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Feb 2021

If you make comics, novels, or any other kind of art.

If you don't get any money from ads or contract with a publisher, does your audience support you with Patreon, Gumroad, Ko-fi, buy your merchandise like printed volumes, pdf, t-shirt or contribute to your crowd founding projects?

  • created

    Feb '21
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    Feb '21
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Ink varies and 9/10 will only ever really come during support events like Inksgiving. Otherwise it's those rare generous folks who pop in once and disappear like benevolent angels or something. Granted I'm hardly active on Tapas so I don't really hold too much of a grudge about it

For the most part though the main place I ever really get money is Ko-fi and that's with commissions. If anything I'm thankful I've had the favor of getting clients at all though I know for a fact most people tend to gravitate to the cheapest options available (which I could get into my gripes about but that's a discussion for another topic).

I don't think I've ever just gotten consistent regular tips tho so I guess the answer to the question would be

Well, my contract with a publisher is also entirely dependent on the audience supporting me because royalties are made up of a percentage of books sold to said audience. So even in that sense: yes.

But thats only one part of the equation. I do get support on Patreon and Gumroad though I’ve only started really messing around with Patreon very seriously in the last two months but it seems to be a good venue for my current projects. I’ve also successfully kickstarted a project (that thankfully is finally together enough to print after getting some outside help).

I only got patreons back in 2019, (like max 4 at my highest), to this day i still don't know what attracts them. I guess my series was slightly popular at the beginning. But my comic has fallen from grace a long time ago.

I shared my Ko-fi and got nothing. Try to sell NSFW packs on Gumroad, but also got nothing.

Had a pretty decent patreon followers however over the years it declined so yea... i'm just lucky to get anything at this point.

Team "no, not really". I have a non-negligible amount of tapas ink generated money that i'm waiting to withdraw once my new comic launches, to start with a clean slate. But that's also considering that most of it came from various Inksgivings and that I have paid at least as much if not more out during those events so... yeah :sweat_smile: very much appreciate the ink everyone has given me and enjoy giving it out to others too but I think I'm in the red there.

Otherwise I unlocked ad revenue in July and have thusly made 1 cent. Granted I don't have an actively running series so it's not at all surprising, but still.

Otherwise I've recently unlocked the ability to earn ad revenue on Twitch as well as get subscribers, and seem to earn about 1 cent in ad revenue per stream as well as have had 1 sub so far. So I've cracked the $2 threshold in a few weeks somehow :sunglasses: But i think the minimum payout amount there is $100 so it'll be a hot minute before I see any of that lmao.

I'm interested to see if any of these platforms perk up at all after my new comic launches or not. I'm not particularly expecting them to, but 2/3 of these options didn't exist during my last comic (the one that did being ink support) so fingers crossed, I guess!

Nooooo but I'm also trying to make a free to read comic?? I would love to make comics my full time job, but as for right now, not yet. :slight_smile:

We're all looking for more ways to monetize & to support other creators. Here's one free way you may not know about:
I use the Brave Browser which has built in cryptocurrency enabled, if you choose to view ads you earn ad revenue, which you can tip to the sites that you visit. I dunno, but crypto! I earned five bucks last month and finally got my main comic site registered. It's just a fun option and a smoking hot customizable browser. Maybe in 10 years it'll be the new bitcoin.

If I save up 3 months of Patreon money I can buy s large cheese pizza! But how to make the pizza last 3 months... :smug_01:

I have a grand total of... 1 Patron. :sweat_02: That said, she's an angel, she signed up to the highest tier I have because she was surprised I had none. I'm hoping that as Blue Star Rebellion grows, I can get more folks interested in the lower-priced tiers.

Beyond that, I get the occasional commission here and there. It's not close to being enough to live on, but it's nice pocket money. For now, I still teach part-time to support myself. Long-term, I'm hoping to work with publishers and make my living that way.

If it turns out that I end up making bank from webcomics, I'll be pretty surprised. It's not the plan, but it would be cool!

I'm just starting out so I have 0 patrons or financial support. I honestly just want to get to the point where it's free to make my comic so I can put more resources into it. I'm not trying to do this for a living, it's just a story

I also tried to make my Patreon (for when I do get members fingers crossed I can basically just give them access to my works ahead of time and sneak peeks/behind the scene stuff so I'm not having to crank out a bunch of new things.

my online audience is really too small for that. I make most of my money from higher commissions that I have to actively seek out. Maybe one day I'll have enough audience to do a passive income from either comics or Patreon, but I haven't figured out that marketing trick yet. I think most professional artists do a balance of passive and active income, honestly.

My current comic has literally just started so definitely not :sweat_smile:
but with my past comics while they didn’t make money online they did well at conventions, people especially loved cutesy arts of the characters on stickers and button badges

I get about 100$ per month on Patreon and occasional donations on Ko-fi and Tapas. Also, sometimes people buy my Gumroad and Lulu books. Not bad for a hobby, especially considering how low wages are where I live (1-2$ per hour).

$1 from 1 patron from webtoons and i get ink in the range of 25-300 on tapas every now and then. I'm grateful for anything though :slight_smile: