Decisions, Decisions

[kriadydragon]

So lately I've been toying with the idea of raising money in order to hire an editor, and for a while now I've been considering going into a small business with my mom in which we combine our art talents and start selling things online.

To all those people who have a business selling things online, could you tell me about it? What's it like, who do you sell through if you sell through someone, is it something that takes up a lot of your time or something you're able to do at your leisure? (The latter I especially want to know since my worry is that it'll end up eating into my writing time, and the main reason I want to do this is for my writing).

Comments

[imbecamiel.livejournal.com]

If you can do it through some place that will help with the promotional aspects, it is VERY WORTH IT, even if they take a good-sized percentage. Unless you absolutely adore doing promotional work and have a decent knack for it, that's probably going to take up more of your time than the actual creating of the products ever will.

Even doing it through a place like, say Zazzle or Etsy or Society6, though, where the site itself helps you get exposure, realistically you have to do a fair amount of promotion yourself and frequently adding new products if you're going to see measurable results. That tends to mean that eventually there's a cumulative effect and you can take it easier with a passive revenue stream, but it does usually take quite a bit of up-front regular time investment before you can get to that point.

[sholio]

I used to sell my things online (early 2000s) and have been thinking about getting back into it. I second what imbecamiel said about promotion. In my case, my online store was never self-promoting all on its own -- it was something I had as a sideline to my main social media somewhere else. That is, I'd talk about new stuff I had on the other online places where I hung out, and then people would come to my store and buy it. (Well, ideally. XD)

I never put much time into it beyond just the setup of the store, but I was also never terribly successful at it. Two things that I intend to do when I make a new one:

- Mailing list. There are free services for this (MailChimp is one) and many businesses, it seems, have them. You just need to make sure it's clearly opt-in and that you never put people on the list without their permission. And then you send out a mailing when you have a new thing.
- Something like Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter for posting pictures of works in progress. People seem to like seeing behind-the-scenes process posts, and it gets them interested in new products. I've bought a number of little Etsy-craft type of things because someone reblogged a picture of them on Tumblr!

Beyond that, I can't be very helpful at all because I haven't done it in a decade and I never did it very well back when I was doing it. XD But the above are things I've noticed people seem to be doing successfully.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've already been doing - or, well, trying to do - a lot of promoting for my book, and through that I've been getting a better idea of how to do promotions.

Of course first I need an actual product, which has been the tricky part :/ Sculpey Clay can be difficult to work with if a sculpture starts to get too heavy, so I need to figure out something I can both mass produce and that won't fall apart on me.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, this was very helpful :D I'd already signed up with Mailchimp for a news letter for my books, which hasn't panned out. I should definitely use it for this.