[Important] End Of Business (Patreon)

END OF BUSINESS

11-20-2022

Hello Patrons, and thanks for supporting me, my art, and JAIYANDT all this year! I used to do a sort of “end-of-year report” for the Patreon and the LLC in years past, but I had an extremely stressful few years (didn’t we all), so the habit fell off. You might wonder if that’s the plan this year. Well, the title of this post might have given it away.

The TLDR is this: my business is, financially, kneecapped. You might already know that I lost the JAIYANDT account on Stripe earlier this year, since their TOS does not allow pornography. I recently needed to close the PayPal account as well. This has meant that not only am I unable to take purchases on Itch, BigCartel, Teepublic, or most other online storefronts, but I can’t use Paypal/Stripe for commissions either. This essentially cut my income in half.

I had a few different options to deal with this problem. I researched other payment services, but I found the same issue: as you might expect, all the mainstream processors have similar bans in place against businesses like mine, but even alternative payment processors, designed just for this, still can't protect their users from the credit card companies’ “high-risk merchant fees,” commonly $1,000 or more per card per year - an unworkable expense. So if my business can’t take cards itself, then individual commissions (via Commiss.io or another intermediary) and subs like Patreon are the only viable incomes left. The trouble is that those incomes are not enough to live on, and they’re not growing. In fact, they’ve shrunk for about three years. I could start adding my work on Ko-Fi, or Subscribestar, but I didn’t see any promise in that. Multi-posting on another sub platform would just diffuse my audience, and take a long time to back-fill with posts before it became effective income, if it ever did. Add to all this the extra complication that Twitter (the largest audience I have) is going mad with new management, extra fees for “Twitter Blue,” users are deserting in many different directions, and all kinds of reductions are being made to artists’ visibility. Since I can’t make the majority of my sales anymore, and I’m not getting new customers, and to try to fix either would take even more time and money that I can’t spare, well… that’s kind of it for the ol’ home business.

I won’t say I didn’t expect these crises to occur eventually, with the industry that I’m in, but I did hope I’d be in a better position to withstand them, and I’m not. Unless I pull the brake now, there won’t even be enough money in the company account to pay taxes, and 3-4 months is not enough time to correct course. To put it bluntly, this isn’t a livable job anymore.

And to be totally transparent, it’s not only that everything was suddenly closed off: I’m also very, very tired of moments like this. Even as a formalized business, I’m always worrying about my meager income, and hopping on my back foot all the time. Living off one’s independent art is a very vindicating, very present-tense existence, but it’s not conducive to planning a future. This more slapdash, less committed form of work – making commissions, selling shirts, shitposting, side-hustling, and grinding – served me right in my 20s, when I was moving from one cheap apartment to another every two years, but now I’m 31, and my life isn’t like that anymore. At my age, I have no savings, no retirement plan, no life insurance, nothing, and the furry art business can’t give me those things. The cost-of-living is only going up. I have chronic medical needs, I’m engaged to my fiancée, we have homeowning responsibilities now, and my transitioning process will be difficult and expensive, as they tend to be. I can’t stay in this gig-based half-poverty for my next decade. Things need to change.

So I am left with the hard call, but really the only call: to quit. I’m going to close JAIYANDT LLC, phase out of the independent business, and look for employment somewhere else. This part of my artistic career has to wind down, and furry art has to become a side thing again. It’s a sad way to wrap up, but my company did finish its two years in the black – an inadequate, slim margin of black, but black nonetheless. Most small businesses can’t boast of that.

So, what now? Well of course, I’ll still make my artwork and comics, just on my own time. Ask The Werewolves Issues #6 and #7 will still be finished, as Damien and I have been making good progress. El Indon is planned to follow after that, with work on other projects being chipped away at when I have the chance. I do have to say that job hunting is my main priority, though, and once I secure more gainful employment, I will lose even more free time, so the fruition of my art might be very far away. Then again, when has that ever deterred you Patrons? You’ve always been there, always sticking by me, even as I stumble and trip. I don’t deserve fans as good as you.

Starting in December, this Patreon will become a tip jar with only one PWYW tier, with no special perks besides the usual login-to-see-smut. I’ll just post everything I can, everywhere at once, and try to make ends meet. You can still commission me via Commiss.io, when I have available slots. Itch only uses Stripe/PayPal, so everything of mine on Itch has been made free, and anything else I post there in the future will be the same. The ATW website will stay up, and the JAIYANDT website will have to be redesigned. We’ll also have to think about turning the Discord server public, maybe with some perks for legacy members. The BigCartel and Teepublic stores had to be closed, but I still have most of the shirt/merch designs, so those could always reappear somewhere. As for the remaining store merch, I’ll post more about it later, but for you Patrons, I will distribute what’s left on the inventory shelf for free. You deserve that much.

As the saying goes, don’t moan because it’s over, smile because it happened – and it wouldn’t have happened without you. Thank you all, once again and always, for seven years of support and kindness. I’ll keep moving forward, and I hope you will too.

Sincerely yours,
Jade