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feedback on nonexitant papercraft website
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I have been posting some of my original paper crafts here and papercraft has basically become my primary outlet since then. I'm going to be starting a website dedicated to showing my papercraft along with selling some pdfs. I have the URL papercrafted.com but nothing is really there right now (just the image in this thread but larger). this may not be the best place to ask for advice about this sort of thing, but I'm basically looking for any good ideas or advice you guys may have.
Things like how much should i give away for free and for the kits I do charge for how much should i charge?
Know any Good cheap ways to advertise?
Have any of you had any experience with project wonderful?
Any one here have experience with licensing other people's characters or IP?
What kind of conventions would be a good way to cross market the web site/papercraft/papercraft games
would I be out of place at an artist alley at a comic show?
i guess thats enough questions to get the ball rolling so for now i will just show you the place holder image i have at papercrafted.com
Things like how much should i give away for free and for the kits I do charge for how much should i charge?
Know any Good cheap ways to advertise?
Have any of you had any experience with project wonderful?
Any one here have experience with licensing other people's characters or IP?
What kind of conventions would be a good way to cross market the web site/papercraft/papercraft games
would I be out of place at an artist alley at a comic show?
i guess thats enough questions to get the ball rolling so for now i will just show you the place holder image i have at papercrafted.com
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For example, I would not pay for a file that I'm then going to have to print out (or have printed) then assemble. Sorry, ink is expensive and good paper isn't exactly free and my printer is a paper mangling piece of crap.
Now, if you printed them out in color on high quality paper, that's something tangible. I get something for my money beyond a collection of 1s and 0s on my hard drive. Plus, I'd have to buy it again if I wanted more rather then just printing off another copy in addition this method saves you bandwidth cost. With this in mind, look into local print shops that might give you a discount on large jobs. I don't know if the site will ever make a profit but it could probably feed itself.
Advertising, toss a link in your sig on the boards. Make small paper crafting things (call them sitewhores?) with the website address visible and leave them in public places (IE Libraries, LAN cafes...). Offer these paper sitewhores for free on your site, offer prizes for people who take pictures with their sitewhores in interesting or notable places. Possibly use your sock monkey as a template.
Gaming cons would probably be the best bet when looking at attending cons. Look at DiceWars for instance. Comic cons or general sci-fi cons may work as well, but likely to a lesser extent.
If you do set up a place in artist alley, bring something big and impressive. It's tough to judge with just the sock monkey image and the paper fruit fuckers (I think that was you anyway) that I saw a while ago.
As to how much you should charge (not to be a downer), I'm skeptical about if ppl would actually pay for this. If you have your heart set on selling them, I'd suggest selling them in sets, not individually. Ppl will think they're getting more and ppl love getting more stuff.
You'd calculate your prices based on how much it cost to make one of those paper animals, and if there's a similar web page on the net see how much they charge. That's your competition! Get an edge on them, see how they do things.
As for advertising, there's only two kinds: effective and not effective. I'd suggest not focusing on weather it's cheap or not, because if it's effective and expensive, you'll get your money back.
The way you figure out where to advertise is by looking at the ppl most likely to buy your stuff. Find out their interests and see how you can get your message accross. Off the top of my head, I can think of all those paper modeling and origami pages. I'm 100% sure the ppl that go there will get a kick out of your stuff.
something a bit more ambitious would be posting on specialty paper magazines. I don't know why, but I think this might end well... somehow!
The artist convention is a SPECTACULAR place to get a lot of exposition for you and your page. Here's what you do, first build a GIGANTIC paper monkey where you'll take pictures of the ppl posing with the monkey, then you give them a card with your info telling them that they have to go to your page to download the picture. Make sure to have sample pictures visible so ppl will know that it's worth going there.
I hope you have great success!!!