A General Update on Things, It Isn’t Good (Patreon)

Hey guys, my content has taken a weird shift right now for some of you and I’ve been putting off making a big statement like this about it for a while now. Just mainly cause I’m afraid of reception, or that some people will think I’m giving up when it’s really far from that.

Before we get any further in this I want to say very blankly that as bleak as this sounds I’m not quitting MHFAP!, I’m taking a new path to get to a point where I can work on it and anything else I want to without fear ever again.

I’m not burnt out on MHFAP!, I’m burnt out on failure. In a year where the world has literally entered the dark ages, I couldn’t just keep grinding like the last three years saying this is the year I’ll finally start making real big money from MHFAP!. I’m not mentally the same as I was mid to late last year. I don’t think any of us are.

My drawing output has slowed down, I can’t bring myself to care enough to do commissions even when they’re related to MHFAP!, and I still owe a number of patient people a number of things. I’m still drawing, and I still like drawing, it’s not about that.

I’ve tried for years to live off of ‘insert money, receive art’ but no matter how much I try to make it work my mind is not built to primarily function off of commissions no matter how much control I have over them. Square peg, round hole. You get the idea.

I never made much profit on anything I’ve tried to do with MHFAP!. I’m terrified of high prices on OCs since it’s just a huge waste if I end up not liking the char and never wanting to use them, as I get better and better at art new char designs just get more and more detailed, I make the ref sheets bigger and more full of writing and lore, and it’s just so much shit for so little. I love so many of the characters I’ve made for people, and I’ve done so many amazing things with them but the whole process just hurts so much these days.

The main thing I’ve always chased is a passive income. That’s what I’m doing now. I don’t want to take your money and do a thing for you. I want to put a thing out and you give me money for it.

I’ve tried that over the years with multiple things. There were two image packs, one very recent. They both failed and took a gigantic chunk of money and time. For the halloween one I wasn’t even charging my friends to draw their chars for it, instead they’d only have to pay the fee for my assistant to lineart and color the pictures. I thought 28 images with 70 total versions was a good price for $20 but I already took pre orders from friends and didn’t want to lower the price. Part of the halloween one’s failure is on me. I’m so mentally tired and defeated right now that I was in/am not in no state to promote it. I naively kept telling myself while working on it that it’d be cool if 100 fans out of my combined 7100 followers across all my social media bought it. That would have been amazing, but instead it’s been like 15 lol. Not even remotely worth the insane time I put into it, or the lack of profits I took during September to justify making it.

I tried to sell Merch twice, the second time much nicer looking than the shitty teespring stuff, but I launched like the exact second the Pandemic was starting to get serious in the US so no one was spending money and I had just spent a few weeks of prep getting products ready. I don’t even think I’ve made $50 from Merch lol.

I tried to sell MHFAP! Audios, before I started doing them as a hobby. That also took a lot of time and money. There were 3 before the Fapcast, and they all failed. I started making them again purely because I enjoy the format and writing them and working with the girls to make my characters come to life, but yeah, the pandemic made that something I had to close down real fast. I was hoping that producing a lot of them and getting podcast sponsors and ads on them would be viable long term, but they are insanely expensive to make even with me being personal friends with a lot of the VAs and with them giving me deals. And even with me not paying for them, they still take too much time to make.

A recurring thing with my business model that’s bad is I wanted to incentivize people to want to get more content with their MHFAP! OCs and since I relied on the brand exposure I would often do things for a smaller cut. Like the recent Harem Life comics I tried. I was desperate to just... WRITE things, and do things with my characters that I love so much. But each strip took like 30-40 minutes of set up, and although Aljune, my assistant, was drawing each and every one of them I still had to edit them very much. And I wasn’t making any profit from them at all, I was just having the $20 sent straight to Aljune.

And that’s not healthy. I shouldn’t be so desperate to play with my toys that I have to beg others to help fund them when I am literally not making any profit from them, just in the hopes that someone will see it and like it enough to give me money to do what I want.

Arena was launched at a rough time and while I got some decent success from it, it died down and the workload became a lot harder and overbearing than I thought.

In a perfect world I would have only drawn the comic for the last 3 years and none of the side projects. In a perfect world I would have had the money to do that, which is why I had to constantly pause, start, pause, stop, the main comic. I haven’t had any income in like 3 months to be honest, what little I have gotten was quickly spent on bills and food and the occasional video game to distract me from the rest of the world right now.

My motivation to draw right now is very low. It takes a long time, even if I’m fast, I’m not always happy with the result, and I feel like I never have time to practice. Now that I do have time to practice, comically, I don’t have the energy to.

Part of the reason I’ve put off this journal so long is because I’m afraid if I say ‘hey guys I don’t feel like drawing, and I have no idea when I will feel like doing MHFAP! Content again’ then people will just assume I’m giving up and take their Patreon money away in droves. Which I could not live with.

The only thing I’ve gotten myself to do consistently is write, and yes it started off as MHFAP! Short stories but those are just not creatively fulfilling enough. They’re filler episodes. I can’t ever advance the main plot and it just feels like I’m piling up more and more of a jenga tower these days.

So I started a new project, Rise of the Guild Master, and working on it has made me happier than I’ve been in months. I’m still not really making that much money but hey. It’s something. I’m not leaking money or making things at a dramatically reduced cost for brand awareness, my friend is funding all the Aljune pics because he likes Rise of the Guild Master so much. So I have to do very little other than guide and train/collab with Aljune on the pic to improve his art, which I’m already still doing, and I get free marketing material.

The whole thing with selling ebooks is that erotica is the most successful genre of books on the kindle store, which is the biggest market for ebooks in the world. And I can even earn royalties from the kindle select program. There are people out there who have like 300 short stories available and they make several thousands of dollars a month from royalties passively and without barely having to promote their work just because the kindle economy is so good to adult fiction. And I want that. I want a passive income like that so much that it hurts just thinking about it.

I don’t know what I’m doing with the Patreon yet. I still want to make MHFAP! But it’s probably going to be a very long time before that happens. I don’t know what kind of rewards or exclusive content I can offer right now or in the future. I don’t want to convert it to a Patreon for my writing because I know most everyone there is in it for MHFAP! And not for me. I have a brand, it’s not a tip jar.

I imagine I’ll start to feel more like drawing as things go on again but I don’t know if it’ll be tons of MHFAP! Stuff right off the bat. This has been the most confusing time of my life, this year, and it’s made me question a lot. Made me really start to think about what I’ll do when I get old. I can’t do real jobs, I’m on disability for a reason. Can’t do commissions when I’m 80 and my bones hurt. Can’t save money now when I’ve been operating at a net loss for 3 straight years.

I really wish I was able to turn my brain off and accept comms even if they didn’t interest me. If I kept doing furry comms then by now I’d probably be making several hundred a piece. But I couldn’t do that any longer back then, just like I can’t do this any longer right now. I’m still a square peg and the hole is still round.

I didn’t write this long ass blog as an attempt to ask for charity, but on the off chance you read through it and feel like helping then the main thing I’d like is if you went and read Rise of the Guild Master. Shameless plug, I know, but it’s genuinely the result of me having the most fun I’ve had probably this whole year- and I’m already making huge progress towards writing more.

Then there’s Patreon, which again, please don’t abandon me on lol.

And lastly you could just donate. I wasn’t lying when I said I haven’t made any real money in like 3 months because of all this so idk.

This was fairly hard to write so I’m proooobably going to ghost for a bit and not respond to any comments for a while.