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Nov 2018

Hey! I've been planning on making a couple adoptables since my winter break is coming up, but I've never done them before, let alone having a paid commission :sweat_smile: . What are some tips about making and selling adoptables? What kind of experience have you had making them? What's a good price to sell them at? Thank you!

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    Nov '18
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    Nov '18
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Not relevant to your question but what exactly are "adoptables"? :thinking:

I've never gotten into the adoptables market/community, but it'd probably be a good idea to keep up with folks who do? See what price they're selling their adoptables for, what kinds of things they do that make their adoptables desirable. I know I've seen Making A Good Custom Species tutorials on deviantart somewhere. But in general, you're going to learn the most from observing folks of all skill levels who do what you want to do!

Also, finding places to participate in that community would probably help! If you have access to toyhou.se, participate in the forums! If you can find adoptable communities on DA or furaffinity or wherever the kids are these days, join them! Adoptables can be profitable, but they're also a kinda niche market, so you'd want to have some connection with the sorts of people who like buying and trading OCs!

I don't know much about making and selling (beyond the whole fact that you're selling a design, so you need to ensure what you're designing are ideas that are fresh/ something different for most artists.) I do know that community suffers terribly from a lot of immaturity and general bad business practice where young sellers will demand to have designs given back for any reason up to regretting selling it in the first place or believing the buyer isn't do anything with the design. Having a set of rules in your ToS that make it clear you're not that type of person would help.

I'm a huge freaking sucker for adoptables, especially as a writer who can't draw their own characters.

Things that tend to draw people are unique concepts and obviously polished art. Closed species are hugely popular on devianart and separate you from the crowd of other people who are doing adoptables.
Regular old human adoptables are hard to come by, so that would be something different (I've been searching for three weeks with a general idea of what I want and still nothing >.<).
Offering custom adopts is also a good idea!

Definitely make sure you have a very clear TOS that includes your feelings on using your designs for commercial work as well as resale of adopts- so that somebody can't buy them from you and sell them for double the value, that happens.

A constant on deviantart as well is the concept of 'adopt auctions'- pick a starting price you think is fair for the amount of work you put in and then take bids. It's surprising how high they will get. Just make sure your terms of the auction are clear and that you keep to them- nothing is as annoying to me as making my bid and then having the artist ignore their own rules so I miss out on it or have to pay more.

haha oh boy. adopts
now i wanna start this off by saying i was never really into making adoptables? ive dabbled but im not a big seller and you're probably best just looking at whats popular
but yeah. chibi designs, working off bases in big batches often works really well, "concept designs" like if they're themed after something (usually food), multicolored hair, fantasy aesthetics, urban fantasy- those tend to sell well
dont be afraid to use an existing base made by someone else, i dont personally reccomend spending too long on each design because there's no guarantee they'll sell (especially if you've never done commissions before so you don't have a gauge of how many people are willing to pay for your work)

do what you like, there'll always be someone else who likes it too, as they say