I'm feeling a bit sick today so I'm posting an interview I did with Jon Hodgson about his website IlloDeli where him and several other artists sell limited licenses to their work. It seems like a good way to make some extra money off of your sketches,studies and professional art where you happened to negotiate to keep the rights to sell the artwork again. Hope you enjoy the interview and find it interesting. Afterwards feel free to go out and set up your own website for licensing your work. Next week's article will likely also be about licensing but not illodeli.
Was it difficult to set up the website?
In a sense yes, it would be wrong to say it was easy. However we had the services of an awesome web tech - Ben at Strange Egg Design. He was highly motivated in seeing what Wordpress could do for this kind of project, and offered us a great deal on the work. We did pay for it though, which is something we all felt was important. It does take work to maintain, and with a large database you always encounter problems with fine details, and we've had the occasional technical glitch. You can see we still call it a beta.
Has this been a profitable venture?
Yes. We all put in an initial investment, and we've all recouped that fairly quickly. I think we offer a solid product at a great price, so it's done well. It was never going to rival Plan A - commissioned work from publishers - but it does make a small regular income for next to no work now that it's all up and running. And all that old, experimental, "hobby" work is getting some use, which is a good feeling.
How do you drive traffic to the website?
Here's the rub: Whenever it gets a mention at publisher forums (like the one at rpgnet) we get sales. Whenever we advertise at those places we get sales. Sadly we lack the time to make a more effective, continuous campaign. Given a stronger push I think it could be a success of several magnitudes greater than it is now. It ticks over nicely enough, however. And the very heart of the whole idea was seeing that we all had this "spare" work, and no time to sell it. So to put too much time into Illodeli would defeat it's purpose.
I see there are many artists on the website and a variety of prices. Do you guys coordinate prices amongst each other?
Yes, we certainly do. For each category of image there's a couple of price points, and we use one or the other. It seems a good idea to keep it simple.
What has been the response from clients?
This was the unexpected part. We have a quite tight group of repeat customers, who fall into a quite specific publisher bracket. They are the guys who want to be bigger and do better, who recognise the value in good quality artwork from known artists within the field. I suspect many of them don't talk too much about it with anyone, since they want to keep the site to themselves!
We've had a few customers who I know having shopped with us went back to commissioning artists, since it showed them the value of being able to determine the specifics of the images they bought. Which I think is a good thing.
Criticisms have been that we don't have enough variety, or put a lot of new stuff up on a regular basis. We're fine with that - it's an outlet for specific kinds of work, and our supplies of that were always going to be limited. The most regular criticisms are from a couple of people who want highly specific things, but are never going to find those things in "stock". They need to pony up the loot for actual commissions. Some have been disappointed that the Illodeli license doesn't cover CCGs or Online games. We just can't extend to those markets with our current pricing, but we always talk with interested clients to find a work around.
A few cheeky clients early on suggested we make them pieces for free, and then sell them on Illodeli. Which of course we didn't do. All of us take commissions for pay on a first rights basis, which would in theory allow us to resell via Illodeli at a later date. Equally all of us charge up to 10, even 20 times the price for bespoke art than what we charge on Illodeli, and a few clients didn't really grasp that. I suppose you can't blame people for trying to get a freebie.
I have two clients who now regularly hire me on my bespoke rates who began their businesses with the little boost Illodeli can give. They've made a success of the model, and now pay me my regular commission rates. That was an unexpected bonus, and very gratifying to see.
What has been the response from artists?
It falls into a couple of groups. The overwhelming response was "sell my stuff!". It took up an unexpected amount of time to field those requests. From day one it's been a closed shop - owned and run by the investors who make the art. That's a very important aspect of the business to my mind: It is creator owned and run. We always planned to expand it given the time, but we also knew it would always be a very measured, slow expansion based on quality. On occasion I have been vexed by artists who simply wouldn't take no for an answer.
Soap box time: Sadly there's a lot of guys out there who, when they fail to win publisher commissions, think the next best thing is to sell stock art. The problem there is you're competing on price rather than quality, and the accepted price point for most stock is rock bottom. And so you can quickly fall into the poverty trap - you don't make enough money to stop and "level up" your skills, you constantly have to churn out lesser work for pennies. There isn't a lot of money in stock art in comparison to making commercial commissions. It's pretty simple maths. So it's a very poor Plan B in and of itself. Also, if you can't make work that is attractive to buyers as a bespoke commission, one wonders how it's going to be attractive to buyers with all those benefits stripped away?
We didn't want anything to do with that side of it - we didn't want to earn money from people who couldn't do better elsewhere, or mislead them on that. We didn't want to skim off money from someone else's work. We didn't want to be a middle man, or a bargain basement. We're artists selling our own work directly. Illodeli is highly targeted as a place to sell our side projects, old work, experiments to a very specific market who understand our license and pricing. It was something of an educated guess that those customers existed, but they do. And those guys aren't looking for rock bottom priced, lesser quality work.
These days as an AD I'm well used to writing rejection letters, but it felt really odd a few years back having to tell people we didn't want to sell their work, and when pressed having to explain it was a quality issue. I found that very difficult, and not a role I was used to.
We've had small amounts of flak from those who just hate all stock art, and see us as that. I don't believe, given our license, we are quite the thing those guys think we are. I'm no great fan of stock as it generally exists: selling infinite reuse to an image for a couple of bucks seems insane to me, and that's not what we do: I don't like clip art.
We did have just a couple of complaints that we were selling artwork too cheaply. It's a tricky one, and an issue we genuinely spent a long time considering. Did we want to potentially undercut the guys selling their work at rock bottom prices? In the end I don't believe that's what we do: Since our stock is limited, the license is quite restrictive (it's a single use on one book for most of the images), and of course the customer doesn't get to chose the specifics, and knowing who our customers are, I'm happy we're not directly competing with the entry level market to any great degree. I think we're offering another option which has very different aspects than hiring an artist to make a bespoke image, equally we're not "5 fighters for $5", and I think there is room for something in between in the market place. At this point we could talk about the free market; how vulnerable you make yourself if you enter the market with a handmade, low quality, bespoke product for a really cheap price; the specifics of our collective responsibility to compensate for other people's poor business acumen; who is entitled to protection from competition and so on; whether the Illodeli model helps grow new publishers which is arguably better for everyone? But it's probably a more complex issue than we have space for. These were all issues we carefully discussed and which give Illodeli it's form in the beginning.
Another couple of people have tried to do similar things, but I've always been aware the main obstacle is the software and the marketing, rather than the will to sell licenses to images. It's much the same as regular freelance in that respect: Every one wants to do it. Few people follow it through, because it's hard work. The desire alone isn't enough. A couple of people who took up the idea (which they are most welcome to do!) didn't fully understand it, in my humble opinion.
Equally we've always been open to offering up our tech to anyone who wants to go into partnership of some kind. It's funny, on that score. A lot of people want us to sell their work, but offered a franchise, where they would use our store software for a fixed fee? Meaning they had to invest actual cash themselves, as we did? They aren't interested.
Now that it's set up, in theory it's easy. However there's a couple of obstacles. I'm a stickler for every detail being exactly correct. What we are doing is asking people to give us money on the promise of a download. I don't want there to be any problems with that. There can't be any problems in that process or the whole thing falls apart. And so all the data entry has to be exactly right: potentially you could add dozens of products that were mislabeled or not connected to the right files. Priority number one is that doesn't happen. So it's slightly demanding to add new products and test them appropriately. The other issue is that all of us are insanely busy with Plan A - commissions. So it's hard to give Illodeli the love it deserves. Overall I would say it has been a successful experiment, but the big issue is time. If your work is attractive enough to sell under the Illodeli model, it's attractive enough to sell as commissions for a lot more revenue. Catch 22. Time is our most valuable commodity and if I needed any proof of that Illodeli has provided it by the ton.
How much of your time does the site consume or is it pretty easy to drop your sketches,studies,etc into?
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