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Message: <blockquote data-quote="J-H" data-source="post: 9548267" data-attributes="member: 7020951">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."</blockquote>

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