger piece for sure. I might not have gotten it bigger in 2017 but I successful planted good seeds for 2018.
Ad Money/Comixology
These two categories are what I have the least control over.
Comixology, I’m honestly pretty happy with. I think they are doing a good job. It take me like a day to upload a new comic and then I can leave it be. So it’s a passive paycheck that doesn’t take much effort to put up. I once tried another comic reading on tablet system but I had to be the one to selection each panel. So it was too much effort for a system that isn’t as popular and makes less money. I ended up quitting that one.
It was nice to see growth there in 2017 because I didn’t do much other than just put up what is new. So I donno if my new store is successfully getting people from my site to them or if [Super]Natural Attraction being digital exclusive gave me more attention. But I got a few comics on the best selling submit section.
Ads have always been frustrating and been going downhill both in terms of quality and payout. Ads are down in 2017 compared to 2016 which I’m not surprised by. Sorcery 101 begin down and then Misfits of Avalon ending removed the two big draws to my website on a regular basis. So impression which are all ads care about are down. That combined with ads steady march downward made this not a good year for my ads. There isn’t much I can do about it.
Patreon/My Store
So both my patreon and my store were the two area’s I wanted to push more in 2017.
I had my big site redesign early last year. A big part of that was to try and get people to visit my store more. My store sales was tweeked a few times before 2017 in the hopes of getting more sales. There has been some success. But the new design gave me the biggest push sales wise. So that’s good.
Patreon is probably the biggest failure of 2017. I switched from charging people once a week to charging once a month in the hopes that would get more people to sign up for the patreon. But I just ended up making about 1/4 the money each month. And the higher level rewards, (like the level that included this original post) never ended up getting a bit. I also tried some streams where I would do sketch requests and while people backed at that level they never made requests and I had trouble getting motivated to do them. It was very frustrating and for 2018, I’m gonna just keep it simple as in you can read certain things early but nothing were I have to do more work there. Because I would like to work smarter not harder. And if I’m not someone suited to running a very active patreon successfully, I’d rather put that effort into something else.