We managed to get a nice assortment of features and bug fixes finished this week.
Character Sheets are probably the most interesting addition. It's a brand new feature and we're still in the process of making it look sexy. Please try it out and give us feedback. Full details about the updates are at the end of this journal.
Being Anonymous
There's a useful feature about buying and selling through Inkbunny that many people probably don't know about. Unlike selling through Paypal, with Inkbunny you can remain totally anonymous. Buyers and sellers can control what personal and contact details others can see. You don't have to give out your real name and address to customers or artists to buy and sell with us.
Even when items are being shipped to you, Inkbunny takes your details, processes and ships print orders directly. The artist never sees your personal details.
The only contact details customers and buyers share are the ones made public on the user profiles.
Normally, the artist will see the customer's Inkbunny account name as the buyer, and that is all. But customers can be totally anonymous if they wish. They can add items to their basket, and then log out and buy as a Guest. So the artist just sees "Guest" as the buyer.
If you use Alertpay through Inkbunny, only Inkbunny staff see your Alertpay details when you pay for items or when we send you money made on sales.
Easy Money - Where are those portfolios?
Of course Inkbunny is mainly about free art. A bare fraction of items here are for sale. But those few items for sale are very important to us! It's the only way we get the money to run the site, and to continue development. So we focus a lot of attention on sales in site news.
Our top selling items are all Portfolios.
It takes about 30 minutes to get a ZIP archive of your work together and make it into a digital portfolio. Make a nice cover image to upload as the preview and you have yourself an instant item for sale! Portfolios are always of great interest to your followers. Fans like being able to download a simple archive of an entire year of their favorite artists' work. And you can even spice it up with some unseen artwork or behind-the-scenes sketches and other goodies.
Be sure to price it sensibly! It's a good idea to charge less than you would for a real printed art CD. Cheaper prices means more sales. Customers are even happy to buy work they can download free elsewhere, if the price is right and they can get it here and now. It's nice to support the artist and to have the "real thing" direct from the source.
It's so easy to make and upload portfolios, that we wonder why so few of you have tried it so far! It's certainly meant a lot less competition for the ones that have given it a go, and some artists have made hundreds of dollars in sales already. We're just a little site with a lot of growing to do, so sales are only going to increase with time.
Here's an example of how some of the most successful and best looking portfolios on IB are presented! I trust you all have your ratings and blocked keywords set so I don't have to warn you about the content and themes here.
[largethumb]13498[/largethumb] [largethumb]10347[/largethumb]
[largethumb]9010[/largethumb] [largethumb]11424[/largethumb]
[largethumb]11979[/largethumb] [largethumb]11453[/largethumb]
[largethumb]8009[/largethumb] [largethumb]12597[/largethumb]
The more work that everyone buys and sells on IB, the more the site will grow and the more members it will attract. So please make an effort, even if sales start off slowly at first. Having a bigger variety of things attracting customers to the site will help get things moving!
Getting more uploads of free art onto IB is just as important! Please add more of your art archives when you have the time. It's the easiest way you can help make Inkbunny grow. Use the Bulk Uploads feature to make the job easier!
Updates for Version Beta 23
* New Feature - Character Sheets. There is a new submission type called Character Sheet that lets you assign a set of standard details such as Name, Age, Gender, Species, Description, History, Family, etc. These fields all display under the uploaded files in the submission, allowing you to turn any submission into a multi-image character sheet. Character Sheets have their own gallery which is accessed from a link at the top of your user page once you have at least one Character sheet.
You can set existing submissions as a character sheet by going to the Edit Details link at the top of the submission, and choosing Character Sheet as the type. To enter in your character details, you then need to go to the Edit Character Sheet link that appears at the top of the submission once the type is set.
If you upload a new submission as a character sheet, the character details page appears right after the submission details page in the upload wizard.
The adult section in character details will only appear for members that have adult ratings (for sexual themes) turned on.
* New Feature - Download Latest version of your purchased files. When an artist updates a file you purchased, you will see an "Updated" message in your New Submissions gallery. If you go to your Bookshelf, you will see that a "Download Latest" link appears next to submissions that have newer versions of files added since you purchased them. Note that the "Updated" label in New Submissions will also appear when the artist has updated the preview file.
* The "File is big enough for print" suggestion message can now be hidden per submission, rather than it sitting there taking up room being annoying, reminding you forever and ever even when you never plan to sell that submission as a print. Just click the new hide link at the end of the message.
* You can no longer accidentally hide submissions from yourself if you set them Adult but don't have Adult ratings turned on for your user account.
* New optimised versions of the backgrounds have been added to suit more standard screen sizes, so some of you might notice you get a better view of the background now. We don't allow the browser to do this dynamically via javascript or CSS because browsers are bad at scaling images without serious quality loss. It also saves data to send you exactly the right background sized for your monitor.
* Fixed a bug that allowed thumbnails of Non-public submissions to show in some gallery modes, which would show as thumbnails with blue warning circles over them. The actual submission was never accessible so it would have just given members an error message if they clicked those thumbnails.
Thank you, everyone!
Starling