I made a bit of it! Less than I would have liked, more than I usually do! I’m well ahead of my loans, but not done with them. Frankly a couple things entertainment related got in the way. A dead TV, a replaced desktop pc, nice trips, nerd events, and various other fun things all ate into the spare change. But in any event, the money situation is pretty okay on my end. Now, if you want to hear about how I intend to improve that further, hit the jump.

I’ll be contacting yet another round of reserved commissioners soon, but I also intend to publicly open up new commission slots in the near future. I am very likely to raise the price a bit though, turns out I’m just not physically interested in doing these commissions quickly and would rather finish them to the best of my ability. If that nets me less customers, so be it. But that’s not the only way to get art out of me.

I’m thinking about doing fund raising weekends, via the old Coney Island Art Institute stream. Basically, the plot is you give me something like 7 bucks and you have me for the hour of drawing live on the stream. That’s certainly possible, I should think. If this is something interesting, feel free to let me know with comments.

Speaking of the stream, I’m going to seriously look into getting more producers, turning it into a semi serious art theater. Could be cool, if it works.

And then there was one other scheme I wanted to try. I’m thinking of drawing and selling digital content like comics or wallpapers via Paypal through a “storefront” on Tumblr. I wanted the easiest, simplest, method of telling people that there’s paid content available and you just have to click this link to buy it. 8 to 10 page comics, released fairly regularly, sold at a $1.25 each.

The “storefront” I’ve started thinking of it as a moving store front. With Tumblr’s reblogging feature, a link to buy the book is shared just as easily as if you wanted to comment on it. There’s also the opportunity for negative reviews, or worse people just sharing the download link right on the post notes, but that’s okay. I’ve come to the opinion it’ll cost me more to spend on defensive measures than it would be worth. There are pros and cons to people sharing your material. I like to think the good outweigh the bad in the end.

I’ve looked into several cloud storage solutions. Though I have used MediaFire in the past it’s very possible they’ll go the way of Megaupload soon. Skydrive and Google Docs provide the most space, but unfortunately are too closely tied with my personal data. I think I have settled on Dropbox, though the space it provides is kinda small the service is clean. Whether or not it’s good for direct e-commerce is something I’ll look into further.

I was wondering if my regular followers had any opinion on their method of reading comics digitally. Personally I think Comixology is the current reigning premiere method of reading comics digitally. But there’s the whole thing about dealing with publishers that I think I’ve got a chance to avoid here. To that end, I need to choose a method that is both comfortable but universal. I’m deciding between CBR/CBZ files and PDFs. CBRs give the reader a lot of flexibility in how they want their reading experience, and among digital comic readers it’s a fairly universal program. PDFs however, give me a little more control on the experience even if they are harder for me to put together. PDFs are also universal, and can even be viewed straight off of Dropbox or the other cloudsharing sites.

In any event, I’ve got a small viewership and it would be hard to expect turning a profit at such low cost and unpredictable demand. But I’m also attracted to the very low overhead this method appears to have for getting comics out there. Not worried about piracy, people can share the comic as long as the dropbox link still works. And Tumblr users can easily signal boost the “store” to help me out if they wanted to.

The only thing that can stop me, is finding the time to do these things. I should be a trying couple of months, to say the least. I’ve still got loans to fill.

Comments? Thoughts?