realized that they are very misleading?
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Outside of that, the biggest question would be what the site does for me as a client. Will you translate my ideas into Japanese for better communication with the artists? Or is the "holding on to the payment" the only upside to paying a fee to your side? Because the same "no revision, no talks, artist decides, just wait and take it"-workflow is the same I can get from the artist via Pixiv. So - speaking really unfairly - what'll your page do beside sending my message to you to them on pixiv?
After all, you take an 8% service fee that can get really big really fast if we talk about professional works...
But I generally agree, that we need better contact points between japanese artists and western creators. It can be a real pain to find great artists both on Pixiv and deviantart, especially for bigger projects, but I'm not really sure who exactly your target audience is with this site. Especially as you post it on a novel site: the commercial option you mention on the landing page didn't seem available for any of the artists and it would also be important to now the bounds of "personal use". Reposting/republishing it as webnovel cover often falls outside of that, even if you don't make any money with it. Not even talking about patreon.
Going by your impressum and activities, this one is an approach from the Japanese side. So I'll just list stuff that would be important for me as a weiter to have implemented before the site would be usable:
- Revisions: Especially with a language barrier in between, no revisions for OCs are a massive risk I wouldn't take in 99% of cases.
- Multiple works at once: Especially with sketches or lower prices illustrations, character designs become more important. So people might need multiple works (or multiple covers) in the same style. Having to buy one, hoping that the artist might or might not draw another one for no visible reasons can lead to situations were expensive artwork becomes "worthless" if a writer wants to avoid switching styles every new volume.
- Commercial usage: as said above, the license is extremely important for a lot of the more advanced writers. Heck, even I consider it "just in case". Having no (obvious) option to filter for a commercial use means I have to click through all interesting artists and be disappointed. Which makes it the pixiv experience with less "other artists to click through".
Don't get me wrong - I like the general idea. Especially because I just went through the whole pain of finding artists for another project. I hated it. Any alternative is welcome. But if you want to sell your stuff to a more western audience, you should also cater to them. And the fact is that the western mindset and also the western workflow is generally completely different from the japanese way.
So if yo want to break through that barrier, there needs to be something more. Whether that is through artists that guarantee to understand a certain level of English or stuff like the one In pointed out above. But as long as you don't offer anything outside the usual "pay for one artwork, pray, and be quiet"-workflow, there'll always be sites who do that stuff better just due to the higher number of artists...
Anyway... just my thoughts.
Good luck with your project!
