Art for DM's Guild publications

[J-H]

I know some people are putting out full-fledged illustrated books on the DM's Guild, complete with lots of art. Examples include the Hell-themed Asmodeus one last year, the Honkonomicon, and more. At the high end with the right team and a near-guarantee of selling a couple of thousand copies, there's obviously some way to get a lot of art done within the budget.

Then there's the rest of us - the solo operators. I have published a number of items on the DM's Guild. My best seller is Silver (>150 copies) over a 4 year timespan.

I have another campaign fully written, but it's still in playtesting (it's taking 2 years to playtest a 2-to-10 module via PBP - but I only have 1 IRL game and it's busy). I would love to have a few 3D maps or images showing certain locations that are hard to map in Inkarnate or have 3D elements, like the half-sunken flooded castle, the fortress monastery in the middle of a lake, and the crashed Illithid UFO.

Unfortunately, I don't see how to have an art budget for this.

Most of my small modules (1-2 session adventures) have sold less than 20 copies, and brought in less than $20 each in the last two years.
My Silver paid me $379 over the last two years.

How can I move beyond AI art, and get someone to do a nice 3D drawing or rendering? I don't want to ask for 3-5 hours of work for $10, but I also don't want to spend $200 on art for something that's going to take two years just to pay for the art.work. I also don't want to split 25% of the revenue from a 100 page campaign off to someone who "just" did 3 or 4 art pieces when I did all of the designing, writing, playtesting, editing, etc.

How does the pipeline for commissioning art like this work? How does anyone make money doing it? Where would I go, and how would I get art like this done without either spending substantially more than I make or offering terms no rational person would accept?

I feel like either I'm missing some pieces of knowledge, or that the answer is "Either you spend money to publish, or you do all the art yourself."

 

[Morrus]

How does the pipeline for commissioning art like this work? How does anyone make money doing it? Where would I go, and how would I get art like this done without either spending substantially more than I make or offering terms no rational person would accept?

I feel like either I'm missing some pieces of knowledge, or that the answer is "Either you spend money to publish, or you do all the art yourself."

What you're saying is that the business model is not (ethically) viable. And that, unfortunately, is often true. Which is why people turn to unethical models--AI art, underpaying, exploitation of artists, and so on. It's a crappy situation all round.

However, there are options--stock art is usually inexpensive, and I believe DMs Guild allows you to use WotC's own art? Or at least some of it?

Another big option is Kickstarter. Work out what it costs to ethically make your product, and then try to fund it on a crowdfunding platform. If it doesn't fund, then that's valuable information--the market isn't there for that product. If it does, you have the funds you need to do all the art and stuff you need! You can't sell it on DMsG then, but you can sell it on DTRPG and other platforms, sell print-on-demand versions, and so on. Plus Kickstarter only takes 5% of your earnings compared to DMsG's--is it 50%? Your profit margin is way higher.

I'm sure others will have more suggestions, but Kickstarter is my recommendation. Your example is exactly what the platform was designed for.

 

[Marc Radle]

Morrus makes great points and excellent suggestions!

 

[J-H]

Thank you Morrus!

Yes, the DM's Guild does allow use of art from a certain subset of books, and has consolidated that art into several free ZIP files. It's primarily from 3.0/3.5 books; I have recognized pieces from Libris Mortis, BOVD, and one of the Monster Manuals. It's pretty slim pickings. They explicitly disallow everything outside of that content. There are also a few art packs you can buy on the DM's Guild for use in your publications, but most are character portraits or maps.
I used stock art for one cover (a crashed UFO), but it's hard to find anything specific, and a lot of what I saw looked AI-generated anyway.

Kickstarter requires a lot of work with advertising, marketing, mailing lists, etc., to be successful. Between work, farm, family, and church, I don't have enough time and energy to properly run a Kickstarter, even if it led to a 50% profitability increase.

I would want to partner with someone to publish campaigns or modules via Kickstarter. I've had the impression that your team at EN has plenty of contributors and doesn't typically solicit outside work to publish. If that's not the case, or if there's someone else I ought to look at working with, please let me know.

In the meantime, what does an artist charge for a nice-looking map or 3Dish drawing of an exploration site? It seems like someone with the right tools could whip something out in an hour or two, but I am fully aware that "seems" and "is" are two different things.

 

[Morrus]

Kickstarter requires a lot of work with advertising, marketing, mailing lists, etc., to be successful. Between work, farm, family, and church, I don't have enough time and energy to properly run a Kickstarter, even if it led to a 50% profitability increase.

Sadly, to sell decent numbers of anything you need reach. People can’t buy your stuff if they don’t know about it, no matter where it is — DMsG, KS, Amazon, your own web store. I believe that of the available options KS makes that job easier, not harder.

But yes, publishing requires time and energy however you do it. Nothing’s free! I don’t want to be a downer, but your question seems to amount to “how do I publish if I don’t have the time, energy, or resources to publish?”

Sorry! That sounds more negative than I wanted it to. But there’s no magic wand. I still think KS is the answer to your problem, but if that’s too much work then I’m not sure what else to suggest.

As for the cost of art, I wrote this article a while back. It might be of help:

Self Publishing: What's An Artist Worth?

If you're like many other folks who have recently delved into the foray of self-publishing 5E products, you've probably quickly realised that art is expensive (actually, I dislike using that term - it's not expensive for what it is). Some people are lucky enough to have artistic talent which...

www.enworld.org

 

[Sacrosanct]

Publishers today have it so much nicer than us Indie publisher when we started 20 years ago, or even since 2016 in regards to art. There are tons of options for stock art now that are very affordable. DTRPG is the place to go. And it's really good quality: Dean Spencer, Eric Lofgren, JE Shields, etc.

IMO, there is no real reason for anyone to use AI art in publishing. I dipped my toe into those waters a couple years ago when it first came out, learned a lot since then (from artists), and won't touch it going forward. For a lot of reasons. Even if you set aside the ethical and potential legal issues, there is so much inexpensive quality stock art now that you don't need to.

If you do reach out to artists, I would also avoid anything about exposure or royalties. Just pay them their rate. I know you asked about a nice looking map, but the cost of art is so varied, there really isn't a way to give you a good idea. It could be $200 or $2000, depending on who is doing it, how complex you want it, and a million other things.

Basically, making a game costs money. Like any other product. If you want a professional looking product and exposure, you're going to have to pay for it. Most of us spend a ton of time doing a lot of it ourselves to save costs. The less time you want to spend on a project, the more it's going to cost you getting someone else to do it. And in this industry with tiny margins, you really need to consider if it's worth doing that way.

 

[J-H]

But yes, publishing requires time and energy however you do it. Nothing’s free! I don’t want to be a downer, but your question seems to amount to “how do I publish if I don’t have the time, energy, or resources to publish?”

Sorry! That sounds more negative than I wanted it to. But there’s no magic wand. I still think KS is the answer to your problem, but if that’s too much work then I’m not sure what else to suggest.

As for the cost of art, I wrote this article a while back. It might be of help:

Self Publishing: What's An Artist Worth?

If you're like many other folks who have recently delved into the foray of self-publishing 5E products, you've probably quickly realised that art is expensive (actually, I dislike using that term - it's not expensive for what it is). Some people are lucky enough to have artistic talent which...

www.enworld.org

You're not entirely wrong with that interpretation! This is just a hobby I'm doing for fun and creativity; if it becomes too much work, it's definitely not worth it to me. However, if I'm doing something, I want to do it well.

I might do better trying to find whoever is publishing anthologies and working with them. I've had some oddly specific-themed modules (ever had a 5e party fight a farm tractor? I have), although everything already on the DMG is too late to include.

Thanks for the article link. It answered my entire post and then some!

Publishers today have it so much nicer than us Indie publisher when we started 20 years ago, or even since 2016 in regards to art. There are tons of options for stock art now that are very affordable. DTRPG is the place to go. And it's really good quality: Dean Spencer, Eric Lofgren, JE Shields, etc.

Thanks, I had not thought about checking DTRPG. I'm 5e only and hadn't looked beyond the DM's Guild.

If you do reach out to artists, I would also avoid anything about exposure or royalties. Just pay them their rate. I know you asked about a nice looking map, but the cost of art is so varied, there really isn't a way to give you a good idea. It could be $200 or $2000, depending on who is doing it, how complex you want it, and a million other things.

I've read enough on NotAlwaysRight to know better than to ask about exposure or royalty Artists and photographers seem to get the short end of that stick the most.
If you're good at art, you make it look easy, and if it's easy and fast, then it must be cheap and anyone can do it, right? It's just Photoshop! (and ten years of practice - you pay for the ten years, not the one hour of work)

 

[ART!]

If you do reach out to artists, I would also avoid anything about exposure or royalties. Just pay them their rate. I know you asked about a nice looking map, but the cost of art is so varied, there really isn't a way to give you a good idea. It could be $200 or $2000, depending on who is doing it, how complex you want it, and a million other things.

I've read enough on NotAlwaysRight to know better than to ask about exposure or royalty Artists and photographers seem to get the short end of that stick the most.
If you're good at art, you make it look easy, and if it's easy and fast, then it must be cheap and anyone can do it, right? It's just Photoshop! (and ten years of practice - you pay for the ten years, not the one hour of work)

Absolutely, all of this! I'm an artist (with a background in commercial art and illustration) and my wife is an artist (with a background in fine art), and even I have been guilty of not thinking it through and asking an artist friend if they could just whip something up real quick for me for free!

No one should be asked or expected to work for less than they're worth - including you!

Re Kickstarter (or other crowdfunding): you can pay someone to manage your crowdfunded project, but of course that costs money, too.

 

[ART!]

This is now a thing, too: The Public Domain Image Archive! You can browse by category, plus they also have an "infinite view" mode where you can just scroll through random images forever-ish.

 

[LordEntrails]

So I'm in a similar situation. I'm not publishing RPG content for a living but I want to do it ethically and in a way that does not undercut those who do publish RPG materials for a living. Even though I'm not an artist, I've been able to do all the maps (300+) of them myself using Campaign Cartographer. I've been able to gather other open source interior art (portraits, a few items, etc) from CC-SA-BY or CC0, or similar licenses. And I've acquired some stock art from sources listed above as well.

The one piece of art I decided I had to spend money on was the cover image. And here I looked through sites like Deviant Art etc and reached out to various artists (And only heard back from one) about the possibility of licensing existing art they had. The intent here was to get something they already had created and had not been used on other products that would look good, but not cost what a commissioned piece would. Now, I got lucky, and a friend who has been helping me with editing my adventure has a young cousin who agreed to do the cover for me for my budget. I'm thrilled with the cover they did. And for my next project I hope this one makes enough I can spend more on art for the next one. We shall see.

TLDR: lots of free and low cost ethical resources for interior art. What money you do have to spend, spend it on the cover image.

p.s. I did use CC0 content from the British Art Museum for my first cover. Took a lot of searching to find something I liked, but it's there and public domain.