Nuki News #39: A Year Conquered!

More like ‘A Year Survived’, but, it’s officially come to its close. We’ve slain the beast by persevering through it and all of the difficulties it brought. In quite a few ways I’m still not used to this, but I’ll hope for clearer skies in this next year.

The point of this post though, the final NukiNews of 2020, is to go over how I did! You can check out the previous quarters of the year in these review posts:

1st Quarter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/35784368

2nd Quarter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38844451

3rd Quarter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/42199433

So, first things first- it’s been a full year of operating my Patreon in this weekly post format, and it’s been super great. I’m surprised I’ve kept up with this so well, and I hope it’s been of something of value to yall supporting me. Getting to see what’s going on under the hood n all that? It interests me for the creators I follow, so I took the gamble of doing something similar for myself. Initially I was pretty nervous about it, talking about myself in this way, at first.

My goal was to make this Patreon project-oriented, and my first “project“ was indeed to become a full time artist. I had no inkling or prediction it’d actually happen this year!! I’m seriously ecstatic and proud about that, even if it made me very nervous about the change. I couldn’t have accomplished this without you! Knowing I’d have to do what I could to keep the ball rolling so I’d have something to write about each week kept me accountable(Even if some weeks were more mundane or ‘filler’ in a sense ahaha). It’s going to be a harder road ahead for me, I know. But I’ve bought myself much time to figure this out!

How has my goal-tracking been? I wanted to make double the money I made in 2019 from art, and open for commissions every month. I not only did that, but made TWICE as much as I set out to do! How?? Sequences, really; people enjoy getting to express their idea over a set of images opposed to just 1! This propelled my financial gains way up in a short amount of time. This discovery really helped here. I can’t say it’d work out for everyone, right, but for me specifically it was my merging art, getting to show a before-and-after along with that lovely awkward in-between image works people’s imaginations more than a stand alone pic of two characters going “WTF??” at their weird predicament.

Now, I did have follower/watcher count goals on Twitter and FA, but seriously looking back it doesn’t seem very important to me to track this stuff. I didn’t reach these arbitrary goals I decided(I set 5K for twitter and 3K for FA) but I hadn’t put much stock in them to begin with. Follower/watcher counts are super hard to glean information from. What’s truly important to me is how many of the folks following me actually enjoy and interact with my work first and foremost, and of course ability to purchase commissions from me, since I can’t very well do this for a living if I can’t keep a roof over my head. For posterity though, I’ll lay it out, I gained about 1580 followers on twitter(64% increase), and about 558 watchers on FA(27% increase).

I also had wanted to get to post 150 pictures this year, but sadly juust slightly fell short of that, at 147; but it’s okay, I’m not holding myself too hard to it since I did quite a lot more than 150 drawings/pictures; it’s just when posting, some were compiled into one ‘post’ and some I just never shared(like personal story art stuff). But it was a metric I made with the goal of posting regularly online. I'm my own boss now, so holding myself to metrics rigidly would just end up with me forgetting why I set them up in the first place.

Speaking on being online- streaming! I made a modest goal of streaming at least 50 times this year- basically once a week, with about 2 weeks off in case something happens(like the move in April ahah). I ended up streaming 79 times, for a total of 322.5hrs(averaging a length of 4.08 hours per stream). I feel going into 2021 I’ll be doing some things to beef up my streams to be more worthwhile to folks in some way or another.

Oh right, what’s in store for 2021 anyway? I accomplished most of my goals this year, and that’s swell, but next year... Hrmmm. I’d say most of it will be me figuring this full time artist thing out now that I’ve been freed from my day job. I noticed after October I stopped reading a book a month, so I’ll need to hop back onto that(my dearest roommate got me a Kindle for my birthday so I’d better make use of it!) I wanna be a positive presence for the fat fur community most of all, and getting to do so with my streams and art would be where I’ll start. I might veer into being more ‘educational’ or helpful in the sense of going over how I do things or my process, too, even outside of this Patreon. I mentioned I was going to make a poll last week, and it didn’t happen yet(oops), because I felt I needed to review all my accomplishments and how the Patreon was doing over all.

Either way, I gotta thank you again for your support here- you’ve helped make this year manageable for me. The routine and consistency of writing Nuki News posts has indeed held me accountable, and it’s good for me to know it’s helped a few of you too, reading these.

I’ll end this with a question- what do you want to do in 2021?