Price of Rejection

It hit me pretty hard.

I've submitted 6 After Effects templates to VideoHive within the past 2 months and they have all been rejected due to quality (or lack thereof). I don't have any approved-for-sale templates on VideoHive (VideoHive ID: AnglerDigital), except for a random piece of stock footage I took of some fireworks a couple years ago.

After some heated emails and discussions with VideoHive staff, I finally settled on some pretty important self-reflection and taking a good look at myself and my skills.

The bottom line: I'm just not quite there yet.

At least, certainly not VideoHive quality. I still think that some of the templates I have created are worth distributing to other people so that they can learn or just use it, but I also don't feel right about just giving them away for free, after all I worked long and hard on them.

So, while also pursuing other After Effects template stores in which to sell my stuff, that doesn't prevent me from providing the templates myself through my website. The problem is, how do I go about accomplishing this?

I've got several options:

1. Create a point-of-sale micro transaction for each template I want to sell, user buys through Paypal and then through a 3rd party system (which will require some money, and maybe quite a bit for large storage) is provided a short-time-usage download link to get to the template.

Difficulty: Hard

2. Employ a donation system, that with each individual donation, that user can select a template of their choice in which I will provide a download link (or location, maybe dropbox) for them to grab the template files for a limited time.

Difficulty: Medium

3. Continue to only sell through 3rd party sites like VideoHive and Revostock.

Difficulty: Medium

I just envisioned option 2 today, and I feel really good about that option. Maybe make the minimum donation of $2.00, so anyone can grab these templates for 2 bucks each. And I would make some of my simpler templates for free, like the MrFatalix intro.

I'm open to suggestions.