Guides

How to make an accent shop

Before we begin, a disclaimer: What I outline here isn't the only way to run an accent shop. Also following these guidelines to the letter won't make your shop successful 100% of the time. Accent selling depends mostly on the quality of the stuff you're selling, not the thread itself. Although a good thread will make it easier to sell things...

Now we got that out of the way, you're probably here because you like drawing on dragons and you want to make mad cash off of it. But you don't know where to start! That's what this guide is for. It'll explain how to sell accents without breaking your own bank and maybe give you a few pointers on making accents too. If you're interested, read on!

How to make accents

Let's start from the very beginning. If you already have accents ready to sell, you can skip this part.

• First, you want to download a template from the Custom Skins section of the site.
• Then open up the file and draw whatever you like! I'm not going to explain how to make accents with the templates because osiem already did a fantastic job here. There is also the on site tutorial which also could be useful.
• You finished your accent? Good! Just make sure that it follows the skin/accents guidelines or it might be denied. One of the big rules is area coverage and that's something I'll go over later in this post.
• Buy the blueprint you want to use for submission. Be careful to choose the one you want! Accent blueprints allow for accents with up to 30% coverage. Skin blueprints allow for any amount of coverage. Buying a single blueprint will give you one copy of the blueprint. Bundle packs will give you multiple single blueprints, if you want one copy of different accents. Multi-copy packs are what you'll be buying most of the time if running a shop. A 2-copy blueprint will give you 2 identical copies of a skin/accent, a 5-copy blueprint will give you 5 identical copies, and a 10-copy blueprint will give you 10 identical copies.
• Upload your submission! If all is well, you'll get an automatic message saying your submission has been recieved. It'll take anywhere from a day to a week for your submission to be processed, unless there's something that needs an admin's attention.
• If your submission is approved, you'll get your designs back as items. Congrats! If it's denied, they'll usually tell you why it's denied and give you back your blueprint so you can try again.

About area coverage

All accents must be below 30% in area coverage. Any more than that, and you'll have to use a skin blueprint instead. The skin moderator uses the Photoshop histogram tool to determine coverage, which is explained here. If there's transparent parts, the mod will eyeball the accent to see if it's really under 30%, because the histogram tool won't account for transparency.

Another program you can use to check the coverage is paint.net, which is free. Once you download it, open your accent as a 350x350 png file, hold down shift and use the magic wand tool on the outside of your accent. The tolerance of the magic wand tool should be 0% for the most accurate pixel count. Then go under the edit bar at the top of the program and invert the selection. The program will give you a pixel count of the selection in the bottom left corner. That should be under 30% of the dragon's pixel count. Again, this method won't take into account transparency, so the mod will have to make the final decision about that.

[30% pixel counts for each dragon and gender to go here]

How to make a shop

You want to make your thread in the Skins and Accents forum. What you title your thread is up to you, but I would recommend putting what kind of stuff you're selling in it. Like the breed/gender combo and descriptive words like 'robot', 'runes', 'flowery', 'pastel', 'starry', etc. That way, people browsing the forum for a certain kind of accent would open your thread if it sounds like you're selling something they want.

Now, what do you put in your thread? Here are some things that are important to have for both newbie sellers and veteran makers:

• The price of your skins and accents. Generally accents go for 350 gems-550 gems and skins go for 600g-1000g but you can price your stuff however you wish.
• Any additional currency you're taking. Do you take treasure as payment? Or maybe there are items you want? Treasure payment is something people will ask about so make sure you have something about that. You can offer a gems to treasure ratio or a treasure price for your stuff.
• When you'll require payment. Do you need the payment when someone places an order? Or when you submit your accent? Or when you recieved your accent from the queue?
• A statement about holds, if you'll do them at all. How long will you hold an accent for if someone wants it but doesn't have the payment right now?
• A statement about reselling or trading skins/accents. Once you deliver something to someone, it's theirs. But people are generally considerate enough to not resell/trade a skin or accent if you, the creator, don't want it to happen. If you don't want your accent to be resold or traded, put that in the first post! If you don't mind, put that in the first post! If you have restrictions on reselling and trading, put that in the first post! That way people won't have to message you asking about it, or get a nasty surprise when they don't want the accent anymore.
• Ping lists. If your stuff is popular and sells out quickly, or if you're finished with a sale and someone still wants a copy, you can make a ping list. Basically you'll ping the person that you have copies of an accent right now, or you're taking preorders for it. Also, people can ask to be on a general ping list for when you're selling anything, both new and old.
• Skin/accent preview icons if you have made them into items already. Just use this code:
  
  [.skin=####]
  
  While taking out the period and putting in your skin id after the equal sign. This will make it easy for people to preview their dragons with your accent and you'll get a lot more customers that way!
• Accent previews if your accent isn't made into an item yet. This just involves putting your accent on a blank grey dragon or some other dragon that wears it nicely. People can't tell what your accent looks like if you show just the accent. So a dragon wearing it will make it easier for them to visualize it.
• Retired vs. returning skins/accents. If you have something popular that you made once and you won't ever sell again, you should mention that or else people will be asking you about it until kingdom comes. If you have something that you'd like to sell again, that's a returning skin/accent and it wouldn't hurt to mention that so people can ask to be pinged about it.

Besides those points, anything goes. You don't need fancy banners. You don't need a story about a dragon running the shop. Just lay down some rules, show the accents, and you got a shop.

How to sell accents

I've noticed people generally sell accents with one of two ways.

• They make preorder lists. Someone has a skin/accent they want to sell but don't have the money to buy a blueprint right away. So they open up a preorder list and people that want to buy the accent can ask to be put on that list. Once there's enough people on the list, they ask for payment from them and use the money to buy a blueprint that'll make enough copies to give to people who paid. Generally people will wait until there's 5 or 10 people on the preorder list so they can buy a 5 or 10 copy blueprint but some people can submit their stuff earlier and sell the rest of the copies on the AH.
• They submit their skin/accent and sell their stuff on the AH directly. People who generally do this have enough gems for a blueprint already and are confident that their stuff will sell on the AH easily. If there isn't actually enough interest, though, those skins/accents can be sitting around for a long time and you might not make your money back right away.

Ok so now I bet you're wondering how to get more interest for your accents? Sometimes trying to sell accents is like trying to sell dragons if you know what I mean...

How to really sell accents

Making a thread in the Skins and Accents forum is a good start. But how else can you advertise your stuff?

• Advertise on the flight rising tag on Tumblr! People love accents on Tumblr holy crud.
• When advertising on Tumblr, put #flightrisingskins down as one of the tags so the flightrisingskins blog will reblog it.
• ??? Needs more suggestions!

Reserved

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I just started typing this this afternoon and I'm tired of working on it so I just posted it right now for suggestions and critiques and stuff. Obviously there's a lot more to be written but I think I got the basic gist of it down. So go ahead and post. :P

Really cool guide, gonna ping myself for later use.
Thanks for writing it!

@Elyndria

@sheepska
was thinking of making some accents. so pinging my self