Recently I've been doing some further thinking about business plan stuff, specifically the golden question of "How Do I Make Money From This?". It's a good plan to diversify as much as you can, as that way you have alternatives available if a given source of income dries up.
To break it down, my current revenue streams are:
- Comics - Decent sales when there's a new issue out in print, but tails off pretty quickly in between.
- Freelance illustration - Pleasantly remunerative when it's available, but not a steady source of income until I've built up lots more contacts who want to procure my services on a regular basis.
- Character sketches - Popular when I've done them at the FLGS, and hopefully this will continue when I start offering them on the site.
- T-shirts and related paraphernalia - Somewhat time-intensive in terms of coming up with polished designs, and a bit of a gamble when it comes to success or failure. Also not hugely lucrative at present - I don't have the funds (or audience) to sink a bunch of cash into inventory that may or may not sell, and print-on-demand gives pretty minimal per-unit profits.
- Advertising space on the site - Negligible at present. Need more site traffic.
Apparently one of the keys to this "making money from art" thing is to get paid as many times as possible for each piece I create. Comics are stupendously time-intensive, but once they're drawn I can print and sell as many copies as people will buy. Likewise t-shirts, posters, that kind of thing - and a design that's good for a t-shirt can also be good for a mug. All these things are slightly impersonal, however, and could be said to lack the artist's touch - and that's a good part of the appeal of buying from an independent creator.
Sketch commissions do have the artist's touch and aren't as time-intensive as making an entire comic or coming up with a refined t-shirt design, but are more of a one-shot deal in terms of revenue - I still only get paid once for each sketch. More elaborate paintings likewise - even more time-consuming, still only get paid once unless I decide to sell prints as well as the original. This could be considered an argument for charging more for my work - if I'm only getting paid for it once, I should make sure I get paid properly.
Ideally, though, I'd be able to create something once and get paid for it multiple times. Something that has that hand-crafted feel, but which doesn't eat up all of my time to produce new instances of it. Something like... printing. Not the copy-shop variety, the art-and-craft variety.
I listen to the Art & Story podcast a lot, and among other things they do a fair bit of printmaking - mainly silkscreen, I think - which gives their stuff a much more personal touch. Bookmarks, minicomic covers, posters, that sort of thing. Designing the original stencil takes time, but once that's done you can, with relative ease, make as many copies as you like before the screen wears out. Now, silkscreening is a bit too costly for me in terms of space and equipment required, but I've been mulling over an alternative:
Lino printing.
Investigating further, it seems kind of ideal. Not a huge space investment, setup and materials aren't too expensive, and the high-contrast style I use for my comic would translate pretty well to this printing technique. And I really like the look of the end result, too - kind of reminiscent of old-fashioned woodcuts (unsurprisingly).
It's also pretty flexible - you can get different effects by varying the combinations of ink and paper colour (dark ink on light paper, light ink on dark paper), you can even do stuff like painting in extra colours by hand to make each print more unique, if you feel like it.
I shall investigate further. And let you know how it turns out.
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