As many of you who have been here from the beginning know, I started this blog as a way to bring web presence for my writing. As time progressed, my posts veered from writing to whatever thoughts went on in my head to the different careers I’m trying to get off the ground (writing, voice over, photography).
Well today I’m here to say that one of my careers is out of the gestation stage and is out in the world, YAY! As of October 1st, my husband, Craig, and I have an Etsy site where we will sell prints of our artwork. Mine will be nothing but photographs, but Craig’s offerings will be some photos and some pointillism (or stippling) of photos either that I’ve taken or he’s taken. Yeah, he’s artistic like that. 😉
When Craig and I first started talking about selling our art, we tried to make our own website. Unfortunately, creating a shopping cart proved to be too difficult for us. We both have some working knowledge of how to create a website with Dreamweaver (Craig more than I), and I’ve got a few years’ experience with writing this blog in WordPress, but the shopping cart just kept causing issues.
So we looked at quotes from people to build our shopping cart for us. We told them that we only needed the shopping cart, not the rest of the website, but the prices we received back from people was too prohibitive for our budget right now. We even had someone tell us that we could build a shopping cart site through WordPress, but I guess I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to WordPress: Yes, I think it’s a fine site for blogging, but too many sites I’ve seen that use WordPress for their store, or actual site, all end up looking the same to me. I can almost always tell when it’s a WordPress site, and I just didn’t want ours to have that same look.
So that left us back at the “pay someone else” option, but again, without a budget to afford it. Then I had an idea of selling our stuff on Etsy and use some of those proceeds to purchase a web designer’s help. Craig was on board with the idea, and he got to work on our Etsy shop. I started editing some of my photos to make them shop-ready, but I began to feel overwhelmed with the sheer amount of images I’ve taken over the years, not to mention my wavering opinions of my pictures.
Some days, I’d think they looked amazing and that people would LOVE to purchase them, but other days, that inner critic would rise up and say “You have NO training in photography! What makes you think anyone would buy your pictures?” When my inner critic began to get too loud, I’d walk away and decide to look at them with fresh eyes a day or so later. I still wanted to make sure that I didn’t over-saturate our shop with pictures that were just various angles of the same building, or statue, or whatever. I only wanted to include images that made people say “WOW!” when they looked at them, and not just “Eh, that’s nice,” but when you’ve got thousands of photos to sort through, you get burned out REALLY fast.
Then one day, Craig noticed we were dragging our heels. He suggested that we open the store, even if we only had 10 images to upload, because we could always add to the store, and this way, we’d at least have it started. So we set to work even harder to get it up and running. And we found that we actually had 48 images all ready for printing! We gave ourselves a deadline of October first and got all the business licenses and tax permits that we needed within two weeks.
So YAY! Our Etsy shop is up and running! And we’ve got a blog that will run twice a month; the second Wednesdays will be Craig’s blog on some of his images, and the fourth Wednesdays will be my blog. This will help give people the baskstory of why we took particular photos, or maybe even some tips on how Craig creates his images from just tiny dots of ink.
We’d love for you to check out our Etsy shop. We’ll be adding images every now and then, so make sure to check back regularly. And if you’d like to learn a little bit about each of the images, check out our blog every other Wednesday.
Droppings From the Mind of Alyx 