Not Quite Eisner

Whoops, haven’t used this thing in forever. Now I’ve finally finished all that dang NDA work, maybe I can start posting stuff here again.

emilykcomicsmith asked: I buy most of the gear for the kids' games myself, and as I'm sure you know, dice and minis and books for upwards of 15 kids ain't cheap. For what it's worth, most people are fine with you reflagging or sharing their stuff - just ask them first, and provide a link to their site or social media page. For a lot of us, me included, those lost views can make the difference between paying for medication and utilities.

paintmeahero:

I refuse to believe that my post has resulted in you losing money for medication and utilities.  This post, and indeed your twitter story has nothing to do with your art. I haven’t taken anything from you. When I reposted it, I didn’t shave your name off the screencaps, or pretend it was my story. It takes no time for someone to go to twitter to look at you, and then perhaps to follow your link. I know for a fact that people have done this because I look at the stuff they’ve been adding to the post. 

 Mike Mearls’ original re-tweet brought attention to your twitter as well, did you accuse him of taking money away from you, or am I special because I’m not famous? I can edit the original post, but no reblogs will have the edit, as far as I know. 

Ok. 

First of all, there is a HUGE difference between retweeting a thread on a social media platform (twitter) and screencapping that same thread and posting it on a different social media platform (tumblr) without adding a link to the original post/poster. People could (and did) follow Mike’s retweet back to me with the click of a button. When not given a link to follow, many people don’t engage further, resulting in lost views. I, and many other freelance artists, rely on views and circulation to gain commissions. When you don’t link back to us, we lose views and thus we lose commissions. 

That post has a great deal to do with my art - I pay for gear for the kids with commission money. A lot of the commissions I do are pieces of people’s dungeons and dragons characters, the sort of piece that might interest the sort of people that like and share a tweet thread about D&D. 

Freelance artists live hand to mouth, and use our social media to advertise ourselves and our work. Not crediting or sourcing posts represents a huge loss of income around the world for these artists. It’s not just me, and it’s not just you. This is an endemic problem.