Justyna Dorsz – Page 15

Double earnings for masks in April

Last month Threadless doubled royalties for regular t-shirts sold in artist shops. This month they are doubling royalties for masks. If you haven’t enabled them in your store then you definitely should because they still sell very well.

Read the whole post that Threadless wrote about it, including an explanation of how to let Threadless manage your prices: Double Your Earnings with Face Masks in April!

I particularly like that they included example earnings when face masks are sold for full price, and when they are sold with discount:

I know artists are sometimes confused when there are site-wide sales and they don’t get paid in royalties as much as they expected.

Here are some of the face masks in my artist shop on Threadless:

No cats jumping off cliffs — it’s official!

My brother and I made a few games about cats. The latest one is Summer Paws. It recently received an “E” ESRB rating. ESRB stands for Entertainment Software Rating Board, and they provide ratings for games to indicate if a game can be played by kids, or teenagers, or if it should only be played by adults. Our game got “E”, which stands for “Everyone”.

As part of the process of having our game rated we had to show if there’s any violence, alcohol, or anyone jumping off cliffs. We didn’t have anything to show really. We intentionally didn’t include any elements that might not be suitable for kids when we worked on the game.

Now it’s official – Summer Paws, a game about cute cats, is a family friendly game and can be played by everyone 🙂

Black Sands

I turned my recent sketch made with reMarkable into a design.

Here’s the sketch that I made first:

Then I inverted the colors because I like while designs on black t-shirts more than white t-shirts with black designs. I took part of the design and places in on apparel:

But I put the whole patterns on home decor items, like: rugs, tapestries, blankets, and some accessories:

I titled it “Black Sands” because it was inspired by this photo I took in Iceland:

Black Beach in Iceland - Photo by Justyna Dorsz — Iceland

Welcome new people

My website statistics tell me that there’s been a 29% increase in traffic in March. That’s — wow — that’s a lot. Reader, what is the reason for your visit?

I wrote a few posts about creating designs for Threadless and other websites. If you are a new artist trying to make a living, then those might be useful to you:

7 websites that send me money
No sales? Read this.
Can you make money on Threadless?
Why haven’t you opened your TeePublic store yet?
TeePublic Resources for Artists
Threadless too has resources for artists, I just haven’t written a post about it yet. But I wrote about their new video series.

However, in real life, I am not often asked about details of my work or how I earn money, or anything like that. People are more interested in my story: how did it happen that I quit my job? weren’t I scared? is it really possible to earn money on your own? what if I fail? People tell me — and believe me, this surprises me every time — that my story/life is inspiring. That they too would like to be so independent. But, for various reasons, they can’t.

I like the idea of inspiring people to quit their jobs and do their own thing. If you read my blog then I hope you at least get that much out of it — an inspiration, a little push, to quit the job that you hate, that wastes your health and time, and to put effort into finding a creative work that you like, be your own boss. If work for others, then only until you learn enough to work for yourself.

Sales increasing

I am happy to report that the apparel market is going back to normal after the February and March slump. Whenever I visit Threadless I have new “You just had a sale on your Arists Shop!” notifications.

Other artists are hopefully seeing similar trends.

Dark Woods

When I draw something I never know if people are going to like it. There were designs that I thought were going to be popular and weren’t. And designs that I didn’t think were going to sell well but they surprised me.

My “Dark Woods” design is sort of in the middle. It’s just reached $400 in total earnings. So maybe it’s not a huge success. But it’s passive income — this design will continue to earn a small amount every month.

I’ve said it before — you never know how your design is going to be received. Don’t second guess yourself, publish all your designs, and let people decide if they like them.

Daily vs. Dailyish

It’s much easier to stick to a habit if you make it a daily habit.

For my whole adult life, I’ve been trying to make a habit out of going to the gym and exercising regularly. I had always assumed that exercising 3 or 4 times a week was enough, so I set rules for myself like: go to the gym at least 3 times a week, or go for a run once every two days. And sure, sometimes I managed to stick to it for a few weeks. But, inevitably, I would be too lazy to exercise on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. And then I would have needed to go every day for the rest of the week — it seemed too much, it wasn’t the plan to have to exercise every day. I would get discouraged and abandon the whole idea. And then try again a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until I decided to go to the gym every day that I managed to make it a habit and stick to it. Only when a task is non-negotiable, a habit can be built.

Bundles with stolen designs

What often happens: someone steals my designs and designs from other artists, then bundles them together, and then sells those bundles for pennies on Etsy, eBay, Creative Fabrica, etc.

People buy those bundles and try to list designs from the bundles on sites like TeePublic, or Redbubble, or Amazon. Then, I, or my lawyer, have to request for those listings with my designs to be removed. And then I get emails from confused people, who thought that they had bought bundles legally and they had their listings removed. And now they want to know what happened.

Thing is, a lot, maybe most, of those bundles are illegal. People who sell them didn’t make the designs and didn’t pay others to make them. They stole designs from artists like me and sell them without permission.

If you are one of the people who want to buy bundles of designs to sell them on apparel on various websites then sooner or later an artist will spot their design in your store. And you will be hit with a notice of copyright infringement.

How to avoid those situations? For starters, don’t ever buy bundles that are weirdly cheap. Think about it, creating a design takes anywhere from one hour to a few days. No artist would sell their design for $5. Some of those bundles cost $5 and contain 30 or 50 or even 150 designs! That’s just not feasible.

You, most likely, want to have a legitimate store with legal designs, not stolen from artists. But you can never be certain if designs that you buy in bundles are sold legally. To be completely sure that designs are legal you have to either make the designs yourself or hire an artist to make designs for you.

Google Report on Games

A friend sent me a link to Google’s Global Insights Report. There are some interesting takeaways.

First, searches for “competitive multiplayer” rose 70000%! Not that I plan to make a game that is a “competitive multiplayer” but it shocked me that that kind of game got so much more popular. It reminds me, I have been hearing good things about the “Escape from Tarkov” game. Maybe when I have time, I will check it out.

The second thing of note in the report is that people searched for “hard puzzle games”. Which, again, I find surprising. I assumed that people would rather play casual relaxing games, and in fact, the Android Play store is famous for relaxing games like Candy Crush Saga. I didn’t think there were even any hard puzzle games in there but I am going to check.

Overall the data that Google shared confirms what we already knew from Steam’s report: more people buy and play games than ever before. Check the full report here.