The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

So I promised myself that I wouldn't think too much about the whole situation regarding my old store, but I did my weekly math on how much I've made since going solo.



Refresher: When I was selling my scraps at PTE, I made 33 dollars my "best" month and the last month there, I got 10 dollars.



Two weeks into selling on my own at independent stores, I have made 83 dollars.



All of these places have the same commission rate, so the store gets half of what I sold. Same as it was at PTE....(or should have been)



I don't know about you, but there is a HUGE difference between those numbers. I almost want to call her out on it. Almost.



Dumb cunt. I hope that she keeps running her store the way it is now. It means she will run that shit straight into the fucking ground.



Stealing from me and other artists. Bitch.

So a little bitterness that I've been mulling over the past few days.



Last week, I stepped down from the tube store I was working at. There were many reasons for this. The biggest one was my school work for the fall semester. I'm taking 4 classes that will require a fuckton of papers. American government, American lit, astronomy, and advanced comp.



So I stepped down from the entertainment coordinator, the copyright manager, and as a designer selling my scrap kits. In my email to the store owner, I was polite, nice, and quite flexible about the situation. I told her that my schoolwork was my biggest focus right now and I wouldn't have the time to devote to the jobs I had. I also told her that I would finish out the month with the contests and it would give her a bit of time to find someone to replace me. I wasn't going to just leave her high and dry, I wanted it to be a good departure.



Yeah. Right.



Two days after we exchanged emails, agreeing that I would close out the monthly contest and she would leave my kits up until the end of the month, I get a rather shitty email.



She pulled my kits from the store...early. I was then locked out of the CR email account and booted out of the staff group. Here is where it gets interesting.



I forwarded all the entries to the contest since I wasn't going to be a bitch. I told her that I would forward anymore that showed up that night. I mentioned that the next morning, I would delete the email address associated with that contest, so she would have to change it on the website.



A few hours later a couple of very interesting things happened. First, I was banned from a tagging forum that is run by one of the other staff members, for no reason whatsoever. Second, a post went out in the main FB group stating that the monthly contest was canceled because a staff member up and left without warning and deleted the account. Third, I had some of my suspicions confirmed about how she was running the company.



For the few weeks leading up to my email, she kept emailing artists and designers saying that sales were low this month for some reason. She then mentioned that she wasn't sure how she was going to pay her bills. This was a constant thing being said. I had some thoughts that my royalties were going to be a bit short this month and then I got the confirmation that pretty much proved my thoughts. I'm about 98% sure she was faking some of our sales reports and taking extra cash for herself. My proof?

I ran a little "contest". Pretty much, if you bought one of my kits in the month of June and forwarded your receipt to me, you'd be entered for a chance to win my next few kits for free.



I got enough receipts to prove that I sold about 65 dollars worth of kits. My commission rate was set to 50%, so I'd get something like 32 dollars..



Come "payday", I got a grand total of.... 10 bucks.



I'm now selling at 3 stores that have full transparency. I can see each sale and how much was spent. In one of the stores, the money goes into an "account" which you can see in real time. Once you have 50 dollars in the account, you can have it transferred to your paypal account. Funny how I can make 25 dollars in a day and half of selling there, but I only made 10 bucks last month? They are the same kits.... o.O



So yeah, I'm a bit upset about it. I've been polite and quiet about the whole thing, but it has stressed me out.



I needed to get it out of my system and no one from the "community" is on here, so it seems safe.. If there are people here from that side of the net, well at least it's not as bad as facebook lol



I won't rat this woman out to the public, but I hate seeing other artists get screwed over. I know what it feels like to try and make a living doing something you love. Art, music, and acting are really hard to make a good living on. You either need to blow someone or get damn lucky to land a good job. Or you could be a teacher, but even that is iffy with fine arts being cut from schools constantly.



So I'm upset, stressed, and concerned. It needed to get out of my system.



Bleh