Fri, 01 Mar 2024

Progress has been... mixed.

On the plus side, I've gotten some designs into the shop. On the minus side, sales are still mostly nonexistent.

Granted some of these have been Ko-fi/Patreon rewards, but sales on these are all exactly zero so far.

I've been procrastinating on the email newsletter because Obi-Wan, you're my only hope. And I can't help but think I'm going to send it out and the only response is going to be all the unsubscribes. Social media is absolutely yelling into a void: Instagram very excitedly told me that a recent picture got 50% more views than I have been getting lately: 66 views! Now that does contradict what the dashboard has been telling me about my traffic, but even assuming the dashboard numbers are real, they're still about a tenth of what I used to get. This matches what I've been hearing from other artists - our reach has been absolutely crushed.

The way most designers get around this is sock puppet accounts - either themselves, their testers, or Fiverr - who post "look at the designs I made from this designer, here are some professional-level photographs that I'm totally not being paid to post." And I won't do that. But it's a rare occasion when anyone "organically" acknowledges making anything from my designs at all, much less brags about it in a Facebook group. (I can tell when you do, because I see a huge spike in website or Ko-Fi traffic. It's very appreciated, though I can't tell who you are or where you posted beyond "Facebook.")

Anyway, enough negativity. I'm very excited about the upcoming design reward, dropping next week already, and I think people will subscribe or buy the design if I can just get it in front of the right ones. Here's my March plan: soon as the rewards drop, I'm putting the pictures of the Feb/March rewards in a newsletter, and the physical versions in the shop, and a newsletter signup on the page, and a share link, and crossing my fingers.