Thinking about selling my maps

Hey there folks, I am a homebrew DM for a pathfinder 1E group for over 3 years now. Since always i made most of the maps i used myself, especially if it were locations my players visited on a regular bases. For the longest time i used GIMP to do so but now i actually invested in programms to speed up the process and make the art style fit in all maps. I allready got the marketplace creator page open to read about the terms and rules of Roll20 on how to become a creater / sell stuff here. But there are stil some questions left, which i hope you could answer: 1) Do you guys allready sell stuff here? If so, what and how "complicated" is the process? 2) Would you be interested in self-made maps / custom maps? 3) Since i did not buy anything from the marketplace myself yet, how does the process work? Where do the items go? How do i use them in Roll20 after I purchased them?

Some of these are complicated questions (or at least the answers could become large), but briefly: 1) Yes. If you are a popular creator, this could become your job. The process is not complicated at all for the actual selling, but the procedure to become a Marketplace Creator can go very slowly. Be patient. 2) Maps are probably second after tokens in terms of popularity. But some of the more experienced marketplace people might have more detailed answers. Map popularity can vary widely depending on a lot of factors: Quality, usability, genre popularity, customizability, creativity and so forth. I would look through the Marketplace to get an idea of what is out there and what you are competing against. 3) The mechanics of transaction are similar to any online store. Where things go depends on what they are. Art Packs like tokens and maps generally appear in your Art Library, already organized into folders. Many are downloadable so you can tinker with them on your own computer. Maps can also be offered as Addons, so that they are already set as pages with dynamic lighting features or other enhancements. These are loadable as options on your game's home page. Some creators offer their map sets in both manners as a bundle. Extremely complicated map sets that are part of a long and complicated adventure can be presented as modules. These are complete games that you use as the basis for creating your own.

1) quite a lot of us do, yes. It is not my 'job'. It's more like beer money. If I've been recently releasing things my sales go up, and if I'm doing next to nothing to promote them, my current sets get 100-200 dollars a month. I haven't released anything new in several months (new content tends to bring a trickle of eyes with it) but I'm not happy with the sets I've been working on and if I'm not happy I am not inclined to release them. If I had been maximizing my output, it would be more like 200-400 in passive sales in a year's worth of work. There's a cap on it due to Roll20's new limits on how many packs can be released. If someone took the time to dedicate to it and released a pack a week and also diversified where they sell their art, I believe you can get to a point of passive income sufficiency in 3-5 years. Is it complicated? No, I'd say it's more luck in guessing what will be popular. My sets are not all equally popular. The things with a unique mechanism (clocks, the runestones) sell the most, followed by the status markers, followed by the map packs, and finally followed by the tokens. The overlays also sell. I suspect it's the cartoon style for my tokens that push people away, but I don't like to do highly rendered paintings because I find they become blurry when zoomed out. I make tokens that I want to use, which just doesn't seem to fit what people want to buy. My character tokens sell an average of 1-2 times a month. There's such a balance in these things. They can't be too generic or they've been made a hundred times already. Too specific though, and no one will buy them because they can foresee no re-use. 2) I never buy maps. I make maps. If you wanted ME as your target audience you would do better selling stock art for map making. I buy hundreds of dollars of stock textures and assets. I would spend very real money to have access to Gabriel Pickard's fancy decorative borders free of any strings for my use in my commercial maps. Way more than the Roll20 non-commercial license. To sell to me you wouldn't be targeting the marketplace. I only buy things I am too lazy to make. :) To sell to Roll20 users, your best bet is to hang out in some RPG discords and Reddits and whatnot and get to know what VTT users want to have. Make a list of anything you notice someone wishing existed. Maps sell though, yes, if that's what you're asking. My entire career is built around maps. I pull in an acceptable living drawing them. People do buy them in the marketplace. They prefer modular over pre-made, I think. The more set the fabrication is the more limited the implementation. Buy something if you want to see how it goes. It's a small investment to check out how someone else's product is presented, that kind of intel will do you good, otherwise you'll flop around aimlessly trying to guess what people might like and what sort of patter would reassure them you've thought their needs through. It's like any online store, the items show up where you expect. Once you make a marketplace item you'll see anyway, it adds it into your accessible tokens through the marketplace cloud. I suggest you make a couple of packs and apply, it takes a while to be approved. It's worth it! A decent passive income hustle that helps DMs.

Thanks for the responses guys! I will keep all of that in mind. Since the staff also contacted me and asked for something specific, which kind of ASSETS do you produce? The tip with buying something myself is so easy and yet so clever :D Will do it for sure! And another question which came to mind: Do you place an icon / logo / brand on your products? I know this won't be as important at start but i could imagine it being usefull if you want to be recognized?

Yes, absolutely branding is important. It helps people visually group your product together on the page. If they like one, their eye is trained to see its companions. Once you have a lot of submissions, it really helps to create your identity. People know in advance what level of quality to expect. You know what sort of hamburger you are going to get if you see the golden arches, vs the In-n-Out logo. Never, ever stop at a place with a sign that just says "Hamburgers".

keithcurtis said: ... Never, ever stop at a place with a sign that just says "Hamburgers". Underlined for emphasis. This is a bit off topic, but... Strongly  disagree. I would instead say, if you stop at a place with a sign that just says "Hamburgers" then adjust your expectations for the unknown. Thats not necessarily bad. Ive ate at plenty of small "not so well branded" restaurants with outstanding food(or well branded business that sell food as a secondary, and the brand is not connected to the food(like a bowling alley)). There is potential one might be bad, but it's not guaranteed enough to say 'never try'.

1)  Once you're up and running, it's not all that complicated, just keep in mind that as you're saving map names it's good to ensure you already have the tags attached "asset name[tag1,tag 2,tag 3]" to make your life easier on upload.  Also, come up with as many different tags as possible to sprinkle through your pack so it's easier to search.  The one headache I've had is that the assets end up in the order you upload them and you can't reorder them, so keep that in mind as well.  2) I've bought a few map sets (generally the tileable types) over time, and I have friends that buy fully rendered maps.  These types of assets are essential for most games, thus extremely popular. 3) Your assets get put into a folder under the purchased art tab in any game you run.  If you allow downloads, then they're also downloadable.  You can test out assets in a game before your pack goes live by making a "tester" game, uploading the assets into a pack, then playing around with it in the "game."  If you've set a price, it will be under purchased assets.  If you haven't, it will be under the free assets folder.  There's a "sales report" button that allows you to check on your sales which you can get to from the marketplace page for items you own or your seller page.  The more frequently you release packs, the more sales you'll likely get.  I'd also suggest linking to your seller page from your profile to make it even easier for people to discover your stuff.  You'll have "marketplace creator" next to your name in the forums.  Adding the link will make it easier for people who meet you in the forums to find your creations. I'd also add the importance of doing some manner of "market research" in designing your marketplace ad.  Look for the types of assets you're planning to sell and see 1) What's already on the market, and 2) what ads stick out to you.  The packs that drew my own attention the most when I did this tended to have 1) artist/brand name, 2) a few examples of what was in the pack, 3) easy to read font that was not jarring to the eyes, 4) a fairly pleasant/not done in MS Paint design, 5) a consistent look if it's from the same artist.  From there, I kept bugging my friends (who buy stuff from roll20 occasionally and/or who are also artists) about what they liked/didn't like about the various iterations of the ad page design I came up with until the changes started to be so minute they stopped noticing the difference.  That design has become a basic template that I will be using for my portrait packs going forward, and I like to think it contributed a lot to the sales I've made since I started. Your market research should also include what number/type of assets are being sold for what price.  The more you're offering in the pack, the easier it is for someone to justify buying it.  Pay attention to how many unique assets vs. recolors of the same asset are on offer for the packs you look at.  That will give you a sense of how much you should charge.  The more unique assets you include, the higher the price you can get away with.  If your pack is maybe just a few different items that are recolored with little to no more work than that, then your price should be lower.

Erik S. said: keithcurtis said: ... Never, ever stop at a place with a sign that just says "Hamburgers". Underlined for emphasis. This is a bit off topic, but... Strongly  disagree. I would instead say, if you stop at a place with a sign that just says "Hamburgers" then adjust your expectations for the unknown. Thats not necessarily bad. Ive ate at plenty of small "not so well branded" restaurants with outstanding food(or well branded business that sell food as a secondary, and the brand is not connected to the food(like a bowling alley)). There is potential one might be bad, but it's not guaranteed enough to say 'never try'. Yeah, I'm with you, Erik. While I understand many people are prone to fall for branding influence, my best dining experiences have come from places with just a neon sign that says 'pho' or even worse, you had to have discovered it on Google Maps to realize there was even a restaurant there because the hours are hand written on a sign taped to the window and the house looks like a regular house and I'm pretty sure the owners just live upstairs. One of my favorite places to eat. Actually, I'd be more suspicious of 'burgers' than 'pho', but if the food on the sign is a single food item then I have a hope that they're good at one thing and that thing isn't branding. I have eaten amazing non-Western meals at the sketchiest looking stops. There's a taco place a few blocks from me, one of my favorite places in the city, the only signage says '3 tacos $5' hand written. You go in, you get exactly that, and it's great. Now the real suspicious sign is this: Burgers, Pizza, Chicken, Sushi, Chinese Food (cheap!!! delivery phone number) Laundry, Vacuum Cleaner Repair and Money Exchange Mmm yeah I'm not going there. You know why? There's no way they're EXCELLENT at making any one of those foods if they are spreading themselves out in the hopes of capturing all audiences. This applies to packages. If something claims to be every token you could ever possibly need, or the last map pack you'll ever have to buy, absolutely none of the elements will be the best a creator can make. I would much rather pay for Ice Temple, 3 Levels versus 500 Generic Dungeons! If you try to do everything to make sure you get every customer, instead you result in a package that contains nothing great and tons of cheap pieces. Specializing is going to improve your sales, so instead of doing 20 temples, do Elemental Temples, or do 5 different Elemental Temple packs, one for each element, with several variation themes for different Ice Temples, Fire Temples, Earth Temples, etc. You don't want someone to buy a 500 item pack and use a couple items and never remember you, you want to hook them with one really good thematic pack so that way when they want more of that kind of asset they buy a different one of your packs. This is what the most popular map artists do, with packs featured around say 'desert' or 'tundra' or 'jungle' or 'small village' rather than enormous megapacks that do everything slightly worse. This will do more for you in the long run because instead of buying 1 pack and being disappointed, they'll buy 1 pack, love it, and realize they need a new one for the next campaign. ;) Don't try to sell sushi, burgers, and a laundry. Sell people one great idea with enough modular pieces that they feel like they have a decent use ratio for it. I took a look at my sales over the year and indeed, the resultant most popular map set was the highly specialized niche one and not the generic one, and the most popular asset was the Tracking Clocks, which does 1 task. So in the future, that's how I will be moving forward, trying to hone in on a coherent theme for each pack instead of how I started, and that's what I recommend. Branding is useful for people searching for your specific thing. A tiny logo would do, I just put  my name on all my pack thumbnails and usually use the same font, but this can be improved upon if you make a good template for example maybe you always put your name on a red bar at the bottom. Increase the chances people will see your item and recognize it as yours and associate it with pre-existing trust in what you make. :) This is what I learned from 1 year of Roll20 sales. You don't have to be McDonalds, but it helps to be known for doing A Thing.