Tales of humour, whimsy and courgettes
“New phone?” asked Parrotfish.
“Yeah,” replied Jelly. “Just signing onto all my social media apps.”
“What’s your Twitter handle?” asked Cuttle.
“I’m not on Twitter,” lamented Jelly. “I find too many twits make a twat.”
Shout out and thanks to my $10 Patrons, whose support helps me bring you daily tales of groan-inducing terror. Bruce, Badger, Kathy & Warren.
Jordan tweeted me today asking for some advice for a comic creator. I came back with a few suggestions, but one thing sticks in my head whenever creators, bloggers, writers, artists and even photographers ask me for advice. Aim to have multiple revenue streams.
The problem with having one revenue stream is if it ever collapses, you have nothing to fall back on. In addition to that, a single revenue stream is often limited. Even if you make it big time, how many t-shirts do you think you can sell per month? There are common-sense limits here.
So, in this post, I aim to give you some ideas on how I make a living from different revenue streams.
Print on Demand. The obvious starter. Tees, posters and phone cases on Society6, RedBubble and Threadless.
Books. Self-publishing is easier than ever. Try KDP, Smashwords or CreateSpace. Got a comic? Try Comixology.
Affiliate links. I know some people invest heavily in affiliate links, time and advertising wise and see a good return. I see maybe £20 a month from Amazon book links and Skillshare premium sign-ups. Though it doesn’t help I give everything away free, so, a pinch of salt.
Teach. Practice making videos, upload them to YouTube or Vimeo. See how you feel about them. Then get onto Udemy or Linda and start teaching properly and earning from your classes.
Stock images. Urgh, pennies. The pay for stock images is piss poor now Unsplash and Pixabay exist, but, there’s still a demand. Try Shutterstock.
Online product sales. Etsy for Americans, Folksy for the Brits. Make stuff, sell it online.
Digital products. Although Etsy sells digital products, check out Creative Market for selling your graphic designs and photograph packs.
Patreon and Ko-Fi. Ko-Fi is nice to have. People can tip you $3 at a time for your work. Patreon is also awesome. But if you want to earn from Patreon, you need to make it the main platform for your content.
Spec work. This shit is hard. I tried it, I hated it, I left it. But I know some people earn a living from Design Crowd, 99U and Fiverr.
Sponsored posts. Got a social network account or blog? Check out websites like Buzzoole, TBP or Brandbacker.
Write articles for websites. Every major website that takes submissions will have a submissions button at the bottom of the page. Keep an eye out for them.
Paper and digital magazines. Earning a living entirely on the net is hard as feck. So take it to real life. Photos, comic strips and articles required. Even if you’re a gardening blogger. Don’t just look at major magazines. Check out the little local circulars, too.
Freelance work in the real world. Photographers, ask car dealerships if they need a hand with their photos. Writers, they may want you to write something for their catalogues or websites. Artists, ask them if they want a poster designed. Visit your local businesses. Someone will need you for something.
Real-life teaching. Teach your skills in real life. One on one tutoring pays well. Ask your local craft shop if they’d like you to teach customers in-store how to use spinning wheels for a day.
Shows and exhibitions. Either get a stall to sell your wares or speak to event organisers and find out if they need someone. Photographers for event photos. Writers offer a write up of the event. Spinners, you’ll need the spinning wheel again and do some demonstrations.
Shows and exhibitions (part 2). Got a service to offer vendors? Beauty blogger visiting Afro Live or Hair? Visit first thing in the morning. Make sure to say hello to everyone on every stand and that every brand there has a copy of your media kit. Again, photographers, writers, artists, visit these events. Hundreds of potential clients in one place. Make sure they all know who you are, and what you can offer them.
Market stalls. Got a local Sunday market? I make more in a day at one these than I do in a month on Etsy. Sell prints of your photos, art, comics and books.
Phew, OK, obviously there are hundreds of ways of earning a living doing what you love. You are not just a writer, condemned to writing your blog and hoping for a book deal. Or an artist who can only draw comics and sell tees. You’re a creative. Get creative with your incomes.
If you have any other ways of earning as a creative, leave a comment below and help a fellow creator out.
Speaking for myself, I can’t earn a living entirely online. I need to get out into the real world to earn a living and I need to take incomes from different directions. It’s hard work. Certainly harder than a 9 to 5 and longer hours. For those that knew me a pre-Fears, you know how big that statement is from me. But I get to pay the bills doing work I’m always psyched about. That’s always a great thing.
Do you know what else is a great thing? This segue into all the great ways you can support me if you love this post and my daily stories.
Check out my tees on Threadless. You can buy me a cuppa over on Ko-Fi. Want to support me monthly? Hit me up on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. I also have an Etsy store and a book series on Amazon.
As always, shout out and thanks to my $10 Patrons, whose support helps me bring you daily tales of groan-inducing terror. Bruce, Badger, Kathy & Warren.
Cheers, gang.
Spectre awoke to find himself surrounded by Sprites. In the dim light of the moon, it took him a moment to realise they were dead. Their bodies decaying, missing limbs, bloated, dripping water and coated in black sand.
Spectre stood and looked up the road to the afterlife. He reached down to the Sprite sleeping next to him, plucking a stick of deodorant out of his pocket. “OK,” he sighed. “If we’re going together, y’all gonna need this.”
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Bruv, I’m gonna crash here tonight,” sighed Spectre sitting down against a wall.
“Sure thing, man, I’ll keep watch,” said Sprite.
“Didn’t you once work as a security guard?” asked Spectre.
“Yeah, my boss told me to watch the office all night,” remarked Sprite. “I must have seen every episode a hundred times, and I still don’t know what it has to do with security.”
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“My last job was in a sperm donation clinic,” sighed Sprite.
“I knew a 500-year-old ghost who managed to get his missus pregnant,” remarked Spectre.
“So it was a phantom pregnancy?” asked Sprite.
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“I gotta take my mind off the road,” sighed Spectre. “I can’t stop looking up it.”
“I was thinking about taking a job working on the road,” sighed Sprite.
“What job are you after?” asked Spectre.
“A street cleaner,” replied Sprite. “I’m told there’s not much training involved. You just pick stuff up as you go along.”
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“Hey, Spectre,” said Sprite. “I bought a stick of deodorant the other day.”
“Why?” asked Spectre. “You don’t sweat.”
“I just wanted to see if it made me smell nicer,” sighed Sprite. “I followed the instructions, ‘remove the lid and push up bottom.”
“Well credit where it’s due,” replied Spectre, “Your farts have smelt lovely this week.”
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
It’s a month of Virgo! Our lady Virgo has now arrived on Threadless and for this week, she’ll have $3 off.
You can nobble both Virgo tees here: littlefears.threadless.com
And of course, she’s got a £3 discount on Etsy too. littlefears.etsy.com
Happy murder month, my strange and stabby Virgo friends!
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
“I think,” said Turtle, “he’s trying to fill today’s story panel.”
“Or he wants to give people a little lift,” replied Crabs. “What did he write again?”
Turtle picked up the .png file. “Dear readers. You’re awesome, gorgeous, smart, witty and fabulous. I love y’all. Also, your arse looks nice in everything you wear.”
“You’re all wrong,” chimed in Jelly, applying some lipstick. “He’s deffo trying to get laid.”
Or I just wanted to say you’re all awesome and have lovely arses. Imagine how much better the world would be if we stopped ascribing motivations to other people.
Hey, Tumblr, I’m looking at you again!
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
You all know by now I plan things well in advance of doing them. The current Black Sands series runs until October, where there’s a series of one-off daily stories. Then I have Inktober. After that, I don’t know.
I’m still adamant I’m not going to use the 1,000 or so tales I already had written. The extended singular story of Brass barely worked once. I do not want to try that again.
I’m also conscious of my paper usage. I’m currently working on a set of pixel-art characters to drop in alongside scanned ink characters. So I still get to use ink characters on photos, but I’m not drawing hundreds of the same character. It would give my work more consistency and variation as I’m able to bring in new elements. As I’d been using independent graphics, it would allow me to get some basic animations in the video. Even a side-scrolling perspective shift would be visually more appealing than a static pic.
So the series after Inktober will hopefully follow the pixel art, Etta, shown above, alongside a hand-drawn sea-devil. It’ll only be thirty stories long but will be good practice for mixing different styles.
Hey, another thing we’ve been working on this month. One of the strangely popular things I did was a course on Skillshare for turning hand-drawn doodles into digital graphics (linky: skl.sh/2G40lMs ). I wrote a series of follow up courses covering subjects like poster design and turning photos into logos. As with almost everything I create, I’ll upload them free for everyone for five days on release before setting them to Premium on Skillshare. If you sign up to them when they’re free, they’re free forever.
I figure the first (well, next) one I should publish is a beginners guide to GIMP. It’s a 40-minute long free class that’ll give you a tour of all the main tools in the free image editing program, GIMP. That one will be free to everyone forever. No premium subscription will ever be required for that course.
You can download GIMP for Windows, Mac and Linux here (link: gimp.org/ ) and the first course should land next week.
Content creator hat on.
Hey, subscribe, follow, mew quietly at me on social media and you’ll hear about each course as they come out and you’ll be able to nobble them all while they’re free.
Content creator hat off, cleans hands.
Man, why does it still feel dirty doing that? Eh, let’s get a lil dirtier.
If you love the Fears, the puns, the groans and tiny terrors and you have any spare change, there’s a whole bunch of ways to support me and keep the stories coming.
You can buy a tee on Threadless, for which I get $5 per sale. You can buy me a cuppa over on Ko-Fi. Want to support me monthly? Hit me up on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. I also have an Etsy store and a book series on Amazon.
If you don’t have any pennies to spare, that’s perfectly fine. Drop me a comment below and tell me how much pain I inflict on your households with my puns. Let me know how much damage I’ve done to your vocal cords, groaning at my punchlines. Keep me informed as to how much your friends and family whine when you relay one of my stories to them. The groans of “oh god, make him stop,” are like music to my ears.
Cheers, gang! You’re all awesome.
Cheers to Bruce Campbell, Badger, Kathy & Warren for the continued $10 Patronage. You can find me on Ko Fi, Patreon, Etsy, Amazon, Skillshare and Threadless.
Little Fears 