A warning and a praise

[razzek.livejournal.com]

First, the warning. I'm following thornwolf's example here and warning you all about commissioning me. While I'm trying to get better about this, I am not the best person to commission. I take forever to do the work and, lately, I have a horrendous track record with sending out finished pieces and prints. Part of the mailing problem is because I can't get to a post office with any sort of ease, but mostly it's just me forgetting that I have things to put in the mail. When commissioning me, I tend to be on the forgetful side (I fully encourage commissioners to e-mail me, IM me and pester me in general so I'll remember what I'm supposed to be doing).

At this time, I'm not accepting commissions for anything until I finish with the large amount of them I've let pile up. In the future, I'm thinking I'll only accept one commission at a time, which should help. :P If anyone has any advice on how I can improve my bad habits, I'd love to hear it.

Now for the praise. just2draw is an excellent commissioner. He's been more than patient with me over the past four months I've been doing work for him. He even bought me a scanner in exchange for an additional commission so I could show him the progress I was making. He's been very supportive throughout the whole process. His characters are also a joy to work with. If you ever get a commission request from him, don't turn him down. :)

Comments

[kaputotter.livejournal.com]

I can reccomend a few things...

1) get a Gmail account. It has saved my BUTT on many an occaision and I would not be able to hold the amount of commissions at one time that I'm doing now without it. Never having to delete an e-mail ever again, in conjuction with using the search engine, is extremely helpful because it means never having to again ask a client to repeat the details of what they want you to draw for them, or their address, or anything. Also, there are the tag features and the star feature, which lets you customize and categorize your messages. You can then order them by classification to view all categorized messages at once. For example, if you know something is urgent, mark it urgent; when you click the urgent tab, all relevant messages show up. This will help you remember who's waiting for something (and possibly, what they're waiting for!)

It's the INTARNET.

2) Get some sort of set up, outside of e-mail, where you can keep track of who wants what and for how much (etc.) Posting on LiveJournal is a bad idea because it's limited and you want to include as much information as possible. Same thing for websites, plus the added complication of it not being as easy to update on the fly. (Plus -- this is just my opinion -- it's better to keep that information confidential anyway.)

I reccomend OpenOffice.org. It's better than Microsoft Word, I swear to god. It has a spreadsheet ability. I use the spreadsheet to keep track of: who the client is; how much money they owe me; how much they've paid me; when they've paid me; when I've completed the commission; when the commission was mailed. And so on.

3) Have your mailing materials ready *BEFORE* you even start. I bought a box of 9x12" envelopes at Costco -- it was like, 200 envelopes for $15 or something crazy like that. Costco is also good for me in the cardboard department; near their recycling center is a bin of cardboard that would ordinarily be recycled, but I claim it and trim it to mailing size to protect my artwork in the mail. It makes people happy to see that their artwork wasn't bent, believe me. So have a bunch of that on hand so you don't have to either run around trying to find some, or swallow your pride and pay $2.50 for the cardboard-packed Ready-Post envelopes the USPS offers. :P I also have custom mailing labels with my logo on it ready to stick on real quick. That way all you need to do is write their address on there, jump to the post office, and send it off.

Any Qs?

[auradeva.livejournal.com]

Those are helpful tips for all of us! I tried making my own spread sheet and sticking it on my wall to keep track of clients and I ran out of time to update it and it became more tedious than balancing a check book >.<

There's a Costco down the street that I never go to! EEE!! I just ran out of cardboard today! Do you need a Costco card to get to their recycling center?

[kaputotter.livejournal.com]

Aw hell, you don't need a Costco card to even BUY stuff there. I don't even know why the Nazis check it. They'll let you buy merchandise, they'll just dump a surcharge on you when you buy it is all. (I'm not sure how much the surcharge is, but!)

Yeah, if you just say "I'm here to get some recycling", I'm sure that'll throw them off long enough to sneak by and grab some. ;)

Glad I could help!

[razzek.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've got a gmail account, but I didn't know you could do all that with it. As soon as I get my 'net connection back, I know what I'm doing. :P

Man, there'd better be a Costco somewhere near me; that just sounds too good to pass up.