u/Bitches172882

So i was at this small con a few weeks ago, and there was a vendor selling the most gorgeous sticker sets of characters from a webnovel i actually read. the art was clearly its own thing but you could tell exactly which world it was from. So I got home, went down a rabbit hole and found the author had literally posted saying she wishes people would just ask her before making stuff with her characters. said she’d almost definitely say yes if someone reached out properly. and it just… stuck w me. because i work with a bunch of indie authors and SOo many of them feel the same way. they’d love to see their worlds turned into candles, pins, stickers, whatever. they own everything, they’d say yes in a heartbeat but here’s the frustrating part like i’ve reached out to a few sellers about working with these authors, and most of them only wanna do their own designs or big existing fandoms. nobody seems to wanna work w smaller authors even though the demand is right there.

Two years ago I built a portfolio trying to pick the interesting stuff basically individual tech stocks, a couple thematic etfs and some crypto exposure. i read every earnings report and spent weekends on research so felt engaged and smart about it.
SCHD was always in the back of my mind as the thing , basically "when I got more conservative" type thing 0.06% expense ratio and 100 dividend stocks with 10+ yrs of consecutive increases and I kept not buying it because it didnt feel like enough.
SCHD is up 18.3% year to date, btc etf I held lost 22% through q1 before partially recovering.
so a thing about dividend growth investing is that it doesnt just give you yield but filters for quality. Companies that have increased their dividend for 10+ consecutive years have survived multiple recessions, rate cycles and market panics. The screen itself does a lot of the work and you are buying companies that have demonstrated they can keep generating cash regardless of conditions.
$10.59 B flowed into SCHD in 2026,$27.27 B into VTI and $25 B into SGOV so the boring stuff is where the money went while everyone was arguing about nvidia price targets.

Boring won H1 2026, anyone else late to figuring this out?

Okay so genuine question from someone still figuring out this space.
I was at a small convention last month and there was this vendor selling the most beautiful sticker sets characters from a webnovel I actually follow. The art was clearly inspired by the author’s official designs.
Then I actually went home and looked it up. The author had literally posted on her socials saying she wishes ppl would just ask her before using her characters. She said she’d probably say yes if someone just reached out properly.
Bro, That stuck with me. Like is there actually a way to do this cleanly? Has anyone here ever just… DMed a small creator and asked to use their art for merch officially? Was there any kind of simple agreement or was it a nightmare?
I feel like small creators WANT this but nobody knows how to make it happen without it turning into a legal headache.
Genuinely curious if this is something ppl in this community have tried