As some of you may know, I have created artwork in various forms, most of it 18+/NSFW. However, it's not selling and I honestly haven't a clue why. Clearly, there's a problem somewhere, but I don't know exactly where it lies ... I hope it isn't marketing (or a lack thereof), because then I'm fucked, seeing as I'm doing that by myself without help. No doubt, reading some of the digital marketing eBooks sitting in my library would be of some use here.

There's got to be a market for my digital art somewhere and some means by which to move/sell it, one way or another; I just haven't found it yet. It may require finding the right NFT marketplace (or even building my own), but I'd prefer to avoid kissing a lot of frogs to find a prince if I can help it. After all, I did promise Dave Sawyer and PVM I'd gift them some of it ... I suppose I could build an eCommerce portal for my art on my Website, but I don't necessarily want my art associated with my professional business of building people's Websites. Perhaps biting the bullet and purchasing an unstoppable domain (maybe hosting it on IPFS) is something I should look into as well.

Since Deviant Art no longer caters to deviants, Vixxi is sadly no more, I'm having trouble selling NFTs on OpenSea and SolSea (possibly due to technical issues with those platforms; I can't even mint NFTs and gift them to people whom can circulate them and get my name out), my Weasyl account probably still hasn't been activated despite having created it about a month ago (I haven't looked recently, but don't expect feedback on that) and I can't remember the name of the other Web3 site at which I looked (which might be defunct, anyway)... I wonder if it's time to go back to trying to promote my artwork on Patreon in the hope people subscribe. I might be able to do the same with BMC, but I haven't really played with it or got to grips with it as much as I have with Patreon; it seems a bit of a waste of time for me to do so if I have no subscribers.

I suppose it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, really: Do I post some of the promotional content (as below), which I've done before without much success, and hope people like it enough to subscribe, or do I push them to subscribe and then post content once they have, until such time as they stop? I'm not at all sure of what's optimal here. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? I just wonder at what point taking that approach becomes foolhardy and a waste of time. I'd ask on Stack Exchange, except my post would probably violate guidelines and get closed/deleted for the infraction. I'd ask on My Lot, except that my account got banned for promoting my content and including an outbound link. (I wonder if I'd be permitted to promote my content if I gave explicit directions/instructions on how to find it, but without actually directly linking to it. That seems a bit convoluted and contrived to me.) Ah, the joys of working within the constraints of Web 2.0 ...

Those options might be worth a shot (even though I don't like that they're Web 2.0 and linked to PayPal, which takes up to 8% of my earnings after the sites take their cut). However, the other options which I've tried so far seem to be a dead end and some income is better than none, if I can get it...  Any takers? Knowing how things have gone before, I suspect not. I would be pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong, of course.

There is of course the issue of how to digitally sign/watermark my content in such a way that the identification of it as my creation can't be easily tampered with or removed once it has been purchased, but that's currently a secondary issue to the fact that it's not selling in the first place. I'm sure there must be ways, including steganography (since EXIF data can be stripped and often is), although I don't know if resampling/down-scaling by sites that use it has any impact on that. So many things to consider and investigate just to hopefully make some money/crypto, so little time ...

Maybe I should just go ahead and create a Deviant Art account anyway, upload the tame promotional content and make it clear where to go to get the far more explicit/racier stuff while I wait for it to be removed and my account banned. That seems to be what other people do and how they drive visitors to Patreon. That might work for a while. Of course, there's always making promotional videos and putting them on YouTube and Vimeo as well. The filters it employs for adult/sexually explicit and/or suggestive content seem to be highly inaccurate (judging by the fact the Wheeler Walker Jnr's Puss in Boots features porn stars with bare breasts and isn't censored, but the original music video I made for Dark Heroine is really not very racy but somehow got age restricted).

A sample artwork (with watermark) of some of the tamer content on offer, since this post cannot be marked as NSFW  

Believe me; there is a great deal more content sitting on my HDD at the moment and it is definitely far more explicit than this (some of it even blatantly pornographic, because one of the tools I use doesn't just permit that, it seems incapable of generating anything else unless given very clear instructions to keep it clean and even then it often fails at that). However, what I've got is definitely not going to see the light of day unless I can keep it locked behind an 18+/Explicit content/NSFW filter and/or paywall of some kind. (That's why I was hoping to be able to get my Weasyl account activated, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon, unfortunately.)

I will admit that I am somewhat annoyed that I can't access my account on Night Café, supposedly for technical issues regarding my gallery and the images therein. Given that some of them are rather risqué, I suspect they violate the terms of use and my account has been perma-banned. Frankly, I think that's pretty stupid, since I was simply leveraging the capabilities of the AI to get it to render content. It's not my fault that it did things that its creators don't like or want it to. If anything, the fault lies with them for not preventing/restricting it from doing so. After all, it's a given that people are going to use technologies in ways its creators never anticipated/intended and the only truly effective way to stop them is ultimately to remove those capabilities.

Thumbnail image: Cartoon illustration of Tori Black X Emma Watson as Kim Possible in a black catsuit, gloves and cat ears, holding a cat mask