Hello, it's Susan here from Koumori No
Hime Cosplay and today I'm going to be talking about how I pay for cosplay.
Since I run a cosplay tutorial channel, I end up making a lot of costumes over the course of the year
and I've had a couple questions as to how I do so.
So I should start off by saying that I am NOT a professional cosplayer.
Cosplay is still very much a hobby for me
and I do have a primary job
which is what I use to pay for my bills and car insurance and it does help to pay for cosplay,
but I am also fortunate in that I have been able
to monetize my cosplay in a way that it kind of
feeds itself in this kind of
"circle of cosplay"
and I thought that going over it might be helpful for some of you.
So, let's get started! Since I create content for YouTube the perhaps most obvious way I monetize my cosplay is through YouTube Adsense.
Now my channel is not necessarily a very large channel and it's also very niche, so
YouTube checks are not very big- but the revenue every month or so
helps to reinvest back in items that I don't necessarily
resell, such as wigs or if there's a particular tool
I need to complete a particular project. Even though it is the second method on this list
this is the primary way I fund new costumes, and that is from selling the old ones.
Certain costumes that I have a particular attachment to or that were competition pieces
(something that I spent a lot of time and resources on) I
may keep, but a lot of the other costumes I end up selling after I've done a photo shoot for them.
My two main places that I sell them are on Facebook,  "Cosplay for Sale" and
"Plus-Sized Cosplay for Sale."
Those are two great resources for finding costumes. Now on sites like that you tend to be competing with
people selling their own costumes, either ones they made themselves or from Taobao,
so a lot of times I don't end up making a profit off of the costumes,  usually
I just end up making back the material cost. But that is still a way to
reinvest back into more materials for new costumes and
to keep more space open in my closet. The third method is through selling e-books.
Currently, I have two e-books for sale through Amazon, "Cosplay Sewing for Beginners" and "How to Start a Cosplay YouTube Channel."
These are examples of passive income where I've already written the book,
it's then hosted, and then whenever I make a sale the extra couple dollars a month then gets reinvested back into
the
"circle of cosplay" I keep mentioning.
The last method on this list is a another form of passive income and that is Amazon affiliate links.
When I use an
item that I purchased from Amazon in a video,
I'll put a link to it in the description box
and if someone clicks on that link
it'll track their user behavior for 24 hours,
and if they purchase something from Amazon I get a small commission from that item. Now,
this doesn't change the price of the item, it just helps the channel.
This is going on a little bit of a tangent, but one thing I should mention is that if you decide to incorporate
affiliate links of any type into your cosplay
monetization plan you do have to disclose that they are
affiliate links. This is something that not necessarily cosplayers, but I do see other people online, and even companies,
posting links to Amazon without stating that they are an affiliate link.
So that is something that you do have to disclose and one thing
I really wanted to mention while talking about this portion of the video.
There are many more ways that cosplayers fund their costumes. These are just the four ways that worked best for me.
I hope you found this video helpful. For more cosplay videos, please subscribe, and thank you very much for watching! Bye!
