I've been selling stock for a year, more or less, ever since I did the StoCo WYFA workshop in Nov 2021 and had the idea. How much have I made? Not a lot. Has it been worth it? Sure has!

 First, my numbers:

DTRPG Gross: $243.08 Net: $158.00  -DTRPG takes a flat 35% of all sales as I am a non-exclusive publisher

Itch Gross:  $51.45 Net: $38.23 - itch fees vary between transactions and payment methods, but the final cut ended up being around 25% overall.

So being non-exclusive has been solidly worth it, even strictly by the numbers.

Those numbers are pretty low though, huh? Well, for most of the year, I was working full time(in retail)- I quit that job in October, and then immediately got Covid. I quit it because since March, management changes had been making it particularly stressfull, unpredictable, and physically damaging. So for those 6-7 months, my output was almost nil. In that context the numbers look much better. The other thing that happened  was the proliferation of AI art.  I don't know to what degree it cost sales, but at minimum the volume of it on DTRPG affected the visibility of what little I did post.  Monthly sales numbers basically fall into two groups: if I posted something once a week during that month or the month before, I did alright. If I posted little or nothing, I sold little or nothing.

Were there other factors? Well, it's probably worth looking at my top sellers(combined data):

What sold well? Art of objects or items (o's in the type column) 7/10.  

What did I actually  draw? More than half of what I listed was character art- which is very specific when it comes to style and setting. Four friends is the only character art in my top ten sales, and two of it's sales were as part of a bundle. Not that I don't have item packs that didn't do well (poor Hats!), but they did much better overall, especially the black and white sets, which are decent value even if you only need one or two pieces, more generic in subject matter,  and go with everything. I have a necklace pack in the same style as Five Rings  that's been half done since last February- if I was serious about chasing $$$, I'd finish that.  Characters are more fun though.

Did any of these make enough to pay me minimum wage for the time I spent on them? Nope. The closest would be Omens and Rations, two simple black and white sets that were each finished in 2-3 hours. Five Rings isn't far behind either, but the vector style it's done in is quite a bit more time consuming. If they keep selling, maybe they'll make it in the next year.

Overall, I'm not dissatisfied. I think this is probably not particularly exceptional for someone entering the bottom end of a market, with shaky skills. Although I've been an artist my whole life and have post-secondary education in Graphic Design and Game Art, those skills were very rusty when I started drawing stock in November- I hadn't had a consistent artistic practice in several years, almost a decade really. Even the slow trickle of sales was a good motivator to keep going, and the fact that simple black and white work did fairly well let me feel like it was ok to make stock that was simple and easy if that was all I had the energy to do. If I'd instead spent the same amount of time writing, I might have released 3-4 adventures in the year- doing enough writing to release at least one(or some kind of TTRPG product) is still a goal for '23. 

There's one more factor that's been really encouraging, and that's commissions. Just a handful of them earned more than my stock sales, and gave me the delightful opportunity to be a collaborator of sorts on several extremely cool projects. I'll be hoping to do more this year- I think I do my best work for them.  

The next blog posts I'm working on are going to be about commissions and collaboration, specifically work trades and royalty shares- if you have any questions about those, please post them in the comments!