News item #1 – I’m working on a bunch of things on itch.IO including updates to existing 3d asset packs, a massive overhaul of the older textures from 2013, a new European texture pack [built from photography I took myself in Austria, Switzerland and Germany due to a trip I was invited on in 2023] and a North Africa/Middle East 3d asset pack. Now, despite attempting to have that all in place for a launch sale at the very end of January, clearly that fell apart as the end of that month approached. Everything’s fallen behind (so far, so typical) but I’m still working on all these things and they should be done in February now, not January. Some of them are really close now.
News item #2 – Etsy activity’s slowed dramatically post-2023. That means I have more time to work on asset collections and new product creation (papercraft kits and more) for Etsy, work on website updates which is not trivial, there’s a ton of outdated stuff online and things which need overhauling, fixing. And then on top of all of that, a bit of video reworking for a relaunch of HornbostelVideos.com soon, and ongoing work on a list of game dev projects. So really about 20 broad efforts in progress, each with a list of usually a few dozen subtasks [give or take] like making a really good new textured 3d model start to finish, or processing a batch of texture maps in a subfolder, reworking a web page, etc… the sort of things that can take maybe 3-5 hours each to get done. There are something like 1200 of these tasks queued. In time terms, it’s easily a year or more of stuff to do even setting aside the unknowns like how many people will place print orders on Etsy – orders that finance other work but also add to the queue and delay everything else in terms of the timing. If Etsy sale activity slows, as it has slowed lately, that is the time to try to get some of those tasks in the queue churned through. And I’ve been doing just that, including the creation of a few new paintings to fill in Etsy shop categories which were a bit sparse. I made some relationship/romance themed art recently for the purpose of Valentine’s Day but now it’s too late for that stuff to be shipped to anyone by that day… nonetheless I’ll show you that now.
News item #3) I’m going to be keeping sale discounts fairly modest on the popular Etsy print service listings from now on – usually only 10-20% discounts, at most, with other items that nobody really ever buys, sometimes going to as low as 25, 30, 45% off, possibly 50% in very rare cases. We’ll note – custom bookmark designs, poster prints, the most typically purchased stuff that sold constantly in 2023, all those things are now about 12-18% more expensive than they were at the end of 2023. So even when on sale, they’ll never drop as low as they did during the Halloween 2023 sale.
That – massive discounts across the shop at the time of a holiday spike in activity – was a disastrous incident, and it won’t happen again. Not only will the products that sold TOO FAST for me to keep up with demand no longer be as cheap, but the sales that do occur will usually not coincide with big end-of-year holidays ever again. So if you want a thing relating to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Christmas or New Years… don’t expect any discounts at any of those times. Do expect occasional random sales to appear seemingly out of nowhere and disappear just as unexpectedly, at seemingly random points not tied to any major holidays. This will drive many people nuts but the hope is to even out activity year-round to whatever extent is possible. And not announcing the start or end widely? Helps smooth out buying activity. Part of why the prior sales went horribly was the massive awareness of the sale coming up, and its end day and a rapid surge of buyers all in a single day right before sale end. This sort of wildly uneven buyer activity concentrated in just a handful of days out of the entire year, meant that there were weeks of nothing happening, and weeks where I was so flooded with orders that many of those were severely, unacceptably delayed. I wound up refunding hundreds of dollars of orders and sending a massive volume of apology messages to worried, upset people. If you are following my social media accounts closely you might see a bit of info on imminent sales once in a while in one spot or another, but mostly it won’t be widely displayed. I will say this – there are going to be two sales on Etsy this month. One of them is pretty short, and it is just starting right about now. The other lasts a few days, and is later in February.
Again, the links I discussed:
