My personal story of starting to sell maps

[7Sided]

I hope to encourage everyone on the forum with my experience selling my artwork and pursuing this interest as a business.

I have been pursuing a side business in roleplaying games since August. In fact, I joined the July/August Lite Challenge with the intent of creating a product to sell. Then I skipped the August/September challenge to focus on getting my map ready to sell. Now that I've created the product templates for my maps, I can quickly get a finished map into product form. Currently, I have two maps for sale at DriveThruRPG.com and a third that is in product form but I'm giving away for free as a newsletter signup incentive. The first map is the Giant Hunters Hideout (from the July/August challenge) and the second is Dracula's Castle (which I hope I submitted in time to be included in the Horror sale!). I only have sold about 6 copies each, but I have done zero on the marketing side. So my next step is to start to develop my email newsletter marketing and eventually drive traffic to sell maps from my own website.

Anyway, I am starting small but I just wanted to encourage anyone who has considered marketing their maps to give it a shot! It's not exactly "easy" but with some diligence and hard work I think it is attainable!

For those who have sold your artwork, what has your experience been? If you have wanted to but haven't yet, what's holding you back?

Thanks again for the supportive community here!

[davedowd]

Back in the day I created many playable maps for the HalfLife engine (Day of Defeat in particular). I sold a few to clans that wanted customized maps for their servers. I quickly realized though the amount of hours it took to create something like that would require a final purchase price that worked out to below minimum wage. I am not saying you can't make money doing mapping but it may be hard for most people to make a full living off of it. I am sure there are folks that can, and living in an area with a lower cost of living would make it easier. I imagine it is similar to writers, most work at it part time while working a full or part time job doing mundane work to pay the bills.

That said I known of a graphic artist working in San Francisco making $100k a year (which has an extremely high cost of living.)

[Gamerprinter]

I've got 35 map products offered on my DrivethruRPG publisher page, and I will be releasing adventure modules soon, written by known author/game designers that are basing their modules on maps I've already published and sell. I've been doing that for a couple years now. In the meantime I regularly do map commissions for publishers. So you don't need to encourage me, I've been doing this for a while now.

I even offer map tutorials guide book from the same page.