random wrote:
As someone who was intimately involved in the original investigation into commercializing custom MTG artwork, I need to tell you it is not an easy way to make money, even as a long term plan. I know, because I did the costing exercises for Ralph, when we originally considered turning artwork into production (posters, cards, or whatever) and then delivering them to a worldwide clientele.
-please show me pieces of art that you commissioned and projects you've been apart of. You emailed some artist/s and printing companies? What else do you "know" about producing this stuff. I can email an artist and if he's hungry I'll get a deal. If he's busy he'll ask for 5-8-10K or ignore me or tell me to fuck off. Do you know what WOTC pays for artwork? Do you know what other companies pay for art? Do you know what artists need work?
If you do the production cheap (and I am not even factoring in the cost of the artwork) you can't make money because fewer want something "cheap". If you do it nice the cost is higher, and you price out many potential purchasers. If you try to make it nice and limited edition you put an immediate ceiling on how much you can raise. And in every scenario you need to factor in global delivery costs.
This is true but then this is a COLLECTORS site. People here tend to own "rarity" items which means $$- limited editions and nice ones are indeed $$ but then that's the name of the game on this site, no? Shipping, everyone has to pay for their own shipping. Collectors are accustomed to it.
This is one reason why so many fantasy artists have so many limited edition items on their websites.
The reason they keep making them is cause they don't sell? "Fantasy artists" can have a very narrow profit margin and they're screwing around with unprofitable methods year after year?
Brom/Donato make $$$$$$$ - Larry Elmore for decades made all his income off of prints- he has a limited edition and then when it sells out he prints up another limited edition. Then the art books. The trading cards, screen savers, mouse pads. You know more than those guys about what sells? "Good" original art is evergreen- how do you think digital art makes money these days? You think these guys do 10 pieces of digital art per year for WOTC and it pays the bills all year long and WOTC covers the 401K or what?
such an undertaking can easily become a money pit
This is true. With mostly anything a project could fail. Such is life. I don't think there's a silver bullet "option" asides continued donations.
Is that realistic? Reading what has been written I'm assuming more might need to happen. Maybe I'm completely out of touch with reality-
I wont post on this thread anymore and here I apologize for antagonizing/beating a dead horse.
You are so out of touch with what I was saying.
First: As background, I spent 12 years in the print industry, and was intimately involved in both technical and costing aspects on the manufacturing side. I spend another 6 years on the buy side, in technical sales & marketing to an International clientele, and was solely responsible for either personally designing or approving every pamphlet, brochure, manual, poster, etc. for the companies that employed me.
Over those years I was involved in specifying millions of dollars of printed items. Some were huge orders, some were small specialty runs. So if you want to talk experience, I'll put my "printing" credentials, either actually producing an item, or costing it out, up against anyone. If you
go back far enough, you will find threads of me describing, in detail, how virtually every card error occurs. That knowledge came from having to fix such problems on a weekly basis for years.
Second: Like every industry, for every successful fantasy artist there are many who never make it. The most successful develop a following as a result of a commercially successful product with which they have an affiliation. The successful artists parlay that initial success into a "stable" of products, each becoming a revenue stream. Enough profitable products and the artist becomes a financial success.
Important to a fund-raiser for this site: Virtually no fantasy artist I know of got rich because of one piece of work. Rather each piece of work opened new opportunities for the next. If you want a better-known artist you pay more. But even the best artists produce the occasional (or more-than-occasional) clunker. A fantasy artist becomes successful if his "win" ratio is high enough. However, this site does not have the luxury, or funding, to try to build a portfolio of offerings. This site has one shot to succeed, because a financial failure will ensure that another attempt is not even tried.
The first evaluation (by Ralph), was doomed by constraints that pushed the cost to ~ $100 for a poster, and ~ $30 for a small group of tokens or proxies. Less expensive print processes and less expensive artists (I had one who would have done the work for a cut of the action, and no up-front cost) were rejected out of fear that sales wouldn't be sufficient with a cheap product or an unknown artist, no matter how talented.
If you look at prior fundraisers used by this site, we had trouble getting sales of 100 sets of Crazy Clown tokens (series 10). These were cheaply made, but weren't that expensive to buy. I bought out the final 10 sets so the site could get their cut of the money.
As a site, we have less than 1,000 members. Even if you get a 10% participation rate (high for this kind of endeavor) that means less than 100 purchases. What are you going to offer that makes a sales level of 100 a big money maker? Or what will you offer to the larger Magic community that will quadruple sales while not getting entities like Wizards upset?
That is a problem this site needs to resolve. Wizards allows lots of their copyrighted material to reside on this site, for the benefit of both the site and Wizards. But Wizards also let it be known (explicitly) that any sales by this site of competing items, or of any items that infringes on Wizards copyrights, would end with Wizards yanking all their protected material. Maybe Wizards was bluffing, but it certainly isn't my call to take the chance.
Many or the earlier most-likely-to-succeed "art" ideas included tokens or proxies that could compromise the Wizards relationship. Added to the cost of commissioning the original artwork, the challenges overwhelmed the likelihood of success.
The challenge, going forward, is how to excite the Magic community to buy something that isn't Magic enough to upset Wizards. And to do it on a shoestring budget.