Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account

New creator looking for general advice

1604811336
Haasio
Marketplace Creator
Hiya!  I'm a student digital artist who just recently got into pixel art.  I just got my first art pack up today!  I've been casually making animated pixel sprites for a few months, and just recently thought to put them together into packs on the marketplace.  I got my first sale a few hours ago, which absolutely made my day.  I'm looking for general tips in navigating the marketplace creator waters.  Is there a content creation schedule people follow (ex: posting a new pack every 2 weeks)?  Do people prefer more variations of assets or more unique assets?  Do people like specific themed packs or catch-all/general packs?  How would you say your experience has been selling/buying on the marketplace? My first pack is linked here, if anyone is interested. Thanks a bunch, Haasio
1604823751
Mino
Marketplace Creator
Some people schedule, some don't. You usually end up seeing a spike in new packs on the weekends, but new stuff trickles in most days. Personally, as someone who doesn't have a timeframe and packs are just done when they are done, I usually post in the middle of the week just so it stays on the front page longer personally. As for variation preference, I can't say for sure. I mostly do animated magic effects, and I've found that sequel packs tend to do less well than original packs. Not a significant drop, but a drop nonetheless. I took a 4 month sales range and made 9 more sales on the original pack compared to the sequel pack, so generally still enough to be worth the time put in. However, that's specifically for my brand of items. Seeing as you do character tokens, I personally would be more likely to buy extra packs if a token matched one of my player's characters appearance better. However, the amount of race/color/class/weapon combinations is so massive that it'd be unlikely to find a perfect match in a few packs, so whether it's worth your time or not just depends on your particular sales numbers. I've found extremely specific packs also do less well than general packs simply because they have less reach overall. Keep in mind, a single person only ever needs to buy a pack one time. I find themes work well if they're not too strict, or have a lot of variety within that theme. One thing you may want to think of is the fact that sprite art, while good looking, will likely be a difficult sell for a lot of people due to the fact that it'd look jarring with anything else other than sprite art. If you continue to make a wide variety of packs with the artstyle, you'll probably see earlier packs do better over time. Consider a person wanting to run an encounter with zombies, ghouls, and skeletons. Two of those are covered for your pack case, but a potential buyer has to find a ghoul somewhere else. And it's much easier to find non-sprite art than sprite-art, and somebody valuing consistency may pass on the pack as a result. So, you'll get much better results once you have multiple packs on the market. As far as experience, I sometimes get messages from people confused about some of my packs, or requests for small edits to some of them. For example, one of my packs uses pathfinder grid measurements, and someone wanted a 5e measurement instead, which is different, so I just made one item specifically for that person. Whether you do custom requests or not is up to you, but I'd suggest checking in regularly to see if any messages pop up. Anyway, pack looks good, I especially like the detailed spritework on the monsters, best of luck to you!
1605467096
Wordforger
Plus
Marketplace Creator
I've been bad about keeping a schedule myself, but that's just me.  The joys of having a day job and less time!  If you keep some manner of schedule and keep packs coming regularly then you'll probably have more luck keeping a consistent revenue stream because the newest stuff is always going to be on the top pages of the marketplace.  My suggestion would be wait at least a week or two between releases so your packs are steadily on the top page. As for packs...  I personally like to have some manner of versatility.  If it's a character pack, I tend to count how many totally unique base character sprites/portraits there are before I decide to buy, with recolors just being bonus variations.  If it's just five bases colored five ways, I tend to pass it up.  In my own packs I try to do at least 14-15 different portraits, then a few different borders or whatnot.  Themed packs are great for themed adventures, but variety packs are also great for GMs who want to have a starter set for a pick-up game.  It just really depends. If you're interested in making maps, then I'd say that unique and/or versatile are the name of the game.  Most of the map sets I've purchased have been of the type I could easily move around to create something that looks a bit different without having to purchase a new map.  However I have friends that like to purchase really cool looking maps then use them over and over for different encounters.  Either way works.