Jey Pawlik

Really sad to hear about Cohost going under. I've really enjoyed my time here. It felt like a mature place to be and post. Thank you for being here with me.

If you'd like to follow me elsewhere I post very regularly on other socials and my own websites. Feel free to add my RSS to your feeds, sign up for my newsletter, or check out my Patreon (there's a free option!)

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I hope we'll find each other again! Stay well my friends<3

i don't know anyone who has tens of thousands of followers on twitter and is unambiguously happy about it. i don't know anyone who has gone viral and had an unambiguously positive experience. i have never personally created something with the escape velocity to break out of my circle of influence into unknown places and didn't get tugged at by an instinct to pull the plug while that's still an option. a lot of people online are trying to catch a bullet train with a bug net and have no plan for what to do if they succeed.

I think about this a lot as an artist who makes Their Living offline but shares Their Real Art online - I’ve been on twitter for 15 years (jesus fuckin christ) and have never broken 10k followers. Most comics artists I know are between 20k and 75k followers. I don’t know what the magic formula is or how to game it; I never have.

Our follower counts have also never correlated with income. One of the most financially successful artists I know has next to no social media presence. One of the biggest Twitter artists I follow (around 250k) just had to do fundraising for minor surgery
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It’s hard to gauge how many people like your art, how many people want your art. Are you reaching anybody? The most successful book I ever made had maybe 300 “likes” on Tumblr so I doubled that as a gauge for the print run - all 750 copies sold in under 2 hours and I got a LOT of backlash and assholery for not printing more - as if I could read minds or infer anything from a lack of response

I have no idea how many people are reading Shot and Chaser. Best gut guess? 250, maybe 300. No fucking clue. It might be 10,000. It might be 10.

Do I want a bigger following? I don’t know. 10~15k seems to be the threshold where queer artists start getting really nasty, consistent harassment. I’ve already had a small share of that and don’t want more. But there are certain clients I’d love to work for who probably won’t ever see my art or consider me for an illustration job without those numbers. Would that be worth the scrutiny? I don’t know.