Tag: business stuff

I originally posted this on Blusky in response to Marie Enger asking about how artists did sales wise at Emerald City. Then my pal Nero asked that I repost it as a blog post so it is easier for creators to link around. Since I don’t like social media much, I’m happy to obligee.

Here’s what I do at conventions, with the preface that these are things that work for me – someone who doesn’t sell fanart and 90% of my table is books.

Banners

Most people have a single con banner with their name on it and that banner is usually 3 feet wide. Instead, I have two banners that have the name of comics I sell. One is for Sorcery 101 and one is for The City Between. This is because I’m not a big enough name for my name alone to be a draw. But the title of my comics pull people in and make them ask about that specific title. Or in the case of Sorcery 101 (which started in 2005 and ran for 12 years) ask why it sounds familiar.

I also made sure people can also read them from far away. Almost all cons use branding that is red, blue, or green. So the Sorcery 101 banner is orangey yellow to stand out The City Between banner is yellow up top for a similar reason. Both banners are 2 feet wide instead of 3, because the 2 foot banner fits in my checked luggage/suitcase. Here is a link to the specific banner.

Signage

My price tags are cards that go behind each book. I read a book titled Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. It explains that the average person looks at a sign for 30 seconds. So they won’t read a long price list. All mine say are “Title – $”. The exception is the few pins I have are on a card that says all pins are $15 or $10 with the connected book. Then the book title is next to the pin.

Upsell

I have discounts/deals but they are all about buying more books. The pins don’t get discounted with each other, but do with a book. I also have a tote bag with The City Between skyline that is $15 or free with purchase over $60.

Book Sales are Priority

Both tote bags I sold at Emerald City are connected to The City Between. So if someone likes or comments on the tote bag, I use it as a prompt to say “It’s connected to my comic series about queer werewolves in the future.” to get them to look at the books.

I also tell parents walking by (slowly, not ones in a rush) that the fairytale books are kid friendly if they are looking for something for their kid. I also have the kid friendly books separete from the stuff aimed at adults.

I also have elevator pitches for all my comics. It is one sentence so I’m not talking someones ear off/or explaining the book until the person buys something or leaves. I want them to know what it is about but still have time to think/browse on their own.

These elevator pitches are also easy to type up for a table helper to repeat if I’m away. Here are examples:

• Sorcery 101 is about an inept sorcerer learning magic from a grumpy vampire. I did it for 12 years and those two giant volumes are the whole thing.

This tells them the plot but also that it is a finished story (which is definitely part of a selling point for longer series).

For The City Between I say:

• It is about queer werewolves in the future. The books can be read in any order.

Then I have elevator pitches for the specific volumes.

I think refining elevator pitches are important for selling books because unless everything about the book is clear from the cover like Marie Enger’s Death to the Wizard Kings it might not be obvious to someone that they might like it.

To go back to The City Between, the cover of the Dead Deception gets the mystery/noir side across, but not the queer werewolf part. Lot of the ways to make it visually read as queerer would make it look like a romance, which is the wrong message for the series. So I’m letting the individual covers share the more book specific parts and verbally say the series is about queer werewolves is what works best. And it helps sell a book that can’t fit everything in a design.

Similarly while people like the cautionary fables books, a big selling point is there is on for every continent. And a lot of people get drawn to one cover but don’t immediately realize that they are labeled by region.

Why I Don’t Sell Certain Things

I mostly sell books because designing merch or designing prints is a different skill than making comics. I don’t particularly like designing merch and when I’ve tried I didn’t have much luck with it because it isn’t a skill I’ve worked on developing. I also don’t particularly like buying merch, so I never really know if a design is something that is gonna make someone really into pins buy a pin or what makes stickers sell. So I’ve accepted that and focused on my strengths.

The main non-book thing at my table are the tote bags I’m selling. Those are both designed by Unicorn Empire. I commissioned them and explained The City Between. They knocked the design out of the park.

Also, I’m not the best at designing prints. So I don’t sell them. I table with Kory Bing at Emerald City Comic Con and she’s great at designing prints. She’s got cool dinosaur prints which people do mostly buy because they like dinosaurs, but if I tried to make a dino print it wouldn’t be half as good. And if we both designed a werewolf print, her’s would be more striking than mine.

Not in the blusky thread but bringing it up since some people would probably ask, I also don’t sell fanart because I think it is a trap. I’ve seen a lot of artists say they HAVE to sell fanart to make back their table and also that no one is interested in their original stuff. The elevator pitch part of selling books is the most helpful way to get people to buy your creator owned things. When you have mostly fanart or fanmerch, the recognition of the show/movie/game is doing the elevator pitch part. So you aren’t learning how to sell your stuff and are relying on the property to do the selling for you. Also, when someone buys a print or charm you made of Baldur’s Gate 3 or whatever, are they buying it because they like you or because they like Baldur’s Gate 3? It leads to a vicious cycle of being dependent on fanart to make back costs and never building up your own work. So while it was rough starting out, I’m now at a point where my book sales are making me about the same as some of the people only selling fanart at Emerald City (based on replies to Marie’s blusky thread).

Finally, I have a QR code for people to sign up for my newsletter because I fequentally forget to print flyers/cards and social media is very much in flux right now.

Anyway, that’s the run down of how I run my table at cons as a person who mostly just sells books.

I mentioned in my digital only kickstarter post that I’ve tried to experiment with Kickstarters when I can. Fame and Misfortune was one of them. After seeing webcomic after webcomic use kickstarter for finished collections, I wondered how making a comic that was print only for a year and then put online would work.

Then general/common logic of webcomics has been put it online for free and that will help build your fanbase and eventually sell collections. But in 2012, I needed a new book for cons and was busy redrawing Sorcery 101. Since I already had a fanbase from Sorcery 101, the plan was to have a comic that was print only for a year. Then when it was eventually going online, anyone who was impatient for updates could just buy the book. This was the same thought process for The Better to Find You With and for The Dead Deception which just finished getting kickstarted.

The Kickstarting part was mostly successful. The Better to Find You With was delayed because I hurt my hand. Some folks were definitely annoyed by that fact. So for The Dead Deception I did more of the book before launch than I did with Fame and Misfortune and The Better to Find You With. But overall, the trust and reliably I built with my other Kickstarters were enough to get these smaller books printed  and shipped.

But there were some long term effects that came up when I was posting those comics online. One of the easiest Patreon/Drip rewards to offer are early updates. I definitely think the book already being out is why that reward level didn’t do as well for me. A lot of my regular readers have already read the comic and new readers probably saw the pdf in the store and grabbed that rather than back my Drip.

The other downside is the comic is technically a rerun of sorts when it starts going online. If that’s the only thing going up on my website, then a decent amount of my readers got out of the habit of checking my site regularly. That means they are missing announcements and blog posts.

I’ll probably keep releasing The City Between as print first. But I think I’m just gonna try to get another comic off the ground this year. So I’m getting the best of both worlds.

When I wrote about my con prep and display, the focus of my display was books I’ve published. While they are still what I want to focus on books, I do want to branch out. Partly because it’s always good to have a variety of income sources. Also, books are heavy and they take time to draw. There is a limit to how much I can do in a year.

This is something I’ve struggled with over the years. It’s because I make comics by thinking, would I buy this story. That doesn’t work for me when it comes to merch, because I’m not really a person who buys a lot stuff. I buy books but not much in way of accessories or figures or prints. So to be honestly I have a hard time telling what other people will buy.

I knew I didn’t want to try to make t-shirts. I did that briefly in the earlier years of Sorcery 101. The thing people don’t warn you about when it comes to shirts is you think you are making and have to keep track of product. But really you are making 5-7 products because of all the sizes. I found the shirts to be a pain to keep track off.

So with my new push for merch, I started with making a totebag. This is because I can not only sell it but also use it as a bonus for people who buy a lot of books at my table. Sorcery 101 is a book that weighs 3 pounds. If someone is buying both volumes, they usually ask if I have a bag. So it’s both working as an upsell tool and a piece of merch.  

I wanted a design that someone would buy even if they don’t know what it is connected too. Sorcery 101 was ending but I knew I was gonna make more books for The City Between. Since it was a newer series, I doubt someone would want something that was too direct a reference. I sketched out something that got the general theme of the futuristic meeting the mystical. Here’s a look:

I still wasn’t completely happy with it. After getting stuck on how to improve it, I contacted Amber at Unicorn Empire. Unicorn Empire’s designs are always amazing. I hired them to design and print totebags for me. I sent over my original design and asked if that could do something like that but better. I also sent them Fame and Misfortune and The Better to Find You With, so they knew the general theme/tone/look for the series. After some back and forth I got these:

Next I started working on an enamel pin. They are very popular right now and fairly cheap to make. Again I wanted something that stands on its own. I came up with the werewolf expert idea because werewolf are both connected to my comics but are general enough that a nonreader could pick it up. I made a few designs that were the line art which you can see here:

Then I did some color variations after picking the one I liked best.

They are selling well, so I might do a few more enamel pin designs. A few people asked for a vampire expert one in particular. Like I said, they are cheapish to get made. However, since they are popular right now, there is a lot of competition. So I want to make the designs as strong as possible.

I’ve also been thinking of designing some mugs. But I’m not sure how to reliably ship them places. I’ll probably do some more digging into how to handle something that could break during shipping.

I’m an early Kickstarter adopter. I was the 3rd person to do a comic related kickstarter. While, using kickstarter for preorders has become pretty standard, in my 15 kickstarters I’ve tried to experiment a little. Like my Sorcery 101 books came out the usually kickstarter preorder system, but the City Between books funded books that aren’t done. My newest experiment was doing a kickstarter that is all digital.

There are a few digital only kickstarters in categories outside the comic section. Like it makes sense for a video game to be digital rewards only. But there haven’t been many digital comic kickstarters. There were some help me start my webcomic kickstarters like Lexy’s Cloud Factory. The closest to what I wanted to try was Fresh Romance, which is an anthology with big names attached. Even then they still sold some physical rewards like postcards.

When Kara Leopard and I started talking about [Super]Natural Attraction, we pitched it a few places first and didn’t get much a response. I suggested we try doing a kickstarter that was all digital. The goal would cover our page rates, some promo costs, hiring an editor, and kickstarter fees.

So how did it differ from other kickstarters I’ve done?

The big one is no shipping definitely made fulfillment a lot easier and cheaper. People don’t realize how pricey shipping can get. For Better to Find You With, shipping cost a little over $1700. Sorcery 101 vol 1, shipping cost 2700. And for volume 2, shipping cost 3600. So having no shipping definitely kept our goal small. Once we had everything done, I just had to send each backer a download link through their kickstarter messages.

Thing of rewards was harder. I couldn’t go to my standards of giant comic packs and original art. Sure, we could have made some postcards or pins but sending those out would defeat the point of the no shipping Kickstarter. Wallpapers was a easy one to think of as were Kara’s commissions. Whitney Cogar, our colorist, agreed to make a coloring tutorial and I put together a development PDF. Other comics have had success with cameos so I thought that would be a good fit too.

But promo became a lot harder. While, being fully digital cut down our expenses, people do like stuff. Having a digital only kickstarter didn’t generate as much autobuzz as my other kickstarters. Usually my kickstarters make ⅓ of their funding in the first 3 days, ⅓ in the middle, and ⅓ in the last 3 days. This kickstarter didn’t get that big immediate surge, I usually expect. I had to work harder to promote [Super]Natural Attraction. But that seemed like a fair trade off for not having to ship something. It turned out to be a good thing that we were only funding a 22 page chapter at a time. We probably wouldn’t have made goal if we had shot for 100 page book.

I’ve done two other digital only kickstarters. One didn’t have a video and was only up for a week. The other was a sequel to [Super]Natural Attraction. After the second [Super]Natural Attraction, I talked to Kara and we agreed that the pay out for [Super]Natural Attraction isn’t quite what we hoped. Mostly because making the video takes so much time. We are currently testing it out as a Patreon/Drip exclusive comic to see if works as a draw on those. I’m not against doing another digital only kickstarter, but I think I’ll only use it for small on shots. As an ongoing, I don’t think [Super]Natural Attraction is cut out to be funded this way.

Last year I did a blog post that compared my goals for 2017 to what I actually achieved. It’s a good way to kick off the year and get back into the groove of writing these business behind the scenes. So to start with let’s look at where the money came from in 2017 compared to 2018.

Here’s 2017 graph telling me where the money is coming from.

And here’s 2018.

Conventions

Conventions are still a big part of my income. Like I said last year, they wear me out a lot because of travel.  I went into 2018 with the goal to make the same amount at cons total but have it be a smaller piece of the pie. Sales at cons are up and the pie piece is a little smaller but not as small as I’d like. So at least for the foreseeable future I’m still gonna be going to a lot of conventions. My plan for 2019 right now is to set my own hours. Part of why cons take so much out of me is the hours keep getting longer and longer. Having to be on from 10-8 is rough. Then add being at the table early for set up before the show opens means I’m working usually 11 hours straight at conventions. From now on, the show starts at noon for me. I can be better rested, well fed, and can maybe go running before the show.

Freelance/publisher payments

So this category is basically covering all the money I got from publishers/companies this year. It includes some freelance editing I did for Iron Circus Comics, my advance for Jose Pimenta and I’s Know Not What We May Be, my advance for The Stone King, a work for hire writing gig, and some odds and ends. I predicted this piece would be bigger in 2018 and I was right. I want to keep growing this section. I’m doing more editing for Iron Circus Comics already. That combined with royalties from Iron Circus reprinting Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales means it will at least have somethings coming it. I got a few pitches out the door too. So fingers crossed that this will keep getting bigger.

Ad Money/Comixology

I have the least control of either of these categories. Both are down in 2018. I think ComiXology is down because I didn’t put any new self-published stuff up there this year. All my self published stuff got delayed. So I’m only just now adding new titles to my comixology store. Hopefully, my comixology sales will go up now that The Stone King is out.

Ads on the other hand are still heading downward. I’m at this point just hoping my Drip picks up so I can ditch ads all at once.

Patreon/Drip/My Store

My new store seems to be working well. Even though site sales are a small piece of the pie, they did go up a significant amount. This is especially good because, well, I forgot to update it for roughly a year. This year I’m gonna try to keep it up to date and hope that lets it continue to grow.

As for Patreon/Drip. That went down. A lot of the things I tried to get newer patreons didn’t really work. Switching to Drip gave me an end of the year boost. But that founding period was a one time boost. I can’t do it again in 2019. I’m trying to think of new ideas to get people over there. The big one is I’m considering making my newest comic be Drip exclusive. But right now it would be hard to navigate a comic on Drip or Patreon.