The Toy Chronicle Presents: Pricing! The Experts Viewpoint

Great article by TTC taps a few experts (including Benny) to weigh in on how to price your custom toy work. What's fascinating is how different all of our responses are, based on our differing roles in the custom toy game! Excerpt below:

...we often hear the biggest question on artist’s lips: “How do I price my work?!” We hear it more in the run-up to conventions – whether that’s ToyConUK, DCon, Five Points, as a lot of newer artists who are working out of their bedrooms are starting to venture into the big, wider world of Designer Toys for the first time and are looking for guidance. Some artists get it right, some horribly wrong. The question still remains.

Read more on the TTC site here!

Tony Gil Reveals Diamond Free Runner Mickey with Full Fabrication Video

Our buddy Tony Gil, the man behind our blog's Tenacious Ninja mascot, is at it again, this time with a Mickey version of his classic Free Runner character. Tony pulls back the curtain with this run of customs by recording the entire process from start to finish! Check the "making of" video below:

Watch the video on YouTube here, and while you're at it, follow Tony on YouTube as well.


To pick up one of these super limited Diamond Free Runner Mickey customs, head over to Tony's shop here.

Benny's Crowdfunding Tips

Thinking about running a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign? Read my personal tips that I've developed over several years of running campaigns:

Before

Be Honest With Yourself:

Is this a viable product? Ask 20 people you know who ARE NOT FRIENDS AND FAMILY. F&F will support any stupid thing you do, but that only gets you so far. You need a widespread thumbs up from strangers. Try to get this info in advance. If no one likes the idea, move on to something else, or refine it according to the feedback you get.

Be Honest With Yourself 2: Time

A crowdfunding campaign is approx 30 days long. During those 30 days, it is a FULL TIME JOB. This is not an exaggeration, I’ve run several. Trust me. It’s 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for 30 days. The month before and the month after the campaign, it’s a part time job (figure 20 hours a week). From the time you start the project until delivery of your product to backers, it can be a year or more. You will work on it between 5-20 hours a week for that ENTIRE YEAR. Sometimes more (shipping to backers) sometimes less (let’s say, the month the project is being sea-shipped to you). At NO TIME is it OK for you to not keep updating your backers weekly and checking into the back end of your campaign daily. That only ends several weeks after you've shipped your last reward to your last backer.

Be Honest With Yourself 3: Is This for You?

I have heard from several people in my industry that crowdfunding is pandering, and that if you really believe in your project, you'd self-fund it. While not all of us are rich and successful like those detractors, they have a point: Crowdfunding isn't for everyone. It's ton of work, it opens you up to extreme public scrutiny and pressure, and basically, your reputation is on the line every time you run a new project. The campaign could fail. Can you deal with that? Do you have ANY other options for this project that don't involve such a time-consuming method of acquiring funds?

Good categories - here are a few categories of projects that tend to do well on Kickstarter:
- games (card, tabletop and online)
- electronic devices
- high-tech apparel
- small non-electronic gadgets

Start Early: 

Buy an easy to remember domain to support the project. Build a simple website or even just a landing page that shows the item you’re making. Backstory, design details, illustrations, general info about item/project help people understand more about what you’re doing. If you don’t know how, get someone to create the site for you. This is not optional. You don’t have to fully reveal the item, but definitely get some info up on the web about you, the name of the project, the type of project, background info, preliminary sketches. Literally, if you have a sketch of some sh*t in a notebook, snap a picture of it with coffee stains on it and your jacked-up pencil in the shot and post that. People love that sh*t.

Social: 

Also start social media accounts. Build community early, before launch. Twitter is good for contacting journalists and writers. IG good for sharing pics. Gotta have a FB page too. Building community early is the best way to generate buzz before launch.

Not kidding, Start early. Start now. Build website and social media accounts NOW, today. The bigger your network is by launch date, the more successful you’ll be. Read up on how to get more Twitter and IG Followers. It’s not hard, it just requires smart posting (always incl images and hashtags) and non-posting actions like Liking and commenting on influencers’ posts, reposting/retweeting, and generally being active and engaging on social. If you don’t have time, get someone to do this for you.

Email List: 

Make one. Don’t care how. Use MailChimp, MadMimi, ConstantContact. Any way that you can collect emails is a good way, even if it’s a manual list on a spreadsheet (that can get time consuming though, better to install a signup form on your website). To encourage signups, include this link in press release and share on social. Possibly come up with a cheap reward for email signups: free digital download, access to insider info, or mail a 3” sticker. If you mail something, don’t forget you need the person’s mailing address. Many signup forms allow you to add that info as optional. 3” die cut sticker is maybe $0.25, and a stamp is $0.49 so you’re looking at cost of approx $0.75 to acquire that contact. Can be worth it if they pledge $50 to $100 in your campaign.

Get Your Sh*t Together: 

Make sure the financial details of your project, and your vendors, are all in line and ready. Solicit quotes from factories or vendors, get it in writing. Often this means an intial expense out of your own pocket to create a prototype / 3D print / working model / MVP. If your “vendor” is an individual (a resin caster for example), make sure you have 2 other resin casters lined up to take up the slack if your individual vendor flakes. If you have a factory making your product, re-confirm your quote after a month or so. The timing of your project can lead to cost overruns- if you ask factory for quote and then you actually go into production a year later (this is not uncommon) you don’t want to be surprised at a new, higher quote from your factory! Often producing in higher quantities is cheaper per unit. Plan for future sales. See #3.

Get Your Sh*t Together 2: Plan for disasters. 

Have a game plan for each facet of your project if something fails. Know the costs associated with your backup plans. Know the costs for EVERYTHING. What will you do if you’re a little short of the goal a week before the end of campaign? What will you do if you’re way short of the goal a week before end of campaign? There’s no right answer, what matter is that you have a game plan. Simply running a campaign is a big PR push so you can harness that interest and push the customers to preorders on your commerce website if the campaign fails. KS does NOT give you an email list of your backers if your campaign is not successful, so make sure you set about acquiring those email addresses somehow before the end of campaign

Get Your Sh*t Together 3: Plan for post-campaign. 

What will you do with all the extra items you have? In a campaign you might sell 400 items… but you may have to manufacture 1000 or 3000 as a minimum order. That’s awesome, what are you going to do with those products, where will they be stored, will they be sold in your ecommerce shop (do you have one?) or will they be sold wholesale to other shops? Can you move 90% of the overstock to a distributor and have them deal with it?

Get Your Sh*t Together 4: Understand What You’ve Signed Up For. 

Read the details and nuances of how your platform works. Participate in multiple projects (as a backer) on both IGG and KS. This will give you good info. It’s best if you are a backer of a wildly successful, huge project, plus a successful small project, AND an unsuccessful project. You will learn different things from all of those. 

As important: read all the documentation on the platform you’ve chosen. There are ways each company communicates w you, schedules to sending you money, ways they deal with issues, fee structures, etc. This type of project can move around $5K to $100K or more. Do you REALLY want to be responsible for $100K of other people’s money, and NOT understand how, when and why that money is transferred to you, and what happens after that? There’s taxes. Understand tax ramifications of moving that money around. It’s usually a f*ckload of money. If you’re not fiscally responsible, don’t run a campaign. End of story.

Get Your Sh*t Together 5: Images, Video, Copy

Great images, with branding, in a square shape, are best. Use them in your campaign. 

A video need not be long or complicated. Most people stop watching after 30 seconds. I’ve examined the stats on mine and heard the feedback too, this is standard. Make your video short (30 seconds) and you don’t need to be on camera the whole time. It’s nice to see your pretty face for a few seconds, but then you can just switch to a voice-over and video of the actual product. Everyone hates the sound of their own voice on camera. Forget about that. What’s important is: do YOU sound excited when you talk about the product??? If you don’t, re-record the audio until you’re f*cking Billy Mays. If you’re not excited about the product, no one else will be either. Do not drone on in a monotonous voice. Everyone hates that. Wrap it up, get to the point, ask for support. End of video. 

Copy MUST fully describe the project. DO NOT USE FIRST PERSON in the copy. Your first chance of copy in the campaign is the one bloggers will copy and paste. They can’t write in first person. Write about the product. Look at successful campaigns that generated millions, and replicate the format of their description. You can talk from your own point of view, but like in a press release, you should quote yourself as the founder/creator and use quotation marks. It feels weird the first time you do it but ignore that feeling and speak about yourself as if you are the most interesting person in the world and you deserve to be quoted.

“Writing this blog post at 9AM on a Saturday morning seems a strange way to spend your first waking hours of the weekend,” Tenacious Toys CEO Benny Kline reveals. “But it’s like an itch I had to scratch - I couldn’t help myself. The rest of the day will not involve computers at all.”

Get Your Sh*t Together 6: Money

How much money do you have saved up? How much can you put on a CC or borrow? Factor that into your goal amount. Your goal should be as low as possible. The lower it is, the better chance you’ll have to hit it. Look at other successful campaign in your space. Make a list, write down how much they took in. Be super honest with yourself about whether you have a bigger or smaller network than those creators. If yours is smaller, you may take in less money. Make sure that your goal number is so low that you are super confident that you’ll hit that mark VERY quickly. It’s better to hit your mark and still not quite take in enough money for the production, than to entirely miss your mark and fail. You can always put an extra $2K on a credit card to get your vendors paid. You cannot go back in time and re-run the campaign with a lower goal number.

Get Your Sh*t Together 7: NO. 

If you plan on screwing up and not delivering for any reason, and not returning that money you took in, please do not run a campaign. Your choices on that front can actually f*ck up other peoples’ chances at success, like mine. Don’t be a d*ck.

Timing:

Don’t launch during any events that will distract your audience. Holidays, sporting events, elections and other time, money and energy consuming events will prevent you from reaching people. DO NOT LAUNCH OR RUN A CAMPAIGN BETWEEN THANKSGIVING AND CHRISTMAS. That whole stretch is off limits. No one is spending money on your stuff during the holidays if it won’t arrive for 8 months.

Reach Out: 

Make list of people/blogs/writers who have covered similar crowdfunding projects in the past. Email them a press release to get on their radar. Look up PR format and tips on how to write a good, concise press release. Don’t forget to include a SUPER engaging pic and all the details, incl launch date. Give them the link to your new website (cuz you don’t have one to the actual campaign yet). 

Plan Your PR:

I’ve heard from a successful KS creator that he did send press releases to a targeted group of journalists beforehand, but asked that the info be embargoed until his launch date. He communicated with them a lot and set it all up so everyone knew what to do. All 10 journalists posted article simultaneously on his launch date and ensure a HUGE kick-off to his campaign. All you need is EVERYONE in your space talking about you for one day- be unavoidable. Be everywhere for that one day. Everything snowballs after that. You can’t stop working, but it’s good to get a healthy start.

Embargoes on the launch info are NOT entirely necessary. They may or may not help. The other strategy is to just get the most # of people posting about the campaign as possible in the weeks leading up to the launch. Don’t forget, consumer attention span is very short. They need to be able to see the article, click the link and enter their CC info right away. Often, getting press on the web 2 weeks before a launch is useless. You might get some signups, or new followers, but what you REALLY want is backers instead. It’s easier to acquire a backer in the moment, right after launch, than it is to convert an early follower to a backer.

Launch Day

1. Post link to the Kickstarter on homepage of your website, in Twitter and IG profile, in button on your FB page. Send second PR to your list of writers with that link and the fact that the KS is LIVE now. Also email your general email list with the link. 

2. Be available. Respond to inquiries, be flexible. Add to your campaign’s FAQ or update the copy as necessary as questions arise. Add images if yours are not sufficient. Alter reward descriptions if people are confused. Add more rewards if people ask for them.

3. This is a full day of work. Plan for it. The whole day is spent on email, web and phone, communicating with influencers who could get the word out to a lot of people. 

4. The campaign is live, so make sure your website and social media accounts are updated to include ALL info about the project, the full reveal, plus links to the campaign. You can stop hiding all info now as it's publicly available anyway.

During

You need to monitor messages in the campaign and on social media and email daily, and respond daily. If people want to give you money but have a question first, best answer it fast and get that pledge. 

Like I said above, expect to put in a full workday on your campaign every day during the course of the campaign. Your PR work is not done until the campaign closes. Continue reaching out to industry contacts all through the campaign, tell them what you're doing. Get coverage. Web, TV, radio, outdoor signage, Google / FB ads, sponsored posts, etc etc. You better do as many of those things as possible, and start early. Once you are 50% of the way thru the campaign, is NOT THE TIME to begin panicking and setting up ads and outreach. The first week is the one you need to put some muscle and thought into outreach. 

Rule of thumb: No one cares about you and your project until you actually reach them. Do not expect people to just randomly stumble upon the campaign. Make sure you actively reach out and contact people every day during the course of your campaign. Make it your goal to contact 10 new people (influencers, or backers, or both) about the campaign every day.

Be Aware, Stranger Danger

Be aware that once your project is live, you will instantly get contacted by all sorts of snake oil salesmen via email, the campaign messaging system, and Instagram. There will be a lot of them. Do not pay them to "help" your campaign. Instead, act interested, reply to all of them, and ask them what exactly they'd do on IG / Twitter / web to generate sales and backers. At some point in the conversation, say, "Hey listen before I pay you to do stuff, I just want to know exactly what your plan is so I know how my money is being spent." Take the info they give you, and figure out how to do it yourself! Many of these people operate on IG, and they just go thru and like and comment on posts that include relevant hashtags (using your IG account of course). Well, you don't need them to do that, you can do it yourself. Spend an hour a day or 30 minutes a day on this yourself after you figure out what their tactics are! Haha, derpy lame asses!

After 

You STILL have to work! You need to communicate with backers daily for one to two weeks, then weekly after that as your project moves through production. You will also have to monitor communications / messages from your backers.

There should be a new tidbit of info or a new image to share with backers every week, even if production takes 6 months. Ask your factory / vendor for weekly updates. Come up with fun ways to engage your audience. Show them what you're working on, if it's related to the campaign. Anything. Just be there and communicate.

WORST CASE SCENARIOS:

You might encounter one, or several!

- vendor makes crappy product
- product delivered to you late
- product delivered to you broken / not working / imperfect
- project is more expensive than you anticipated
- you have to change what you're planning on making in some way
- product / project turns out to be impossible

In all cases, communication with your backers is absolutely key to survival. When something goes wrong, you WILL hear very vocal complaints in your campaign comments, in messages and online on other peoples' blogs! You need to work on accepting those negative feedbacks and use them to make a better product. Often your biggest complainers are actually your biggest fans. All feedback is valuable. If one very very vocal person is demanding some change, don't automatically make that change. Survey your other backers to get their feedback on the proposed change.

Depending on the issues you encounter, you may have to refund part or all of the money that some/all backers gave you. Hopefully not, but be aware that if you fail to deliver on some part of your project, your reputation is on the line. You need to do what's right and send money back to people if they are unhappy or if you fail to deliver.

The thing to remember about crowdfunding is that when you launch a project like this, and source your funds from the public, this becomes the public's project. The crowd owns it, you're just running it/managing it.

That's either a major downside, or a major upside, to crowdfunding. If you deal with the feedback in a reasonable manner, listen to opinions, and try to keep everyone happy as best you can, you'll do OK. If you make posts and updates that are dismissive of your backers and their concerns, people are going to get angry. Just remember....

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Feedback welcome! Please comment!

SHARE THIS POST! 

I didn't write if for my own edification. I wrote it for you and your followers, so give me a share please! Danke.

- Benny Kline

How to Set Up A Twitter Account and Tweet Effectively for Your Small Business

Twitter Bird illustration by Bigshot Toyworks

HOW TO TWEET

I’ve noticed more than a few fellow artists and entrepreneurs struggling lately with their social media accounts… so I decided to write a few posts to help guide you through the basics.

DISCLAIMER: I am not presenting myself as an expert, so all ideas presented here are simply my opinion, my viewpoint on the social media organism. You may experience success by following other guidelines, or none at all. 

GENERAL SETUP, ACCOUNT PLANNING & HANDLE CHOICES

This may not seem important to you as you begin tweeting, but it will be very important down the line as your business grows. Most people start out tweeting to a group of friends/family, maybe in the dozens or a couple hundred close contacts. At this point, you are really just tweeting for yourself, kind of like a post on your personal Facebook page.

If you run a business selling things, or you have a brand of some sort that you are launching, I highly recommend that you give your brand its own official Twitter account. This brand account should have its own logical handle: @tenacioustoys is my brand’s Twitter handle because the brand name is Tenacious Toys. Make it SUPER simple so anyone could simply guess what your brand’s handle would be. If you can’t grab that exact handle, grab one that makes sense logically. If you are an illogical artist, ask the 3 most logical people you know to recommend a handle for your business.

For your own personal account, your handle can be something random if you like, doesn’t matter. Here’s why: You will keep your opinions to your personal account. Politics, religion, gun rights, abortion, and negative feelings are the types of things that should NEVER be tweeted out on your business page. (OK, one caveat: if your brand is based on social awareness of some sort, you can post incendiary supporting opinions. Just get ready for backlash. Sometimes backlash is good as it builds awareness, but if you do something politically neutral like I do - selling toys - you need to avoid incendiary posts.)

NEVER POST general opinions on your business twitter account. JUST post about your products and the surrounding community. If you sell baby clothes, you can focus on the clothing, cute pics of babies, mommy bloggers, etc. If you produce creepy resin monsters, maybe you post about those figures, related resin figures and horror movies. If you sell super cute toys, you post about those toys, anything kawaii, and Hayao Miyazaki. What I’m getting at is that you need to focus your brand message down to only what is relevant to your brand. Again, if your brand or product is politically or socially motivated, sharing an opinion to support that is fine. Baby clothes, for example, are neutral.

Pet Peeve: When I’m following an artist to see their work, and half the tweets I see from them are what they are eating, their last visit with their mom, and the new Jordans they just bought. Totally not relevant to the art they make. I skip over these tweets and get a bit annoyed. I have unfollowed many artists for this very reason.

Exception: There’s no one correct way to do this, so I just want to mention that I have actually read that your customers DO want to understand more about you personally in order to feel more comfortable giving their money to you. That would mean injecting some kind of personality into your business tweets. I totally get this idea- I’d rather buy from a friend than a stranger. That article was  the whole reason why I dove into social media when it first started getting popular. However, it’s a double-edged sword. You do run the risk of losing followers and customers if you are tweeting ideas that might not be universally accepted. Inject personality and opinions into business tweets at your own risk.

Emo: It’s pretty well understood that depressing, sad posts are turnoffs. No one wants to hear about negatives. Social media is an escape from the aggravations of real life. When people are on Twitter, they want to be cheered up, they want a smile or a laugh. Give it to them. No one likes a Debbie Downer account, so keep your complaining and kvetching to your personal twitter account and make sure your business account is all “Tra-la-la EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!”

SET UP YOUR TWITTER PROFILE

I can’t even tell you how many Twitter profiles are set up incorrectly or incompletely. This is a HUGE mistake that can be fixed in 5 minutes, and it will have a major impact on your follows. People take a look at your account profile and decide within 3 seconds whether they will follow you. Here’s what to deal with, from the top down:

Okay, open up your Twitter profile and look at it. 

COVER PHOTO

The large top photo that goes all the way across is called the cover photo - do you have one uploaded? You should. Not having a photo there makes you look like you’re not serious about your business. The size of this image is 1500 pixels wide x 500 tall @ 72dpi. If that means nothing to you, ask a digital artist that you know to compose an image (a .jpg) to those specs and send it to you to upload. It should have your brand name, or your brand message, or images of your products. Or some combination of those. 

One account that has great relevant info in their cover photo is Emerald City CC: https://twitter.com/emeraldcitycon

Don’t forget the lower left side is partially covered by your profile photo. 

Which brings me to:

PROFILE PHOTO

This is a smaller, square image that appears on your profile and also next to every tweet you make. In many cases if your audience is looking at twitter from their mobile phones, your profile image will be quite small. Make sure that this image is VERY simple and clear. a simplified version of your logo is best. 

One artist that does this well is KaNO : https://twitter.com/kaNO

One company that also does this well is MPH: https://twitter.com/_myplasticheart

If you have a brand, you should ALWAYS have a great simplified version of your logo that would work well on a 1-color printed t-shirt or a business card. The same simple 1-color logo can be used as your Twitter profile pic. Consistency is key to brand building. Spend some time developing this simple logo for yourself and use it everywhere.

PROFILE NAME

I’m not sure what this is officially called, but it’s the words you can type in and change at any time that show above your Twitter handle. Your handle is the thing that has the @ sign in front of it. You can’t change the handle whenever you want. You can change the descriptive name/words preceding it at any time. 

One artist that does this frequently is Riff Raff aka Jody Highroller: https://twitter.com/jodyhighroller

(At the time I wrote this, unfortunately, he has his profile name as Jody Highroller, which is unusual. He changes it daily or weekly to something weird, like NEON PANTHER. When you read this post, it may be different.) Riff Raff’s buddy @andymilonakis changes up his Twitter name up frequently as well.

For myself, I find that changeability quite useful. For instance, during New York Comic Con, I change the profile name for my @tenacioustoys account to indicate my booth number. Relevant info that I want people to be able to see immediately, without even visiting my profile. When I tweet during NYCC, my tweets start out reading like this: “NYCC Booth 208 @tenacioustoys - Jason @freeny signing in our booth in 30 minutes!” I don’t even have to write the booth # in the tweet because it’s already there in my profile name.

Most of the time I just leave it as Tenacious Toys, so that people are reaffirmed that it is in fact my account they are looking at. I change it during events.

PROFILE DESCRIPTION

This is the place where you can type the most. USE EVERY DAMN CHARACTER they give you! Don’t short change yourself, this is VERY valuable keyword real estate. Fill it out. Write very very specifically about who you are and what you do. 

You can even type website links in here - I recommend setting up a short link for your site or shop or gallery so that you can share the link and it takes up as few characters as possible. For instance, I bought tenacious.toys to help shorten my domain by 3 characters. My main website is tenacioustoys.com and it has always been there at that domain. However, when .toys came out I was afforded the opportunity to shorten that domain. There are TONS of new extensions available like that, go to GoDaddy and search them. The shorter your chortling is, the better. You keep your regular website at the longer domain and simply set up a redirect that sends visitors to your short link domain immediately to your main domain. It’s pretty cheap and very easy to set up.

If you have a few different links, type one in the description and the other place down below where Twitter officially asks for your website. 

Make sure you type relevant keywords in your profile description: your actual name, what type of business you run, what you sell. Check my @tenacioustoys profile - I want you to see both the usage of 2 different links, as well as the keywords I worked in.

One of the brands we carry is called “coarse toys” - I want my Twitter profile to come up in searches for that brand. 

Go to Twitter, click the Home button. Then do a search (magnifying glass) for coarse toys. See @tenacioustoys pop up under “Top Tweets.” My account also pops up under “art toys” “tokidoki” “kidrobot” etc etc all because I typed those words into my Twitter profile description. Those results are listed at the TOP as the first search result under Top Tweets. Even before the actual tweets. Sweet placement.

Bottom line for description: know what keywords and phrases are the most important for your business and write them in the description. SPELLING IS IMPORTANT because you need to match what you type to what other people normally type in their searches! Punctuation is not important, in this case, except to make the copy easier to read.

You can insert emojis here, but be conservative. Just enough to catch people’s eye as they skim.

LOCATION & WEBSITE LINK

If you have a shop or gallery or business with a specific location that you want people to come to, enter it here. I think you can only be as specific as city, state or country, but not sure. If you have a web business and sell globally, forget that. Instead, use the location field as another text field that references your website link. Writing “Buy prints here” or “Visit our website” are good lead-ins which reference the link, which immediately follows this section. The website link section in twitter is really useful so make sure you fill out both Location and Website fields in your Twitter profile.

OK, that pretty much wraps up the basics of your Twitter account setup, so let’s move on to an overview of what you should actually be doing on Twitter:

HOW TO TWEET

CONTENT

OK so you have a limited number of characters to work with. You really need to make them count. Words in your tweets should be short and to the point. If you are inserting elements like links or images into the tweet, those take up some space so you have even fewer characters you can type. If you have space left over, and you’re tweeting about something really special and sharable, you can end with “Pls RT!” or “Pls comment” or something that encourages audience interactions. 

IMAGES

If you sell things like art or consumer products, you should attach a nice clean image to as many tweets as possible. Most of them. People ALWAYS click on tweets with images more frequently than those without. Regretfully, if you have your IG account set up to automatically feed your IG posts to your Twitter, when the post reaches twitter, the images won’t appear! So annoying! I used to do the auto-tweet thing on my IG posts, but then it just because silly to me to have Tweets without images. So I post to IG and Twitter separately when the post is really important - because I want my Twitter followers to SEE the image appear in their feed on Twitter. And this only happens when you compose a new tweet in Twitter and upload a photo. 

You might be able to get the IG images to post up in Twitter if you use a 3rd party social media delivery system like dlvr.it or IFTTT. You’ll have to experiment with those to see if you can get the Tweets to look right.

HASHTAGS

Use them! Use a few relevant hashtags in each post: 1 to 3 of them. Any more and it looks stupid. Hashtags allow people who are NOT following you to see your posts. This happens when they search twitter for that hashtag. Yes, there are multiple ways to search Twitter, so familiarize yourself with the ways that people couple possibly use Twitter, and figure out how to harness those actions. When you make up a complex hashtag, it’s useless. #bennylovesarttoys is not useful because no one ever types that as a search. People will search the hashtag #art or #toys a lot more, so use simple, broad appeal words like that. 

There also a concept known as “joining the conversation” which you can use to gain followers. When people are talking about something a lot on twitter, and using certain hashtags frequently, you can join in their conversations by also using the same hashtag. New, and most importantly, relevant Twitter users will be able to see your posts and will learn about you.

A great example of this is the recent launch of the FCTRY (@fctry) Kickstarter for a Bernie Sanders action figure. FCTRY launched this campaign at JUST the right time when a huge number of people were hashtagging #feelthebern and #berniesanders on Twitter. They incorporated those hashtags into their tweets about the product and enjoyed a very strong launch to their Kickstarter campaign. They joined a conversation that was already happening. Don’t force this; your post has to be relevant to the hashtag or else this whole idea just won’t work.

TIMING

I’m terrible at this as I’m too impulsive, but there are good times to tweet, and bad times. The thing is, we all follow a ton of accounts so really people need to be tweeting when we are looking at Twitter or else we won’t see the tweets. So, figure out when your customers are looking at their phones (9-5 usually works on weekdays in your time zone) and tweet during those hours. Artists: many of you stay up really late, getting creative at 3AM. Your customers typically have regular type jobs, so they are asleep when you are creating. Do NOT tweet at 3AM, it’s pointless. Tweet when your customers are awake.

SCHEDULING SERVICES

Hootsuite is one of many companies that offers you the chance to create tweets and schedule them to go out in the future. They also allow you to schedule other social media posts in this way. If you find yourself up all night frequently, try to use a scheduler so that your posts go live at a useful time of day.

I’ve used Hootsuite in the past for a client that runs a walking tour company. We liked to share historical facts via Twitter, and those facts were tied to dates (“on this day in 1886….”). We developed a whole year’s worth of cool facts and I used Hootsuite to set up each post to go out on the proper date and time. A few hours of work and we had a whole year’s worth of Tweets scheduled. 

(Pro tip: If you blog frequently, your blog posts can be turned automatically into Tweets using dlvr.it or IFTTT or any number of other services like that. Blog posts can also be scheduled, so you can get your tweets to deliver at the proper time simply by using the scheduler in your blogging platform. This is in lieu of using a service like Hootsuite)

IMAGES

I covered this above, but just for reference: Images you upload to Twitter should be in the landscape configuration as opposed to portrait. Horizontal (wide) images work better than vertical (tall) images. Twitter will cut the bottom and top off of a vertical image when you are scrolling through the feed. You’d have to click on a tweet containing vertical image in order to reveal the full image. With horizontal images, you can see the full image without clicking. Much better.

FOLLOWS, FOLLOWERS, AUTO DMs

OK so Twitter is a public platform which means data from Twitter is readily available to anyone. SO, unless you are a subversive artist like David Choe, it’s best not to follow porn accounts or hate accounts on Twitter as who you follow is info that’s immediately available to anyone. Be warned.

You can’t control who follows you, except to block annoying followers. Other than that, anyone can follow you. Usually that’s a good thing as more followers is better.

I have read many times that you should follow back as a courtesy. When someone new follows you, you’d follow them as well.

I don’t agree with that at all. When I am followed by a new person, I click on them to see what types of Tweets they post. If their tweets are not relevant to my industry, I do not follow. I can’t be effective on Twitter by following all of my followers. My followers trust me to deliver relevant info to them, and in order to do that I have to be able to quickly view important and relevant toy industry tweets so I can retweet or comment. I cannot do that efficiently if I am viewing tens of thousands of baby pics and meal pics. 

My typical follower is a potential customer and that means they are normal people who tweet a variety of personal things. Unless I know then personally, I don’t follow. If my new follower is an artist or works in the toy industry, I will follow as that could be a glimpse into some insider info that I otherwise might not get. Basically my recommendation is that you follow selectively, or else you risk having a non-useful and non-relevant Twitter feed.

Another concept I’ve heard about and experienced, but never used, is the auto DM. Some accounts that sell stuff will auto-follow you when you follow them, and then send you an automatic DM thanking you for following. Usually they share a link to their website in the auto DM. I’m simply mentioning this as an option that you can set up; I haven’t decided yet whether or not I find that useful or irritating.

There, now you have no excuses not to have a complete Twitter presence. Take 10 minutes and set up your Twitter account completely, and take an extra minute every time you compose a tweet, and you'll see positive results.

- Benny Kline

Please comment below and share this post too! Especially share on Twitter!

VIDEO: Scratch Designs and Sculpts a Tenacious Toys Dog Custom

Scratch (one of our customers) decided she was going to do a one-off custom of our blue dog logo and give it to me!!!!!

All of a sudden I got this frikkin sweet custom in the mail! This piece now lives proudly in the glass case in our apartment. Definitely one of my favorites, along with the Benny/Thor action figures that Kris Dulfer and Jason Chalker made for me!

I am so honored and blessed to have such talented and giving customers, it makes me want to give back more to all of you!

Hmm... now what can I give away? Aside from stickers, which I'm already sending out like a crazy sticker freak...

Check this awesome video which shows a little bit of her sculpting process:

REVIEW: Plastik Surgery Resin Casting Handbook by Matt Lunartik Jones

I had the distinct pleasure today of reading the 20-page "Level One" Plastik Surgery handbook compiled by Matt "Lunartik" Jones. This fun, illustrated guide to beginning resin casting is available for just £12.00 ($18) on the Lunartik site here.

I'm sure Matt knew that I am a great person to review this book. I have a bit of technical knowledge and I've been selling resin toys for several years now, so I deal with the artists that cast the resin on a near-daily basis.

However, I have never actually cast any resin figures myself so some of the details are fuzzy to me, or were, till today.

Most of the artists I work with have all of this book's knowledge, plus more, in their heads, so the book might not offer many new insights to such veteran toymakers.

However, ALL resin toymakers have interested friends, kids, cousins, neighbors' kids, or colleagues who probably want to know more about what is involved in resin casting. This right here is a perfect introductory guide to the process and well worth the small amount of money. Makes a great gift for a budding artist!

The entire handbook is illustrated in Matt's clear, colorful and fun style, with handwritten text that makes it feel almost like an old-school zine, albeit a slick and well-crafted one.

I'm not going to photograph and post up every page of the entire handbook as that would defeat the purpose of this post.

However, I will go through a few key points that I liked about it:

Plastik Surgery goes through the entire process of resin toymaking from inception to delivery of the pieces to the customer, and even a bit after delivery. It's incredibly thorough for only having 20 pages. Just the right combination of text and images on each page- keeps kids and ADHD adults interested, fully describes and illustrates all the points Matt is trying to make.

Here you see all the different sections in the book:

1. Overview
2. Concept Design
3. Model Making
4. Silicone Tool Making
5. Resin Casting
6. Painting and Signing
7. Packing and Selling
8. Supplies and Notes

All of the concepts are explained carefully, even a little bit about color variants and the psychology of collecting, the importance of presentation, and several other key concepts which were surprisingly high-level, and sort of snuck in there without me noticing that they were fairly expert explanations of abstract concepts in toy making and selling.

I think one of my favorite things about this handbook is how frequently Matt suggests you stop for a nice cuppa tea. He's right- you can't rush this stuff and you might as well slow down and enjoy it.

I highly recommend this book. I learned a bunch, and I am excited that this is the "Level One" handbook because it means Matt is planning on producing a "Level Two" follow-up to cover more advanced concepts in toy production.

If you are an artist and you don't really know how to start creating resin pieces, this is definitely the right book for you. One of the most frequent emails I get goes something like this:

"Hey Benny, I'm an artist just starting out and I have this great idea and I want to turn it into a toy. Can you help me?"

Now I have a link to give to these inquiries! Pick up your own copy of Plastik Surgery here. Really, I can't think of a better vehicle to deliver this knowledge to someone. You can even get Matt to customize it with a doodle for an extra 3 quid.

- Benny Kline

Planning for the New Year: A Basic Guide for Self-Employed Toy Artists & Customizers

Ian Ziobrowksi painting a custom Dunny for the Dopevinyl 
Kickstarter intro video - image credit: Jordan Ahern

Happy New Year everyone! As we all look ahead to this new year, we are filled with hope and excited to build upon the successes of last year.

But what does that mean, particularly for self-employed toy artists?

This post is intended to set a direction for toy artists and customizers and give some guidelines about decision-making in 2015. Some of the points I'm going to make will also be useful for artists of all kinds, and other small business owners in general.

Here's what I think you should do:

1. SELF-ASSESSMENT - Assess your sales from this past year. Do you have a list of the pieces you worked on, with the amount of money you sold them for, and what you profited out of each one? If not, work back through your paypal and try to figure it out. Make a list of pieces you made, both sold and unsold. Create a spreadsheet, do it on a piece of paper. I don't care. Anything to better assess what you did in the last 365 days.

2. WATCHING THE BOTTOM LINE - Which pieces made you the most money? Did you make a series of pieces that were particularly successful? Why were they successful? Did you sell a piece for a higher amount of money? And if so, did you profit MORE off of that piece? What I am trying to have you do is figure out what made you the most money (profit, not just gross sales) with the least amount of time/effort spent. This is the type of project you should focus on in the new year. Not 100% of the time, but you should be aware of the types of projects that are best for your bottom line, and do more of them.

I frequently urge my friends to stop creating giant $1500 OOAK sculptural pieces and to start producing runs of 3" resin figures, for example. Why? Because normal people don't have $1500 to drop on a 3 foot tall sculpture. But 90% of collectors DO have $40 or $50 they can drop on a small pieces that have been hand-detailed by you. It's infinitely easier to create, promote, sell and ship 3" pieces, especially when you have 10 or 20 or 50 to sell. This is my businessman side battling with your artistic urges. I know you all WANT to make those epic pieces... but unless you have a buyer lined up, I'd try to keep the epic pieces to a minimum each year. 2 to 6 maybe, if you can sell them. The rest of the year, make sure you have items in the $20 - $100 range to sell. Remember, the buyer that has a great experience with you buying a $10 sticker pack might be the one that comes back and commissions a $1000 piece later.

3. PROMOTION - Which partners helped you the most? Did you collab with someone with a bigger network? Did you sell via a shop or gallery? Was it easy, or profitable? Did they promote you? Who got your name out there the most this year? If you don't know who provided backlinks to your site, try this: Go to Google, type linkto:http://www.yourwebsitename.com in the search box. Then, click on the Search Tools button, and choose "Past Year."

Poke through them, all of them. You'll see who's talking about you. This works for checking backlinks to your website, shop or blog. Any web address.

Backlinks also help you in terms of Google- Google likes sites with more backlinks. So try to get links back to your site / blog / shop on as many OTHER sites as possible. Do this simply by being nice and asking the owner of the site. Nothing underhanded here. Just ask. Any toy blog works, so don't be shy about emailing Andy, Jack, Spanky & Nick, myself, Gary, Chris, Ben & Travis and all the other people who write about toys. If you don't know who all of those people are, and you create custom toys... stop now. Go back to Google. Search for "toy blog" or "art toy blog" and make a list of which ones pop up. There's a limited number. Find an email for each of those blogs. Put the emails on the list. Create a "group" in your email system, or a mailing list, containing the emails of the toy blogs you wish to connect with. EVERY TIME you have pictures of a new piece to show, email the blogger group email list you just made. Give them: clean pics of your piece, description of piece, size, material, backstory, quantity, price and MOST IMPORTANTLY A LINK TO WHERE READERS CAN BUY THAT ITEM.

I can't believe how many of you don't do this regularly and it drives me batshit crazy. If you want to sell stuff online, you have to tell everyone that you have stuff for sale online. And the best people to tell are the people who post shit online all the time and have a big following. Read: the 10 most active art toy blogs. Email them.

Just so you understand the concept of networks, think about it this way: if you are selling your car, would you reach more people by handing out leaflets at the local CVS, or by placing an ad in a national newspaper? Take advantage of the bloggers' larger networks to help promote your work.

I've heard that some of you don't like self-promotion. REALLY? Do you like selling your art? Which one do you like more, cuz unless you have full-time management, or you're represented by a gallery, your ass better start enjoying, or at least practicing, self-promotion. No one is going to hand you success on a silver platter. You have to fight and claw your way into widespread recognition by yourself. Step one of that process is reaching out.

4. SOCIAL TIME - Do you have a personal Facebook page? Great, so do I. Do you have a business page for your art, or a fan page or whatever? You should.
What's the difference, you ask?
Well, say I'm an art collector. I find out about your art, but the only FB link I can find is to your personal page. You post pics of your artwork, sure, but also pics of you and your friends drinking, some fried chicken, how angry you are at your ex, how no one buys your art, and a picture of the street because it's raining.

WHO. THE. FUCK. CARES.

If I'm a prospective art buyer, I literally give zero fucks about your chicken and rainy days.

Show me the damn art. Gimme a link where I can buy it.

Start a FB business page, keep a FIRM divide between the types of stuff you post on your personal page (all kittens and chicken) and the art you post on your business page. Business page is ALL BUSINESS: new items, promotions, WIP shots, cons you attended (no fried chicken pics please, we all go out to eat after cons, no one cares), etc etc.

Many artists create a reality - an alternate personality or a whole alternate universe - online to support their art. I'm thinking: FriendsWithYou, tokidoki, Vamplets, shawnimals, Suckadelic... there are thousands of others. They do not post about their art products as regular people who eat fried chicken, they post IN CHARACTER as an entity that exists in a world they have created. I'm not saying all of you need to go this far, but I am saying that there can and should be a divide between your own personal life, and the worlds you are creating in your artwork. Unless your artwork is inherently tied to your physical person and your real personality in some way, there' no reason why your art clients need to know about how cute your kitty is and your thoughts on Obama.

On that note, here's one I need to practice as well: seriously stop dicking around on Facebook. Add up all that time, over a year, posting stupid crap to your personal page and surfing your news feed, and you've just clocked in your LEAST productive year ever.

Get on FB for 15 minutes a day: spend 10 uploading pics of your artwork to your business page and captioning/tagging them properly with LOTS of info and links, spend 5 minutes responding to FB messages, then log off. Any more and you are seriously wasting your life away.

See what I'm doing right now? I'm making a valuable blog post. I AM spending my time on this. Guess what? As soon as I hit Publish, it's sent to my FB business page! Automatic update. So easy. It's also sent to my business Twitter, my Tumblr and Google+, and packaged into an email that's sent to my blog email list subscribers. If you don't understand how to have that done automatically, let me know in the comments and maybe I'll make another blog post about just that type of system.

The benefit of making this post on a blog as opposed to on FB is that Google searches my blog for content and does not search Facebook for content (April 2015 edit: Facebook business page info is now searchable on Google). Blogs are inherently more useful than Facebook for that reason. The Facebook search feature (for content associated with keywords) sucks. So no one ever uses it. Everyone searches Google.

TL;DR - 

1. Analyze your sales.
2. Figure out what made the most money with the least effort and do more of that.
3. Figure out who promoted you and court them.
4. Get serious about harnessing social media and web content to steer your business.

I hope that helps you focus a bit in the new year. Sorry I got all ranty. (edit: I am no longer sorry) Please leave a comment and let me know if this was helpful, and if I missed anything you wanted to hear about.

How-To: Image Management for Artists Selling Online

TENACIOUS TUTORIAL

One issue in my line of work that pops up more often than most is image management. I deal with a lot of images of artwork (in my case, toys) coming from artists. And so I spend a lot of time fixing those images up for use on the web. One image is easy. But editing 100 images becomes an all-day affair.

I want to remind artists that if your intention is to sell your artwork on the internet, your work is only half done when you have completed your piece. The next half of the process is taking proper images and sending them to the proper people in the proper manner such that they might be efficiently posted to the internet to sell the item.

Many times I will get an email, and just opening that email up in my mail program will take forever.

Why?

Well, for one thing, my computer is a little outdated. And until our new one arrives in a few days, I'll dealing with a machine without a lot of RAM or disk space. But the real reason this type of email opens slowly is that it might contain 10 images which are are 10MB each, so my poor old machine is trying to open up 100MB of images just to show me the email.
Not an issue for many people working on brand new machines, but certainly an issue that many people deal with. This week, it's me. (edit: working on my new computer now, but principle still applies)

The second downside to these giant emails comes when I start working. By working, I mean I need to take those images the artists send to me, and I need to change them in several ways to make them web-ready.

Common Issue #1: The images are huge.
I cannot upload images bigger than 2MB to my Blogger blog, or pics above 1MB to my website. Each of those sites has a limit to the size of the images it'll allow me to upload. If you send me an image that's 180dpi (dots per inch) and it's 25 inches tall, guess what? You just sent me a 45MB image. Too big. My next step, therefore, is downloading all those images to my hard drive and opening up Photoshop, and opening ALL those images in Photoshop. I then have to individually change the image sizes for all the images. I could do this en mass in iPhoto, saving time, but when I'm in Photoshop, I need to do a few more things, so Photoshop is my tool.

Common Issue #2: The images do not have titles.
This is the problem for me: the images are all of different pieces, and each piece has a title, yet all the images have filenames that have been unaltered from the time they left the camera. Images titled "IMG_0934.jpg" tell me nothing. And if I am putting many items up for sale at once, I'd have to retitle the images so I can figure out what is what. I have tens of thousands of images on my hard drive. Their titles must be descriptive.

Common Issue #3: Crappy photography.
The images are dark, blurry, too close-up, or have multicolored backgrounds. Please use sufficient lighting, step a bit away from the piece so your camera can focus, and use a seamless, even if it's a makeshift seamless made out of a piece of white paper. That works fine, and it's what I use. I don't own a "real" seamless. It's very hard for me to fix blurry images. For distracting backgrounds, I can sometimes remove them but that takes me 5-10 minutes per image if no seamless is used. Do not take pictures on your lawn, outside with complicated backgrounds, or standing on something dark colored when the wall behind is white. Help me sell your art and give me clean backgrounds.

I can lighten and adjust color balance and contrast and a number of other factors, but all of those steps take time. Repeat them 40 times a day and a significant chunk of my time is used up. If part of the cost of running a toy shop is calculated based on the value of my time, then my margins are SIGNIFICANTLY diminished or eliminated if I spend an hour editing images of an artist's work.

There's lots more to discuss but for now, that will help all of us sell more art online.

SUMMARY:
To sum up, for those of you who are taking pictures of art with the intention of selling it online:

1. All images MUST be 1MB or smaller if they are being used online. In general I find that 72dpi images measuring 6 x 8 inches work fine. That results in a 700MB image. Just big enough for web users to see the piece, small enough that it'll upload and download fine.

2. Title your images on your own computer before attaching them to emails. This will help you organize, and it will help the recipient of those emails organize. Give them a title like ARTISTNAME.titleofpiece.jpg or something to that effect.

3. Take good pictures. Mini tripods can be as cheap as $10. Buy one. No more blurry images. Use proper lighting, preferably from 2 angles. Use a seamless to remove the background and make it uniform.


We're trying to SELL your art here, and the image is all the customer has to go on. Let's make the images GREAT!

I understand that many artists cannot afford to buy Photoshop. But your computer probably came with some sort of basic image editing software (Macs come with iPhoto) so please explore that and learn how to use it. If you have no clue what to do with a digital image once it leaves your camera and gets to your computer, please ask one of your friends for a lesson.