Q: "Will this project be available for free in the future?” A: No, it's a pay-exclusive comic. A lot of text below explains why.
A response to questions and critique.
CATastrophe is created by a group of artists and creatives under the new (ironic?) brand Greedy Bastards(tm)
This FAQ is here to do two things: 1. Answer what Greedy Bastards(tm)'s business philosophy is. 2. Gather some information and responses which may be useful for artists, sponsors, casual viewers, haters and art thieves.
Since a couple of the share sites have started making a habit of sending people to ask the same questions about our business models and stir up trouble, we've collected the questions and slander in one place to save our poor English translator from wasting their time responding in her politically neutral way.
If people have their forum threads to gripe and wring their hands, scheming about the best way to mess with our business, then this is basically our response. The silver lining is that maybe people will see our thoughts on the art theft and internet bullying and cool off a little about trying to fight us over our modest gay romance story, and maybe other artists will share a bit of camaraderie!
Heck, if you're an artist struggling with similar problems, you're more than welcome to share our thoughts or direct people to this. In fact, if you're having problems with art theft, we DO happen to have a secure distribution service that identifies art thieves and protects your content! Maybe drop us a line!
PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS UNTIL THE END, OR UNDER COMMENT HEADINGS: UNCIVIL RESPONSES HERE WILL BE DELETED FOR CLARITY! THIS ISN'T THE PLACE FOR FIGHTING, THESE ARE OUR VIEWS AND OPINIONS.
Q: “Considering that you've said that you'll probably work on this thing for another year at the minimum, will the entire thing cost $500 to buy?!” AKA: No one wants to pay a fortune, right?
For the highest level of patreon rewards, this may be close to the truth. But for the “comic book” qualities, it's significantly lower. Of course, we make 4k quality pages for those who want them!
The caveat here for our business model is we promised our backers to never raise the prices for them, and since then our project has exploded into huge production numbers a month (our supporters are amazing <3 ). When we were making 5-10 pages a month, $3 was pretty reasonable for that, now we're making 18-30 pages a month, new supporters are asked to pay $6 but get that quicker rate of pages for earlier months too so you practically get double the pages for double the price. People who jumped on the project earlier, in the first 3 years of the project, are still paying the lower prices as thanks for sticking with us when it was for less pages.
What about our “Early birds” up to this point? At this point the most up-to-date patrons have hit 530+ pages in the May 2019 releases (which is about 2000 full character pics!)
Early Birds with access to 05.2019 spent: 1000 pixel version - $99 (18c a page) 1920 pixel version - $165 4K version - $330
Of course, other people have put in an extra $5 to get 1-2 pin-ups a month, raffles (before thieves complaining on Patreon shut them down), previews etc.
People who came to us after 08.2018, by the time their subscriptions reach 05.2019, will spend: 1000 pixel version - $156 1920 pixel version - $234 4K version - $364
Remember, this is the total over 3+ years of payments. For newer members this is $6-14 a month: maybe a couple of coffees a month? We're not blind that this might be out of someone's budget: but it's a balance we have to maintain and it's not right for everybody.
a.1> Why is the comic so expensive? Q: “Considering that you've said that you'll probably work on
Q: “Why are there two sets of prices? Why do I have to pay $6 for something worth $3?”
The project began at a rate of 5 panels per month but, with the growth of funding, we've reached 25+ panels a month! (All our funds go to more pages!)
After 8 months of stable 25 panels a month, and after another case of art theft, we assessed the situation and thought: if we increased the amount of content 5 times over... why don't we raise the price to double?
As we've mentioned elsewhere, we ALSO promised to keep rates fixed for current supporters*. So at this point we split the payments into the older “Early Bird” rates: if a person doesn't leave us for longer than 3 months, he can renew the subscription at the old price in this and the next project. *There is an asterisk here – in case payment systems break down and we lose a higher percentage of the pledges to a new payment plan.
So, the price has changed from 08.2019 $3 to $6 $5 to $9 $10 to $14
Thus, people paying for all the content so far would pay a different amount for the whole project: $99 to $156 $165 to $234 $330 to $364? <- a pretty minimal difference at this point?
Mathematically, you probably noticed that these prices aren't close to double, that's because we also went back and adjusted how many pages you get in the early releases of the comic to! :)
For old sponsors, $3/$5/$10 is still for "as much as we can create in a month" - the number has increased from 5 to 30 panels per month.
If funding falls, we create less. If funding grows, we create as many as we physically can. The physical limit is about 30 panels now, but we will be able to create even more with the availability of more funding.
Our older sponsors received more and more new pages for the same price over several years. Of course, growth will be the same for newer sponsors but the conditions for sponsors "after 08.2018" are slightly different. We promised "25 panels a month, or more." and most of our first years of the project is slower than this by far. Essentially, new supporters pay up to twice as much, but get the earlier content at TWICE the pace. Actually, a $6 new supporter pays exactly the same for the first two years of content that $3 Early Birds did, $9 supporters get a 10% discount compared to $5 supporters and $14 sponsors pay 30% less than older $10 supporters.
Of course, our more recent releases come at the same pace, so $3 early birds will get 25+ panels in May 2019 for $3 and $6 newer supporters will get them for the new price: things balance out and the $6 rate is fairer for the number of pages.
Of course, new supporters and old contribute to our pace. If we didn't have newer supporters we wouldn't be able to make so many pages a month – again, virtually all the money goes towards funding the comic (a little to server costs and a larger percentage to payment processing fees).
These pages might not be seen immediately by newer people waiting to catch up: but they only exist because of the funding, paying for back issues as a newer supporter keeps the comic surviving just like the supporters seeing the newest releases that month. :D
The most important thing to know about being a newer sponsor is that if you decide to come to our next projects, when we complete this one, you'll get the “early bird” prices that others benefit from here over on new projects!
And as for people who aren't sponsors of this project? It's very unlikely that we'll even open new projects to them at all: which means you'll have to have purchased CATastrophe to see what we work on next! (and you wouldn't be an Early Bird either!)
a.2> Why the price increase at 08.2018? Q: “Why are there two sets of prices? Why do I have to pay
Q: “Artists share their back catalog all the time on Patreon. Why do you force people to buy the comic in order? Why a time wall?”
We've pretty openly fought back against art theft as our comic fluctuates in popularity enough to merit us interest on the sharing sites, and as such we use digital security techniques such as DRM to catch art thieves by identifying the accounts distributing pages. Digital security against art thieves is punitive, not preventative (meaning we can punish someone we catch by kicking them out, we can't stop someone breaking the rules).
This is the core problem that adjusts how we run our business: after all, if we let people have access to the whole comic in a month or two's purchase it's very easy to steal and distribute without any consequences if you get kicked out. And it's not too hard to make a new account and come back later so it's not really losing much for an art thief.
Our area of focus is on making being a long-term sponsor the most appealing, which means not making it easy to get our back catalog for just a month's payment – it's not fair to the supporters that someone could come later and buy it all for a single month's support and it doesn't stop thievery.
This is where the Greedy Bastard(tm) business model comes in. Our serial purchases are designed to make it easy for a supporter to pay when they can to get the next part of the content and to make it as costly and difficult as possible for an art thief to come back from a block and get to the new content for theft. Maybe it doesn't communicate to an art thief the parallel of years of our work getting stolen and our business threatened over greed... but it is something.
New supporters get the first 12 months of the comic for a single month's purchase (105 pages!) and then you'll see 25+ panels every additional month, like a serial release of a physical magazine you get issue #2, then #3 and so on. If you can't buy the next section the next month, we know where your account was up to and, when you can pay, you'll get the next section you haven't seen (unless you leave for 3+ months without warning). The serial releases or “train cars” analogy is similar to a “blockchain”. Losing your place in the “line” by missing payments is a little fairer too, since unreliable support can make it hard for us to plan our work in a month too...
Of course, if people are expecting this model of getting a back catalog it'd be disappointing not to get all 550 pages of our comic for $6... but if you think of it like serial comics then it's not as bad that you can't get 4 years of our work for a single purchase considering the work put in and the security issues there from every angle.
Time has been our ally here. Our reason for the delays and not letting people buy too far ahead right away is all to discourage thieves: after all, if you steal the comic and get kicked out, even if you jump in right away with a new account you'll be months and months behind and having to pay for all the content you've already seen while also waiting all those months – this is the major deterrent of our business model: honest supporters wont have to worry as much, but with our DRM security thieves will be caught and kicked out. People can buy 10 releases right away, up to January of 2018.
a.3> Why make a serial comic? Q: “Artists share their back catalog all the time on Patreon. Why do
Of course, we're not blind to the fact that our newer sponsors and fans may not have heard of us back when we started the comic. There is some disappointment that some supporters have seen page 200 when you start on 105, but remember that when our early-access supporters joined, page 200 didn't exist for them yet either, and with the pace of the comic increasing with support, it would have taken way longer for them than it will you.
The disappointment is something we totally understand, but it's also our major way to deter thieves, which keeps our project secure from people dropping support hoping for a leak (we had a major leak cause a 15% loss in supporters, which also caused a 15% drop in panels per month for everyone who stayed).
The thieves returning and paying again does go to new pages that honest supporters will see first at least! And they'll always be stuck behind our Early Bird supporters :)
Obviously there's another soft filter in this time delay, if someone is really disappointed in the content doesn't match their expectations (like not reading the description about the amount of adult content) and decides to leave after a few months, they can't share all our content in revenge.
And yes, we're not blind to the people talking about waiting until the end of the comic and sharing it then (which is pretty demoralizing to read...) but this is why our NEXT project will only be available to people who have supported CATastrophe first. We have serious doubts that someone dedicated enough to wait out 5 years of purchases to steal this comic would want to do it all over again to get to the next project, it's definitely not worth the 5 minutes of fame on an art sharing site for sharing our gay romance story...
Basically, we're cultivating a trustworthy and amazing group of supporters this way, and while being late to the game sucks and it'll take some time to see everything (we do let people buy ahead a pretty significant amount, and extra every year!), it's hopefully easy for people to understand that not granting quick access is exactly why our project isn't plagued by thefts destroying the momentum our amazing supporters pay for.
As a reminder too, this DRM technology, and our distribution server, is also open to artists wanting to share their own content privately in serial releases – we have the framework in place to track who is owed what and when – so if you feel like this is right for your project too, why don't you drop us a message to discuss how to join our server as a client and share your own content securely! We're actually looking to add more catchy art projects to our virtual store (comics or just other pictures) as a beta test for a larger more public opening once we work out all the moving parts there! (Limited slots for now).
Of course, we're not blind to the fact that our newer sponsors and fans may not have heard of us bac
Q: “For the same amount of money I could go to the movies or get a Netflix subscription or anything! 25 comic pages for the same price is unfair and greedy!” AKA: Why would I pay this much for furry content?
The likes of Disney have millions of viewers and their content is designed to appeal to a mass market. To be crude, Disney is never going to make adult content... a million people paying $1 is a million dollars – there's certainly no way we can compete with that, but our team still has to put a value on our work and time. If Disney needed to make a two million dollar cartoon, but only had a million viewers, would they plan for them all to watch twice, ask them to pay $2, or give up on the plan? This is the “niche” mentality: we have to consider other ways to make the money we need for the project, than just a mass market.
How many English speaking people are furry fans? Maybe a million or so? Of those, how many of them would be into m+m content? 160,000? Of these people, how many can afford to support a paid site, don't hate Patreon and have a Paypal? 15,000? Less? Of these people, how many are looking for a plot-heavy romance story with only 10% adult content? A thousand? More? Less?
With every step into a niche our audience goes down an order of magnitude. You may have heard artists talk about how only 1-2% of their watchers are potential art clients? That's similar for paid sites.
Of course, this is the niche we're most comfortable in, we don't want to make mindless porn. Sure, it has its place, but we're not making a porno and that means we can't attract attention with consequence-free flashy porn content. Not everyone likes to read! But, we also know that we're cutting our potential customers by 80-90%.
The argument that we've not reached the pinnacle of Disney or something as a furry company making a romance comic is pretty absurd. But considering our potential audience pool we already have 400+ supporters, that's pretty good!
The pros of having a small niche is that we only have our sponsors to answer to – we can have adult content where it makes sense to the story and bad language, even gay content (some of our team don't have the legal freedom to even draw this content). The drawback is that we have a small financial pool and losing sponsors means a larger percentage loss than a company who has millions of supporters can afford.
We have amazing sponsors... And on that note, let's also be honest: as a business, it's a little hard to accept some critique from people who comment on the free websites when people say things like “I'd never support anyone through Patreon... but here's how you should run your business” or “I hate paid sites on principle, but:”. We answer to our sponsors, we make promises like keeping $3 pledges even when we're making 5 times the content, but it'd be crazy to change our business plans for people who don't have any intention of ever supporting us.
We're doing pretty good getting funding for 25 pages a month, it might be a higher price per person than a huge company could afford to charge, but it's a pretty good rate!
a.4> The narrow niche of furry content. Q: “For the same amount of money I could go to the movies
a.5> Page price, quality, speed and number of pictures per month.
Q: "I know an artist who asks 10 times less for his work!" Aka: Why are your prices and speeds how they are?
If you're able to find an artist that does something you enjoy for less than us then great: maybe they're a better choice for you.
Every artist chooses their prices based on what they think is fair. You can't convince a car manufacturer to sell you a car for the price of a bike, and you can't convince them to make a bike out of car parts. We choose our prices on a number of factors, but the key ones are details, backgrounds, color, shading and pace, our art team needs to make 25+ backgrounds a month and draw, color and shade 50+ characters a month. We'd be tempted to ask how much the person who can do images for less money would charge for 25 two-character images a month, almost one a day... but, honestly, we picked our prices carefully with our own work load and our team wouldn't be able to work how we do for cheaper even if someone else could.
In truth, we had the option to lower our cost of living by moving to countries with a lower standard of living... but why would we make our lives harder just so someone else wouldn't have to pay quite so much? (I swear these are actual arguments we've heard when some of our artists moved to less... troublesome... countries and needed to increase their prices).
We'll also be honest... when we've asked where this “other artist” is who creates content similar to ours but for a cheaper, we've got an embarrassed silence, or links to artists who don't hold the same quality of art we do. And we don't want to draw worse for less money...
The problem is we often get told that because our prices don't match another artist, that is bad, but comparing only price without considering quality, time and circumstance is very unfair. Kind of like the argument that a bicycle is $50 for two wheels, so why not sell a car for $100, since it's only four wheels... there's a little more difference there than just number of wheels – it's a foolish comparison non-the-less, even if that's cruelly blunt to say.
It takes us around 6-12 hours to work on a page, which means 225 hours of work in a month, or 50+ hours a week? Yet our prices aren't too much higher than minimum wage for most large countries taking into account overtime.
All we ask is for sober and fair consideration for the work we put out.
a.5> Page price, quality, speed and number of pictures per month. Q: "I know an artist who asks 10
a.6> Other artists give their content away after a few months.
Q: "Other artists give everything away for free when a month or two passes. Why not post everything up for free after a month or two?”
If some artists think their work isn't worth selling after a certain period, that's their right, everyone evaluates their work themselves. We do the same, and that's a personal choice. When another artist chooses to give away their art doesn't have any bearing on when we do.
We don't believe the comic loses its value after a few months of making it, that's why we sell our comic as serial releases... and, I think, that's why people keep asking us for the comic. If it had no value, I don't think anyone would be asking for it.
Attracting viewers takes time, previews and exclusive content is how we do that. See also our previous point in a.4 where we explained why we put out the comic serially and don't share our entire back catalog in the first month on Patreon. The short answer is that our comic has value to it still, and that if thieves didn't have to re-buy every monthly issue of the comic when they are kicked out and re-join, we'd suffer thieves more often. We did compress the first 105 pages into a single payment, because the pace of the comic was especially slow to start and we wanted to be the fairest.
The one thing we can guarantee is that, with more supporters, your $3 or $6, or any other value you pay for this project, will be paying for more pages in time, and access to future projects exclusively available to people who supported this project! Every new supporter means each individual $ gets you more pages!
The one thing we always promise is that prices will never change if you stay a supporter.
There's a saying that flies consider road apples a delicacy, a million flies can't be wrong, can they? It might suit a lot of people better if we gave our content away for free... but that doesn't mean it's right to do or that a lot of artist's work doesn't retain its value over time.
a.6> Other artists give their content away after a few months. Q: "Other artists give everything aw
Q: “I'm confused about your format. Why are the pages this shape? What do you mean by “panels” what about the page numbers?”
Comics come in lots of formats, we recognize that this is sometimes a little confusing.
With the modern “screens” format a widescreen “visual novel” style seems easier to read than the A4 comic book page, especially on a phone. So no, the previews aren't 1-2 panels of some “full page format”. We're making the comic in this widescreen style.
The visual novel style also helps us meter out our work, if we formatted the comic in the traditional style 1-2 more or less panels would mess with the number of pages. Where as with this format if we hit funding for 26 panels, we can make an extra page, not a panel as part of a larger page. With every panel being approximately $100 to create, it's easier to pay back all that is owed in the visual novel style that allows for narrative story lines and beautiful detail... but maybe less dynamic panels than a traditional comic.
For reference, a “panel” is measured by a background and two characters in mostly full body. We consider things in this format where 25 panels basically means 50 characters over the number of pages we make – characters are the most complex part of the images and the largest cost for our team.
a.7> 1 page = 5-6 panels or 1 page = 1-2 panels? Q: “I'm confused about your format. Why are the pa
Some artists give away their art for free out of charity... for others, it's a forced decision.
Some say that publishing a page every week is the perfect advertisement amount to keep your art in the public eye, at least a page or two a month. With a 5-9 panel comic page, some artists can only make a couple of pages a month, especially at the start, and if the rules of advertising say that 2+ pages a month is the best way to spread the word of your comic publicly then at best they're sharing 50% of their art each month, if not everything they've made.
Considering our visual novel widescreen format, we can publish 4 pages a month and only be sharing 20% of our work, not 50+%. Our format is also pretty eye-catching in and of itself compared to the sometimes hard to preview traditional comic format, since we can show off so much detail in widescreen! :)
Being forced into this mindset is caused by a few bad practices and social pressures:
1) Trying to please EVERYONE. Yes, sometimes we have to give a little to get back as an artists... but people who start fights and plot greedily and demand more and more work for free aren't being fair – we work every day on our art and we ask people to fund its creation... people might want to see it all for free, but people will always PREFER everything for free...
2) A lot of artists are trying hard to build their brands and some have amazing art! As we talked about in a.4, romance comics aren't even the most popular comics compared to porn content! However, with this there's also a fallacy: being happy with making “more” than others. Put simply: we've created romance stories in the past before using our DRM protected paid site, and earned less. We've had projects earn 50% to 100% more after a few months of exclusivity compared to being shared for free. AND, an added bonus, our secure website has already earned a reputation for being unforgiving to thieves: new projects that have joined us have drawn attention more quickly and been more protected with people knowing we're willing to blacklist accounts on Patreon and block thief emails across all projects.
3) If it works, why change it? A lot of artists have pretty simple business strategies... but considering we work with quite a few projects and help them out with business advice from our own experiments with submission pacing etc, we've helped a lot of people increase their income. Maybe we don't make as much as some people do, but we've helped increase people's profits by 50%, and there's nothing to say that wouldn't work for these other businesses too, right? Every artist has the right to govern themselves and set their own prices and pace, but we can't help but wonder how much more some of these artists could earn with more business-minded and social psychology experience.
a.8> Depreciating art - what's the mistake? Some artists give away their art for free out of charit
Q: “$6 is too high an entry price for content. Many artists have a $1 tier, why can't you do that? More people would pay, so you'd make the money back.”
The math of our company is sometimes commented on pretty specifically by a few armchair financial advisors. The main question we get is why not reduce the low-resolution releases to $1 (a sixth of the current price!) because we'd get ten times the supporters, in theory.
So here's our take on this calculator diplomacy with our own: There's a minimum transfer fee on Patreon, that “processing percentage” that people rioted over on the supporter's end that Patreon was forced to go back on that added 30-50 cents onto a pledge? That's still there, especially for non-US clients, but it's on the creator's side. This consists of a percentage take, but also a minimum transfer fee, all of which round up. A $1 pledge nets us around 45-55 cents. So if we got 200 pledges for $1, we'd earn less than $100, which means we could make around one panel a month for them and half their money would go to Patreon, compared to getting $2.50 out of a $3 pledge, or not $5.50 out of a $6 pledge.
If we had 200 people paying $1.50, we'd make $200. But of those 200 people, how many might not be that respectful and only be joining with plans to share the project with others? 1 in every 100? 1 in every 50? We can't know for sure on every project, but we do know that the more people joining who aren't having to pay very much themselves for a large number of rewards, the more likely it is that someone would join for those rewards and decide that our polite request not to share the art isn't worth much either.
In our experience, $1 or $1.50 isn't enough to ask for RESPECT, and it attracts people who might sabotage the integrity of the project. And with the processing costs, we'd need to get 11 $1 payments for the content we're currently charging $6 for in order to break even: so we have to wonder how large our potential audience is if we need to get ten times the audience in our most popular donation tier.
If a theft disrupts the integrity of the project it ruins the exclusivity of the content for months... someone paying $1 could deal $300+ damage to the project if even less than 10% of people left thanks to thefts. Not to mention the argument that people would come to us through the art share sites: they now know they have to wait a year of payments before their investment shows them a new, un-stolen page, rather that the draw of support from month #1 being new, unseen content.
Going back to our other argument, our conclusions there, simply put, is this: $6/mo isn't that much to ask in the grand scheme of it being a coffee a week, or less. BUT, a higher price to purchase the comic is a huge deterrent to thieves, because when they get caught the first time, showing up again they're basically paying double for the same content and now it's $12 per 25 panels and so on.
The sad fact is that exclusivity pays. We've lost supporters to other exclusive artists when we get a leak. Yes, we also get people who join at $6 and say this comic isn't for them because of pace, or lack of porn content, or more gay content than they expected or anything else... but had more people doing that when we had a $1 option on projects because it was easy to pledge $1 and not even consider if you'd like it.
Why do we cultivate a group of loyal, amazing supporters in our exclusive content? Because it works out for EVERYONE.
Yes, $6 is more than other projects, but our fans are amazing and they also know we're working hard to honor every $ with content. Every $ a month goes to make new pages, and currently they get 25 panels a month, at least. If we had another leak that caused a 15% loss in funding, that'd be 15% less panels a month for everyone who stayed and then how many people would decide $6 is too much for 21 panels?
a.9> Why don't you have a $1 option? Q: “$6 is too high an entry price for content. Many artists ha
If we reduced our tier prices by half, there'd be half as many panels a month for everyone who stayed. We aren't confident that half the price will mean more than double the supporters, and our experiments with $1 tier options before only meant more leaks, less money, less considerate sponsors, threats to the integrity of the project, and no growth in supporters or financing over time: it killed projects we tried it on.
Back to our calculator diplomacy, here's something we learned through a project: On a project we had a $1 option that 200 people took, but of these 200 people we identified 10 people who were sharing the art elsewhere and that was causing fast turn-over of supporters with a few newcomers, but many people leaving each month.
We made the decision to increase the lowest tier to $3 in that project... and 120 people left. We were down $120, BUT, quite a few of the art thieves left too and a few people who were making a lot of demands that we made the story more like what they expected after not reading the promo material.
But, of those 80 people who remained in the $3 category? Well, they were still paying $200 total, the same amount as the 200 $1 pledges. But, because we actually got $2.50 from every pledge, we actually made about $80-$100 profit, so we were able to make more pages for them than before AND we had a more considerate audience AND we made it more of a hurdle for thieves.
In projects, here's the odds we've collected. A $1 minimum netted us 50% of the income after fees, but also about 15-20% problem clients. A $3 minimum netted us 83% of the income, and about 5% problem clients. We even tried a $5 minimum, and we got to keep 90% of the pledges to pay for pages AND 1% of supporters were problematic.
You'd think that people paying $5 would demand better service and more rewards... but honestly, we had more disruptive people demanding $100 service in the $1 tier. Not to say that $1 supporters are the rowdy bar equivalent of restaurant tiers... but it turned out it's actually not a bad analogy?
Yes there's also people who legitimately can't afford our prices that get lost in that hurdle too, and that really does suck... but we also found a lot more wolves among that flock. If $6 is a 99% barrier on disruptive supporters only joining to steal from us, then it's a business choice that protects the amount of content we can make for everyone.
Sad to say, but considering some of the confrontations we had with $1 supporters demanding more, and the conflicts and attacks we get from sharing sites that demand the art for free, we've found that the higher barrier to entry of putting ourselves as a premium service with premium prices has made our day-to-day a lot easier than the conflicts. 400 people who value our work are better than 2,000 sponsors, with 3-400 who don't respect us and are there to upset the apple cart and terrorize the artists. We can make more content for good people and we love how that is working out for us.
That's part of the irony of our fictional company name. If being Greedy Bastards(tm) keeps the people's angry voices outside our community, and on their own venomous forums, then it sort of works out for us that doing something that makes financial sense for us also makes emotional sense when we have such a respectful and amazingly supportive group of patrons.
If we reduced our tier prices by half, there'd be half as many panels a month for everyone who staye
In case you've not noticed the sarcastic joke here: it's easier for the share site community to call us Greedy Bastards(tm) than to think for a minute about how much they're demanding, for free, and how much trouble they're causing to try and break us down and force us to give them everything we made with someone else's money (for free) – and realize that that's actually a pretty greedy attitude! Even if some people have a weird rebellious philosophy about not being forced to “pay for art”, it's still people demanding our humble little gay romance story free of charge... what would poor Milo think about such greedy actions :O
Simply put, having prices at all is a hurdle some people willing to cause drama won't jump, with our current prices, our DRM protected server, the serial releases AND needing to support our current project to ever get access to any new ones? Well, some people might call our business sense greed, but also our community is the most supportive, respectful and trustworthy from behind all those walls, compared to slumming it through the virus-laden black markets of the internet where people are legitimately trying to plan to “take down” our little virtual comic book store...
They seem to also want us to keep making the content AFTER they destroy the Patreon pool of supporters: the only people who're paying for the content to be made. I don't think they understand that if we got paid $0 a month, we'd make 0 pages... we need to make a living too, but maybe that's just because we're Greedy Bastards(tm)?
Most importantly, they're DEAD WRONG about us being greedy.
If we didn't care about quality we wouldn't make widescreen fully-rendered, shaded backgrounds every panel. We wouldn't pay someone to shade it. We'd hire "worse" artists who could make more images, quicker. If we only cared about money, we'd do all that and still charge around $100-ish a page. If we get a million dollars? We'll make a thousand pages a month (or we'd try?!). If we get around a hundred-ish dollars? We'd make a single page a month.
Every dollar (after patreon's payment processing and Paypals payout rates take their cuts) goes to the 8-9 average hours a month EACH page costs to make, we don't make a profit, we just make more or less pages depending on funding. They fundamentally confuse wanting to spread the word, make more pages and make it so every patron's $6/mo gets them more pages and is more appealing to the people PAYING for this comic with "greed". More payments mean more work hours on a project we love and more pages for your dollar for each individual patron, why wouldn't we want that?
a.10> Why “Greedy Bastards(tm)”? In case you've not noticed the sarcastic joke here: it's easier fo
The next part of our discussion is more aimed at the art theft “community” and their damaging and selfish philosophies. This is the part where we devolve into a rant as much as a defense, but we're sure some people might understand why that's the case...
Art Thieves The next part of our discussion is more aimed at the art theft “community” and their da
So, what kind of people are we talking about here? Firstly we want to identify some of the typical attack vectors of the less constructive and more demanding critics, not an exhaustive list but these actions include:
- Trying to manipulate artists into giving up something they want money for without really any arguments outside of the convenience of not to have to pay anything themselves.
- A stream of accusations based on someone else's disagreement – a frenzying mentality following a chain of one person disagreeing, then the next person seeing their side and exploding about the situation until it's an entirely one-sided argument: without any attempt to work out what the original disagreement was, or the other side of the discussion.
The problem with this is the rage without any actual context. If the truth of the situation comes up it's ignored for someone else's outrage at the imaginary situation... but, at the same time, we're supposed to respect their opinion and outrage despite them not having earned our respect and their outrage being based on a misunderstanding? Respect is earned, a first interaction of trolling us and snickering that most of our team speak English as a second language isn't going to lend weight to your arguments.
- Strange crowd mentalities. This goes back to the catastrophizing comment, but is extra strange when it's a den of people whipped into a frenzy of hoping to get their hands on some gay furry comics out of spite... but also thinking furries are a joke in the next thread over, laughing at how stupid the content is? Why demand something you don't even want? Just on principle? Come on, guys...
- The “magic dollar” argument. There's some very disproportionate arguments out there where comics that cost 15-25 cents a page are disproportionately expensive. Yes, sometimes money is tight but, like the website Ko-Fi was set up for, a couple of dollars a week is a “coffee's worth” in the public eye, but some people treat the same amount as a year's salary when it comes to artists? This can extend to furry critique, the number of people who say we value a 2 character, background and shaded page too much, but would pay the exact same if it was their own character is... baffling.
- The people who don't want to mature and understand that business models can be different, and instead want to turn everything into a verbal sparring match and drag everything down to their level.
- The straight up racist or imperial comments about how people from other countries are “worse” for not having a perfect grasp of English, or should accept abuse or a lower standard of pay because the commentor's country is “better” than the artists: like where ever you were born is a better reflection on your social standing than your learning, earnings, skills or attitude.
- The “not me, us” arguments: ironically, this doesn't apply to their community when they talk about themselves, that's about personal glory, but it applies to anything someone says back about them. Disagreeing with a furry doesn't mean we hate all furries, getting into an argument with an American doesn't mean we hate America. It's a lot easier to stoke the fires of outrage by taking a personal insult and pointing it at the whole crowd... but it's sadly more of a reflection on the fact that these people are so closed off that they think their opinion speaks for everyone, and they can't possibly be wrong, so a person disagreeing with them must hate their whole social/cultural identity.
The sad thing is, there's so much of these fallacies out there that they can't even see when their arguments are total nonsense... It's smarter to check the truth of a situation from two points of view, just like depth perception is based on seeing something from two angles, it can clear things up so easily.
b.1> Kings of the trash fire. So, what kind of people are we talking about here? Firstly we want to
So, what motivates someone to steal someone else's work? - Not having the money for it? - The need to get a moment of glory, since they can't get notoriety through anything creative themselves – why not get a moment of fame by stealing? - Envy. Being the king of a trash fire doesn't really earn anything, so it's pretty easy to hate and envy everyone else who spent their energy and talents making a livelihood.
Of course, you'll probably notice we don't do anything besides punish these last two by making it harder to mess with our business or take advantage of us... It's amazing how many people have puzzled over our “greedy” motives for increasing our prices or reducing free pages when we have journals honestly stating that if we have art thefts we'll reduce free pages to protect the exclusivity factor that sells the comic, or we'll increase prices to prevent easy thefts. Every $ goes towards making more pages for the people paying for them, we don't make a profit the more supporters we have, we just make more pages. We also can't turn 10,000 supporters on free galleries paying $0 into ANY pages, so you can see how our attention has to be turned to our paying supporters.
This is our response to greed, envy, rage and trying to ride someone else's creative project for a few minutes as king of the trash heap: making sure those people aren't part of our community – and it's really all they deserve... Yet the question as to why their actions would have consequences is impenetrable to them...
There's the few people who think they're Robbin Hood, outwitting some great injustice for “the people”. But since we've made it clear that our business only exists because we make a page for about every $100-ish we get from supporters, it comes back to cause and effect: if our business gets disrupted, we'll spiral into making less pages, because we'll be making less money if people leave to get it for free, and our project will be worth less because we're making less pages for a fixed price per person, and more people will leave, and we'll stop making the project and do something else. OR, we defend ourselves.
Defending ourselves means we're enraging the trolls and frustrating the free gallery critics who wonder why our prices are the way they are, why we give less and less away for free, why we don't listen to armchair financial advice from people who say they don't have the personal financial security to afford $1.40 a week towards a comic project or wont support a project on Patreon “on principle”... But sitting back and letting people steal from us means less pages, less supporters, and essentially NO COMIC. But, apparently, it's “noble” to undermine Patreon funded projects: because they'd rather no one made anything instead of anyone daring to need money for it. Art isn't free: because food isn't free. Go ask an artist how much time it'd take to draw 50 characters and 25 backgrounds every month and then ask if they'd do it for free, go on, we'll wait for the laughs to die down.
b.2> The thief mentality. So, what motivates someone to steal someone else's work? - Not having th
The sad, pathetic fact is that a lot of these people think they're entitled to something for free because they are worth entertaining for free. Who's the greedy one there?
Of course it's always buried under some philosophy: - If an artist draws pin-ups of other people's characters, well, they just did fan art, I'm not paying for that. - If an artist draws their own characters, well, what are they charging? If it's too expensive, well, it serves them right to steal it. - If an artist has low prices and draws their own characters? Well, they don't value themselves very much, they're practically giving it away for free anyway, they won't miss one payment.
There's always an excuse, even if it comes down to just wanting fame... well, let's face it, thieves don't really love or trust other thieves either, right? If someone is giving away someone else's art? Well, no big deal, right? I mean, it didn't cost them the time or money it cost the artist and they don't respect THAT level of investment anyway: at that point if he didn't share it he'd just be another greedy asshole. Following that logic: keeping anything for yourself is greedy, sharing everything without expecting anything in return should be the status quo, anything you make is worth nothing... and everything?
The moment you turn one of their fallacies back on them, their arguments evaporate: if you can justify any reason not to care about someone else, you are justifying the exact same reasoning to be used against yourself. And yet they wonder why we don't fold under a barrage of “noble” philosophies? What we say is this: your philosophy is one of disrespecting and disagreeing with people on principle – we'll just disregard and disagree with that, thanks.
The sad, pathetic fact is that a lot of these people think they're entitled to something for free be
c.1> “No one wants to pay what you're asking! Your comic is crap for the price, there's hardly any fucking!”
We'd also not want to buy a game for $60 if we're not sure if we'd like it. Maybe we'll look for a free demo and decide for ourselves first (or just look on youtube or twitch these days!) But here's the difference – even if that free demo or borrowing the game from a friend wasn't totally “legal” we're not ALSO going to go on the internet and call the whole project dumb or boycot the page on Steam or threaten the creators to give the game away for free even AFTER we didn't even need to pay to try it: haven't you ever heard of “beggars can't be choosers”? If it didn't even cost you any money, why are you so mad?
If it was a broken game and we felt tricked after paying full price? Well, sure, then we'd probably write a bad review and have harsh words to say...
But is anyone really confused by the content of our comic? There's 100 pages, sequentially, on our free galleries. Then every 4th or so page as a demo. 500 pages in, if it was going to turn into a massive orgy it probably would have happened by now: we've been pretty clear about the romance and drama aspect of the story being the focus with how many pages are NOT porn. We're not making a porno wrong, we're making a romance story, and if 400+ people weren't paying us every month for the content we're making, and enjoying it, we wouldn't be making it.
We have a warning on every promo page not to expect porn, we have the description on our Patreon page and ask people to read and understand what they're buying before they do... there's really nothing else we can do when 20% of our comic is there for free, we aren't sneaking in porn in the other 80% of pages, we're not actually trying to trick anyone into buying the comic, because they drop out right away and we have inconsistent funding.
Now, let's also address another sore spot... yes, the project, when it's done, in all it's 1,000+ page glory might be $200+, and that's quite a lot of money, but it's not “a fortune” and it's cost over time.
The sad fact is that some people can't afford to spend $6 a month on comics... but we also can't afford to make this number of pages for less either. Some people have reasons why they don't have money, we're not disparaging you, especially if you have a disability or exemption... But that's also not ALWAYS the case either and there are some people making this argument of not being able to possibly afford the $6/month payments who have less noble and understandable reasons, or simply “don't want to work”.
To those people we have to say this: we can't ruin our own quality of life working for a rate that reflects what you “would pay”, and I think most people can judge that by what percentage of their weekly food cost a $1.50 comic subscription would be. Some of us have lived in countries where it was a larger percentage, but we've since moved for our own health and safety and that's why our prices are higher. We can't change the minimum wage or employment rates in certain countries, that's outside of our power, but we also don't live there or owe that person a different rate, we need to be paid a rate that reflects the cost of houses, food and internet in our own country/state. We're not taking anything from you, and we wouldn't want you to spend your money on our comic if every dollar was really that vital for you, people can live without the romantic adventures of a teenage cat boy, it's a luxury, at the end of the day: but that also means we're not a charity.
c.1> “No one wants to pay what you're asking! Your comic is crap for the price, there's hardly any f
And yes, we recognize that “stop saying you're stupid and lazy and don't want to earn money so you can buy our comic” doesn't reflect on everyone... but it DOES reflect on some of you. And to those people, we hope we've made ourselves clear too: if you call yourself too stupid and lazy to get job, your advice means absolutely nothing to us – you aren't a peer, you aren't a colleague, and you aren't a client. It's a serious fault of some people that they start an argument “I have no experience and I can't support myself financially, but:” and that is exactly the sort of unsolicited advice that doesn't hold any weight to us. We're never going to tolerate the same stupid, circular argument from people who can't grasp simple concepts: sometimes you just have to call an idiot an idiot and hope they get the message.
And yes, we recognize that “stop saying you're stupid and lazy and don't want to earn money so you c
That's exactly why they let people openly record movies at their premieres!
Yes, fine, technically “illegal distribution” isn't theft, but we both know we rant long enough without having to use longer words :P
But here's why, also. When people illegally distribute our comic, it reduces our income and damages our business. And if doing something means you steal our sponsors away and we lose money, isn't that basically theft? Getting a copy of our comics from someone means someone broke their agreement with us to not share the content.
No one likes liars and thieves, agreeing not to share our content then doing it anyway or, worse, actually selling it on, is pretty deplorable. We don't really want to associate with liars or “illegal distributors”, so hopefully you'll forgive us for not going into the technical nuance of every shade of social garbage we're trying to keep out of our yard.
c.2> “Copying is not theft! You have your copy!” That's exactly why they let people openly record m
Steal money from the bank and tell the police that you're just using it for advertising.
But seriously, check out our other arguments above. Every time we have a leak we lose 10%+ of our funding by other people not trusting that they need to keep paying for content that ends up online for free.
Without increasing security measures or some other change that makes the comic more appealing for its exclusive, unseen content we've lost support after leaks, and NEVER gained it. Maybe a few people come to us after seeing a discussion about the comic in some viper's nest like the sharing sites, but being able to see a lot of our content we're still asking money for is also a deterrent to supporting us, compared to seeing our promo material on the five free art gallery sites we share on.
In short, no, your “advertisement” costs us hundreds of dollars in supporters and weakens our sales by meaning the clients who stay are paying the same for less pages... not that I think you really care about our audience base, but there's the logical, financial answer to 1% of people who really mean that they're “doing us a favor” by ruining our pay site.
This ties into a similar arguments that pirates aren't our problem, because we're never going to pay, we'd may as well let them advertise.
If we were a huge business that makes a profit and has thousands of fans already, maybe that would be true, a few people stealing and sharing and building up hype on free sites might draw people to us. But we're a small niche project with a few hundred supporters who're paying a premium for our stories. At that point taking it for free isn't just greedy and lazy, it's also ruining the supporter base and destroying the project.
c.3> “It's not stealing, it's an advertisement!" Steal money from the bank and tell the police that
c.4> “If you think people will pay 100s of dollars for the comic you must be crazy!”
Crude answer: if people are enjoying it, I think they will. And if people want to see the next projects we work on, they're only available to our current patrons.
We can't stop people deciding our content isn't worth the money, whether that's $3 a month or $6, but we can promise that the next comic we write will be of similar art quality and only available to people who've bought CATastrophe. This is where we lock down content sharing: it's deterrent enough to end up going back to 24 months behind the current releases when you make a new account, but what about having to go back to the start of a totally different comic? We want want make this as prohibitively simple for people: we're not bending to thieves.
Fortunately, Patreon now lets you block people's payment methods too, so our defense is three-fold: getting new bank cards, paying for everything you already bought, and having to wait years to see the next project. Hopefully that's hard enough.
Yes, the comic has a bit of a price tag, over time, but it's twice as bad for someone who gets kicked out, and that's sort of the point. We have other security measures we can tighten the project with, such as SMS authorization or ID photographs. But we recognize that these things are inconvenient to normal clients too... But as inconvenient as they are, they're also absolutely abhorrent to people who use the shadow of anonymity online to hide their shitty actions.
Of course, we very much hope that we won't have to keep escalating this war with thieves and risk letting our honest sponsors down by the comic suffering a death of 1000 cuts. We would very much like to complete this project, and show the whole story in the form in which it was intended. Only a seriously bad situation will prevent this, but we know people are always looking for a way to share our whole comic and ruin the project for everyone.
Our honest sponsors shouldn't worry too much, it's a very unlikely version of events. Especially when we finally solve the last problems with receiving payments directly, without Patreon. This will give us more control and the ability to block people easier.
As for our future? Well, for one, we're hoping to hire new people to improve the speed of this project and the next one, maybe we'll even be able to hit MORE than a page a day, the ideal would be 2-3 pages per day!
At this point our main concern is people sharing the project after spending all that money, just for the brief high of a “thanks, dude, you're the best pirate!” in some forum comment somewhere. What can we do to stop this? Besides making it really hard to return? Well, hopefully everyone watching the comic is seeing that the quality of the story and art is still improving and wouldn't want to lose their place getting to enjoy what we have coming next by giving in to a little anonymous peer pressure from people who couldn't possibly “waste” all that money themselves (but still demand the content?!). We don't think a quick pat on the back is enough to waste that money and lose your access to a comic you must like at least a little to pay for for so long, and we also know our supporters must understand the value of the comic they're investing in – so we don't need to worry about them ruining the project out of anger or envy at our modest illustrating business (heck, we know a bunch of our supporters have some pretty intense and high-paying jobs!)...
We're extremely happy that our community appreciates each other, and we appreciate them too, maybe the howling and scratching at the gates around our community can be kind of annoying, but part of being in any exclusive club is getting to hang out with other mature adults! :) I guess that's how a lot of online games go too, free games get a ton of cheaters and abusive players, paid games get hardly any... It's the same with paid versus free comics!
c.4> “If you think people will pay 100s of dollars for the comic you must be crazy!” Crude answer:
c.5> “Show me another webcomic that wants such a high price?!”
Counter-question: Show us a comic that draws 50+ characters a month with a similar art levels, backgrounds etc who DOESN'T charge/earn a similar amount per month or per page.
There are some famous web comics that publish their core comic for free and make a similar amount of content (maybe not the same details, in the backgrounds especially), but the epitome of these do ALSO have patreon accounts that fund thousands of dollars of comic a month for rewards we would consider similarly priced to our content (or make a similar amount in tips, even if they don't put a cost on their pages).
We've seen quite a few comic sites that ask for $10-15 for a couple of traditional comic pages a month, at about 10 total panels (10-20 characters), and even then they don't have backgrounds. We've seen plenty of comics making a similar amount of content a month for a similar price, or artists willing to work on some pages for free regardless of funding as a passion project... So we're not exactly outside of the pack in terms of asking price per month
Each page of our comic takes around a day of work (an average of 8-9 hours), which means we're working about 26 days out of the month at least, that's a full-time job. Yes, if we made a comic with a lot of head shots and no backgrounds we'd be able to make more pages, or make a similar number of pages much quicker... but it also wouldn't be our style any more.
As noted above in the kinder, community questions about our format and prices – there's a lot of armchair judgment of our comic's pace, quality and comparison to other projects, popular or not, on the internet. Yes, there are some famous comics out there with 5-10 years of story under their belt, a page a week or so, and they get funded even though they're free to most people... but they get funded regardless, we're not there yet, our comic got more funding when we stopped sharing it for free and gets less funding when we can make less pages or more public pages: so this business model of making pages for the people paying for them works best for us.
It can get quite tiresome to have (especially non-artist) people compare our art quality to less detailed, less time-consuming projects and tell us that we'd be better following their example (especially since we already have to respond to people through a translator) than selling our content how we are. Sometimes it can be hard not to think of this “valuable advice” as being the business advice version of a hobo wandering into a fashion show, or business meeting, and yelling out advice with a cup still in hand for tips. It can be pretty hard to take advice from people who compare us unfavorably to projects that are nothing like ours for one reason or another and act like they even know the ins and outs of both sets of projects work enough to compare them. We've had non artists tell us they could make our comic for less money, or that they don't sell commissions but are pretty sure $50 a character, with free backgrounds, is too much for our style...
For the record, again, we're making a gay romance story in a fandom that has a much higher focus on explicit sex content: we're not going to be as popular as a comic that's mostly a sex book. Reading a bunch of emotional exploration of characters isn't for everyone – but it's the niche we're in because it's what we like to explore. We're always interested in chatting with other artists in a similar position, and maybe we can even offer them some of our security system advice and help them grow their business too: but we're pretty done with the same few people wandering into our comments out of the sharing site forums and offering their unsolicited business advice: it's basically trolling at this point, besides it makes them look tragically ignorant.
c.5> “Show me another webcomic that wants such a high price?!” Counter-question: Show us a comic t
c.6> "You all need putting in your place! If you think you can keep the comic from people someone will find a way to take you down!"
It's funny how a lot of this comes in hindsight: there were plenty of people “punishing” us before we set up a secure server, for being defenseless to digital attacks. They stole art, even when the comic was free, they demanded the entire comic, even when the delay in seeing pages for free was only a month or so and the pages released sequentially (one free page every time we made two new ones).
People stole from us, even when they were going to get it for free... so people getting angry at us now we're protecting ourselves and telling us we deserve to get robbed (or have the project shut down) is pretty cruel. Of course, we're also safer now too, and a lot of these threats are just cries of injustice on forums well known for unreasonable cries of injustice... but it's also true that we invested in security measures only BECAUSE of people attacking us... not that we expect people to understand that we're only protecting ourselves AFTER attacks, but it's a sad state of affairs when disrespect only builds on disrespect.
Our main solace is that we have additional security measures in place now, and if a major attack on our site does happen, enabling SMS or ID authentication will be incredibly difficult for thieves to spoof and far easier to track.
As for claims people have made to “hacking” information about some of the team, much of it has been hilarious speculation or slander. As for the rage people have about us sharing problem users and trolls on the free galleries as a warning to other artists? Well, our conscience there is clear: considering the unfair and spiteful actions of the people in question, and them breaking all agreements with us first, they forfeit any mercy from us too to whatever plans they might have to steal from others and try and get away with it.
Of course, we've made it obvious here that we're not blind to the people who specifically take screenshots of the posts they've made trying to rile us up or teach us the error of our ways with their own business advice. If the advice is well-intentioned then hopefully part a of this response has explained how the paywall is tied to the exclusivity selling point, which has always had success for us in other projects that stagnated under free release models that allowed art theft not to be as big a deal.
As for the not-so-well-intentioned advice: the fact that it's coming from forum threads dedicated to insulting the content creators, scheming to get the content for free and generally being abusive means that their outrage and infallible “logic” in the face of evidence means absolutely nothing to us. The other half of that community is now claiming that if they stop talking crap about our project and team and boycott the free galleries we use for promotional material that people will lose interest in the project and we'll lose subscribers: which honestly would be a godsend and give us peace and quiet to go about advertising to people who don't know the project, and offering subscriptions to our club to the people who earnestly want to join.
As for the mentality that shunning us or brow-beating us with “advice” until we change our business models will affect how to do business at all? Well, we don't really consider the constant whining and crapping on things of the art sharing forums to be very influential, we're just glad the negativity is collected outside, away from our paying subscribers who deserve a more positive social group.
c.6> "You all need putting in your place! If you think you can keep the comic from people someone wi
c.7> "You're just blocking everyone who doesn't agree with you!"
Considering we leave most arguments up, knowing that honest supporters and curious audience members would only learn more about out business by our response than learn anything from the banal whining – it's a pretty stupid claim that we delete arguments.
Usually a person is blocked for the following reasons:
- They advertise thief sites or came from one to troll us (this is 80% of the reasons for blocking). Usually we see them return to the art sharing sites and laugh about what they said, so it's easy enough to block them from trolling again once they've given us their piece of mind. Again, we leave earnest-seeming complaints and questions in our comments and answer them.
- They're just there to publicly make the shit hit the fan... Well, we know where the shit usually belongs, so... flush! We don't have the time to respond respectfully to people who're just there to hurl abuse and expect us to take all that and then change our ways to better please someone who is just there to be an asshole. It's our page, we don't want to look at assholes whenever we go there (unless we're drawing them! *rim shot* (double euphemism points!)) .
- We block people who come to us and take the time just to tell us that either hearing that we fought with some forum troll, or our prices are too high, or they hate promo art, is a reason why they'd NEVER buy our comic. If someone says they wish they could afford it, or are hoping to afford it later, sure: that's fine. But who takes the time just to say “I hate promos! I'm never paying for this!” or, even more stupid, the people who write to tell us they're un-watching us. In either case, blocking them from getting any more upset by seeing us come up on their feed is doing them the best help, we think?
We're not against discussing alternate options, but there are boundaries of respect and common sense there. We're not advertising on the free sites to let people crap all over our page and make it really negative and toxic-seeming a community for people considering signing up and getting our comic... because it's totally not true, our Patrons are awesome!
Of course, it's also kind of double standards. We've found ourselves blocked by them too, sure, but we've found ourselves blocked out of threads on art forums about our OWN comic for stating our own opinions there. We've never mis-quoted or photo-shopped responses from people to mis-represent them on another forum and try and start a big virtual fight over nothing, we also don't buzz around the art sharing forums finding which artist's threads haven't been updated for a few days and pay their pages a visit to tell them there's a little forum out there that disagrees with their business practices... News flash: we already know. In fact, some people disagree with us who aren't trolls, we respect that it's a matter of opinion and a lot of artists are doing what they think is best for their businesses.
Basically, we know the difference between constructive criticism or questions and a turd just being a turd that managed to type a few lines of arguments.
c.7> "You're just blocking everyone who doesn't agree with you!" Considering we leave most argument
We ask that you keep responses civil and understand that section C is aimed at trolls and troll comments mostly on other sites, please see section A for the "customer forward" answers to questions about our business models.
FEEL FREE TO COMMENT BELOW We ask that you keep responses civil and understand that section C is ai
I bought my third comic from an artist here on ink bunny last week, never gave out the outcome for it to others but found it on that 18 channel thing on the web already. It's sad that others will post it there when the artist is selling it. They do post a page here each day for those that can't buy it. I'm on you site as a 14.00 donor but haven't gone much yet
I bought my third comic from an artist here on ink bunny last week, never gave out the outcome for i
Thanks for very much for supporting! You seriously keep projects like this going ^_^ Yeah, the sad fact is that the whole "digital content is free" thing is way out of control... our team of people is so large and busy that we can't afford to just make the comic as a passion project like a lot of artists start out doing - we have too many pages to fulfill to not make it like a business, but that ruffles of a lot of feathers :(
Thanks for very much for supporting! You seriously keep projects like this going ^_^ Yeah, the sad f
We definitely understand that it's sort of a gamble to do what we do too - the other side of things is that posting a comic for free can have amazing results too, but for every project that gets a snowballing popularity, there's a ton that just die on the vine, it's a dice roll and with a team as large as ours we can't afford to gamble on them :(
Like we mentioned above, the free or $1 support comics out there have some problems (not least of all Patreon taking a huge cut of their money) that exclusive and higher priced comics sort of provide a barrier too, that's one of the reasons for offering more artists our distribution model and joining our server - at worst they'll at least be able to make more pages with the increase in money? ^^;
One thing that is for sure though is that VIP sponsors like you have our heartfelt thanks and we might have more goodies planned for the future - we've got a few VIP rewards at the end of this project that'll be VERY exclusive :3
We definitely understand that it's sort of a gamble to do what we do too - the other side of things
I readily admit the current pricing structure is not up my alley, but still look forward to the possibility, one day in the future, where the completed project might be available as a physical publication for a comparable rate to other such publications. Keep up the good work!
I readily admit the current pricing structure is not up my alley, but still look forward to the poss
It's not for everyone, we know. The digital sale price is one we balance on a lot of factors, one of which is hoping that the more people that join the even better value for money it is, the $6 for 25+ panels a month is way better than the $3 for 8+ panels in the first year and the set price means more people just buys more comic pages ^^
As for print - that's hard for us to call and a long way off to talk about super seriously on IF it will happen even. We'd only want to do that after the project finished, and it'd be unfair to put people through the security measures and waiting times digitally then have someone buy the book for significantly less - especially when a lot of them get scanned and uploaded online :( The book will not cost less than the digital purchase, one way or another.
Even if it's fairer that it costs similar, one thing that's important to think about is how complex our art style is on a technical level too, different print qualities are needed for more complex art, and just like we set a certain cost on the digital pages (just like someone would for art commissions) there's more cost involved with "high end" publishing. Even on sale a highly color-dependent and visually detailed comic (without flat coloring!) can get very expensive in hardback. While chances are formatting would mean 2 strips per page we'd still be looking at a 500+ page hardcover book at least, from experience that's a 5lb book for shipping costs, and the smaller the print run the more expensive per-book it is to make...
It's a lot of data to go over when the time comes, but the team is pretty confident they wouldn't be putting out a print copy that's any less expensive than the digital version just on fairness sake - I know not everyone is saying they'll wait to get it for cheaper later and people want to wait to read the whole story in one go too - but we're trying to be transparent that 2+ more years of wait wont also mean a lower price than we're valuing the comic for digital sale.
It's not for everyone, we know. The digital sale price is one we balance on a lot of factors, one of
Do you know of a tool to batch-watermark (DRM) images that one can use to identify someone leaking patreon content? You seem to be using something like that, and I hope it's something everyone can use.
Do you know of a tool to batch-watermark (DRM) images that one can use to identify someone leaking p
initially we naturally studied such tools, but they are weak in quality of protection. As a result, we created our own version. Simple watermark is easy to remove. Therefore, we use a combination of 6 different methods (methods), alternating them. This allows you to find a "conspiracy" - if several accounts try to create a "summary" picture, or use parts of the pictures - we can punish all participants in such studies, traces of which will eventually be published by a thief. All this is immeasurably more complicated than simply applying a translucent text. This is a whole range of measures and technologies.
initially we naturally studied such tools, but they are weak in quality of protection. As a result,
Today Kaion found that a number of his patreon only images were uploaded to rule34,and I was hoping for some kind of advice or a pointer to a tool that would help him to deal with this in an easy and efficient way. ;(
Today Kaion found that a number of his patreon only images were uploaded to rule34,and I was hoping
in principle, not bad ... we could take it to the server that we use for protection. But that would only make sense if he would make his own characters without borrowing something recognizable from Disney. we don’t want any rights issues, etc. plus - he would have to change something in the technical process. And of course, all this is not free - the server takes 10% of the earnings. storage, handling and maintenance costs. After some possible fall, after a while his income will grow by 50-100%, if his goods are in sufficient demand. It is difficult to make any accurate predictions if he drew a comic book, short story, etc. - a series of pictures connected by one plot ... it would work much better. So I'm not sure that our scheme would suit him. and one more problem. he has a lot of cub. and this is also a potential problem in many jurisdictions.
in principle, not bad ... we could take it to the server that we use for protection. But that would
Thanks for making such an offer, and I will be sure to let him know about it. Cub and fanart of The Lion Guard and The Lion King is what his fans expect of him, and where his heart is, so change of that is rather unlikely -- but I will let him know regardless. Maybe he can sort of do two things, I don't know. Just so that one pays, and one's for fun. We'll see.
Thanks for making such an offer, and I will be sure to let him know about it. Cub and fanart of The
Well, we’re just not ready to complicate our situation by adding several potential problems. we have drm and it works pretty well. we can help him improve his skill and much more ... but given that many people take the drawn characters too seriously, the risk of finding some kind of excess vanity still exceeds the potential benefits. To ensure that everything will be fine, it would be necessary to conduct research and seek jurisdictions with a less hypocritical approach than usual. But at this moment in time we do not have the strength and free time for this. But if something changes on his part ... we can take him on board
Well, we’re just not ready to complicate our situation by adding several potential problems. we have
For all that trouble, you’re better off just selling your comics in volumes and have a distributor do a subscription or sell the volumes on Amazon or Gumroad physically or digitally.
For all that trouble, you’re better off just selling your comics in volumes and have a distributor d
It's a lot easier to be sure that production is being funded with the model we're working with now. Other models we considered, like a kickstarter, but they are for much more well-known artists. Sadly some of our art team don't even feel safe in their country of residences being connected to M/M artwork, there is a social stigma against it. We hope the comic speaks for itself to those that support it, but we'll eventually have to negotiate distribution or physical production!
It's a lot easier to be sure that production is being funded with the model we're working with now.
With all respect I think the underlying issue with everything is while you deserve to profit for your labors your project disguises a bad model of product and distribution as some kind of philosophical stand of creators fighting to earn their fair share. It's obvious you deserve a fair share but I believe your price ranges attempt to search for "whales" (in the fiscal sense) rather than find it's widest and most accessible possible audience-base. You do have every right to structure that way but you simultaneously open yourself up to a lot of risk in the instance you have any significant amount of your higher-end customers suffering hardships. You're free to disagree and go at it your own way.
With all respect I think the underlying issue with everything is while you deserve to profit for you
Glad you see it so reasonably! It is certainly a risk, but one we hope we've calculated based on our audience's growth and ability to support us. We're all on the learning process together as artists :)
Glad you see it so reasonably! It is certainly a risk, but one we hope we've calculated based on our
