The little bit of good news is that at the beginning of the week, I achieved a minor milestone - my 100th sale on Greeting Card Universe. And it was followed shortly afterwards by my 101st....then nothing, but that seems to be the way it goes at the moment, like a switch being turned on and off.
The bad news is the outcome of last week's General Election and I've been surprised at how much Tuesday's announcement of a Coalition of the Tories and the LibDems got me down.
Leaving aside the policies and the personalities involved, it's the sense of well-justified betrayal and outrage in the country that I share. Many people were persuaded to vote Libdem who would otherwise have voted Labour, 'To keep the Tories out' and now the two parties have formed a Coalition, with the Libdems trying to deny that they have given ground on some of their sacred core policies and that what they have done is 'in the national interest'!
To add insult to injury, some politicians are trying to claim that this is what we, the electorate voted for, which is, of course, rubbish. There have been various assaults on the electorate's 'trust' of their politicians, most recently the expenses scandal, and all the party leaders recognised this and promised a 'new politics' to rebuild trust. Instead, the word 'betrayal' is coming up again and again in the media, amongst Tories as well as Libdems and Labour voters who voted tactically for the Libdems. Apparently the Labour Party's website is groaning under the numbers of people defecting to Labour so maybe in the long run this will work in Labour's favour and the Libdems will have shot themselves in the foot. Only time will tell.
And for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, here are a couple of blogs that explain our situation better than I can. First, the BBC's Nick Robinson, - note the way he writes about the two men agreeing with one another. In some of the televised leaders' debates, Gordon Brown used the phrase 'I agree with Nick' so often that someone on Zazzle made T-shirts with those words as the slogan!
And here is Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman's blog
And if you find all this too depressing, watch this -
.
It made me laugh in spite of everything!
Enough of politics - they say that a country gets the government it deserves! I've had an even busier week than I expected! Just as I was getting started on printing the catalogue and card order for my Norfolk friend, another call came from Norfolk (through another of my old friends there), a lady wanting to order 10 cards.
Both orders involved quite a lot of customisation, which in itself took up time, but also, the two orders between them included seven new collage name-specific cards. I've sometimes managed to make two of the male name cards in a day, but the female ones take longer...all those leaves to cut out and stick down! But this week I ended up making all seven in two days and both packets had been posted by yesterday lunchtime.
I had intended to make more of these cards gradually, whenever I ran out of ideas for new cards (as if!) so it was all to the good that I've now been able to post them on Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle as well, where I made some matching mugs. Here are just a few of the many combinations -
So today I'm spending some time catching up with other things - like the ironing! But my Norfolk friend received her parcel of cards this morning and is so delighted that she rang up first thing to tell me that she's going to order 30 more before she goes to Germany on Monday! At least I can take my time with that order as she'll be away for at least couple of weeks but I do have to spend some time sourcing matte card to print on as my supplier can't get my usual card any longer. So if anyone reading this knows of a good source of coated matte inkjet paper, preferably 260gsm or heavier, PLEASE let me know!
Showing posts with label sales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sales. Show all posts
Friday, 14 May 2010
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
'Shed Bleu'
This week didn't start off too well!
After the excitement of selling my dragons to the newsagent last week, there was almost bound to be a feeling of anticlimax but as well as that, all the rushing to get the cards printed for the coffee shop had not had a good effect on my slightly dodgy back and it was threatening to go into spasm all weekend. Added to that was my failed attempt to make a collage birthday card for a friend on Saturday. The card was fine and I was sure she would like it but the scanner had turned the little bits of gold paper I'd used to a nasty shade of khaki and photographing it instead hadn't produced anything better.
And then two of my former neighbours in other parts of the country, who have been pestering me for months to send them some of my cards so that they could sell them, suddenly seem, just as I am almost ready to do that, to have been plunged into rather all-consuming situations of their own; so, understandably, selling my cards is the last thing they want to think about. By yesterday lunchtime I was feeling quite sorry for myself and the thought of spending the afternoon making a Christmas catalogue for the newsagent was hardly enthralling!
So I decided to 'play truant' from my laptop and make a start on my ever-growing list of ideas for card designs. After all, that's what's at the heart of all this - if there were no designs, there'd be no catalogue to make, no printing and no online promotion to do!
Immersing myself in my painted papers and glue (almost literally!) did me the world of good and this is the result -
Although I called it 'Spring Garden' when I uploaded it to GCU and Zazzle, it will always be my 'Shed Bleu'! Maybe it's someting to do with the famous 'Gilet Rouge' - I don't know! But I realise with horror that, even after more than 7 years studying French at school and two terms at University, I don't know the French word for a 'shed'! I could look it up, I suppose, but 'Shed Bleu' seems to have embedded itself in my mind!
Late in the afternoon the usual bombardment of emails from GCU arrived. I normally leave looking at them till the end of the day as they are invariably notifications from the forums. (How I wish we could be more selective about which notifications to receive. But it seems to be an 'all or nothing' approach so I opt for receiving them all, just in case there's something important or useful in one of them!) To my utter amazement, amongst them was a sale notification! Someone in Virginia had googled '60th Birthday' and had come up with my 'Life in your Years', Adlai Stevenson quotation!
That seems to be a popular design and I've sold another one this morning to a lady in the walking group.
In the middle of the evening, the Zazzle 'New Product Alerts' arrived - or so I thought. But no, amongst them was another sale notification! This time a mousepad with my collage sailing boats on it. I could hardly believe it! It's been so quiet on the PODstore front for the past three or four weeks and then two sales in one day!
So you can imagine my amazement when, just as I was going to bed, GCU emailed me to tell me that someone had googled '1st birthday' and ended up buying this one -
Three sales in one day - it's altogether rather like the buses; you wait and wait and then three come along at once! I actually don't much like the Rainbow Fairies and I only decided to give them a whirl because one of the little girls I was teaching when I made it last summer, drooled over them. It's not the first of that series that I've sold so the lesson there is that you never know what other people may like!
I absolutely love Margaret Tarrant's fairies and there are quite a number of other artists of her time who painted similarly magical fairies. But my own attempts at fairies came out looking like Barbie Dolls so I decided that if I was going to paint fairies - and they're obviously popular with little girls of all ages! - they would have to be so tiny that there was no possiblity of mistaking them for Barbie dolls. These designs were quite a fiddle to make as I used both transparent watercolours and gouache and each fairy was underpainted in white gouache - and I don't like 'fiddly'! (Which makes my penchant for collage a bit of a mystery!)
I fully expected that third sale to be the end of my good fortune for now - things go in threes, don't they? But no, another surprise was waiting for me at the coffee shop this morning, when the manageress handed me a little plastic bag full of money, which aroused enough interest for another member of the walking group to have a look at my basket of cards and purchase - again! - my dancing man! She suggested that I should do something similar with a woman on it - which I will, when I find the time!!!
After the excitement of selling my dragons to the newsagent last week, there was almost bound to be a feeling of anticlimax but as well as that, all the rushing to get the cards printed for the coffee shop had not had a good effect on my slightly dodgy back and it was threatening to go into spasm all weekend. Added to that was my failed attempt to make a collage birthday card for a friend on Saturday. The card was fine and I was sure she would like it but the scanner had turned the little bits of gold paper I'd used to a nasty shade of khaki and photographing it instead hadn't produced anything better.
And then two of my former neighbours in other parts of the country, who have been pestering me for months to send them some of my cards so that they could sell them, suddenly seem, just as I am almost ready to do that, to have been plunged into rather all-consuming situations of their own; so, understandably, selling my cards is the last thing they want to think about. By yesterday lunchtime I was feeling quite sorry for myself and the thought of spending the afternoon making a Christmas catalogue for the newsagent was hardly enthralling!
So I decided to 'play truant' from my laptop and make a start on my ever-growing list of ideas for card designs. After all, that's what's at the heart of all this - if there were no designs, there'd be no catalogue to make, no printing and no online promotion to do!
Immersing myself in my painted papers and glue (almost literally!) did me the world of good and this is the result -
Late in the afternoon the usual bombardment of emails from GCU arrived. I normally leave looking at them till the end of the day as they are invariably notifications from the forums. (How I wish we could be more selective about which notifications to receive. But it seems to be an 'all or nothing' approach so I opt for receiving them all, just in case there's something important or useful in one of them!) To my utter amazement, amongst them was a sale notification! Someone in Virginia had googled '60th Birthday' and had come up with my 'Life in your Years', Adlai Stevenson quotation!
That seems to be a popular design and I've sold another one this morning to a lady in the walking group.
In the middle of the evening, the Zazzle 'New Product Alerts' arrived - or so I thought. But no, amongst them was another sale notification! This time a mousepad with my collage sailing boats on it. I could hardly believe it! It's been so quiet on the PODstore front for the past three or four weeks and then two sales in one day!
So you can imagine my amazement when, just as I was going to bed, GCU emailed me to tell me that someone had googled '1st birthday' and ended up buying this one -
Three sales in one day - it's altogether rather like the buses; you wait and wait and then three come along at once! I actually don't much like the Rainbow Fairies and I only decided to give them a whirl because one of the little girls I was teaching when I made it last summer, drooled over them. It's not the first of that series that I've sold so the lesson there is that you never know what other people may like!
I absolutely love Margaret Tarrant's fairies and there are quite a number of other artists of her time who painted similarly magical fairies. But my own attempts at fairies came out looking like Barbie Dolls so I decided that if I was going to paint fairies - and they're obviously popular with little girls of all ages! - they would have to be so tiny that there was no possiblity of mistaking them for Barbie dolls. These designs were quite a fiddle to make as I used both transparent watercolours and gouache and each fairy was underpainted in white gouache - and I don't like 'fiddly'! (Which makes my penchant for collage a bit of a mystery!)
I fully expected that third sale to be the end of my good fortune for now - things go in threes, don't they? But no, another surprise was waiting for me at the coffee shop this morning, when the manageress handed me a little plastic bag full of money, which aroused enough interest for another member of the walking group to have a look at my basket of cards and purchase - again! - my dancing man! She suggested that I should do something similar with a woman on it - which I will, when I find the time!!!
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Time to make Christmas Cards to sell locally!
It really feels as if Spring is on the way today. The crocuses are out in the park and there are buds everywhere. But it wasn't just the sunshine that put a 'spring' in my step as I came back from town this morning; that was the result of a pretty successful meeting with the newsagent!
The good news is that 34 out of 50 of my red dragons have been sold in just over a week and the newsagent said that if I'd brought them in earlier, they'd have probably sold out. And the even better news is that he paid me for all 50 and has kept the ones that haven't sold yet, even though St David's Day was yesterday.
The slightly less good news is that he is already covered for Mothers' Day and St Patrick's Day so didn't want mine. He told me he works 10 months in advance so we agreed that I should take in my Christmas cards as soon as possible. Apparently anything with 'Abergavenny' on it or bi-lingual (Welsh/English) greetings sells well.
So my next job will be to add the appropriate text to some of my Christmas cards and perhaps to make cards from some of the photos of Abergavenny in the snow that I took in January. This one, for instance, is a recognisable location in town, with the recently restored tithe barn on the left and the Blorenge in the background - and, by chance, a good space for some Christmas Greetings down at the bottom!
It feels a bit odd to be doing that now that the snow seems to have finally left us, but that's the way it works!
As for the Mother's Day cards I'd made - I only made a couple of each and I'll try my luck at the coffee shop after the Wednesday walk.
Greeting Card Universe seem to be taking about a week to approve cards at the moment but hopefully more like this one will be appearing in my online store any day now!
The good news is that 34 out of 50 of my red dragons have been sold in just over a week and the newsagent said that if I'd brought them in earlier, they'd have probably sold out. And the even better news is that he paid me for all 50 and has kept the ones that haven't sold yet, even though St David's Day was yesterday.
The slightly less good news is that he is already covered for Mothers' Day and St Patrick's Day so didn't want mine. He told me he works 10 months in advance so we agreed that I should take in my Christmas cards as soon as possible. Apparently anything with 'Abergavenny' on it or bi-lingual (Welsh/English) greetings sells well.
So my next job will be to add the appropriate text to some of my Christmas cards and perhaps to make cards from some of the photos of Abergavenny in the snow that I took in January. This one, for instance, is a recognisable location in town, with the recently restored tithe barn on the left and the Blorenge in the background - and, by chance, a good space for some Christmas Greetings down at the bottom!
It feels a bit odd to be doing that now that the snow seems to have finally left us, but that's the way it works!
As for the Mother's Day cards I'd made - I only made a couple of each and I'll try my luck at the coffee shop after the Wednesday walk.
Greeting Card Universe seem to be taking about a week to approve cards at the moment but hopefully more like this one will be appearing in my online store any day now!
Friday, 26 February 2010
The Spring is Sprung....
The idea of producing greeting cards for men (to be bought mostly by women, I expect) has provided me with a bit of a challenge and I hope this one may be suitable for men and women alike.
I can't think why I'm so enthusiastic about make collage designs - I certainly don't find it relaxing! All the precise cutting and fiddling with tiny, sticky pieces of paper doesn't allow me to get into 'flow' as I normally do with my painting. It still takes me much longer than any other medium I use and I generally end up with stiff shoulders and an aching back. But there's something about the finished result that keeps me going back to it over and over again.
I was surprised how long it took me to scan it and resize it for Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle, as well as for my 'private' webpages that I send out with the survey questionnaire, for my 'dead tree-ware' catalogue and for this blog - and then to upload it to the various online stores, not to mention going through all the processes it takes to make it into cards that I can print myself. I suspect all that took me even longer than making the collage itself! (Of course, it doesn't help that I do some things on my laptop and others on my main computer upstairs and it all has to be transferred from one to the other at some point.) I'll just have to hope that GCU will approve of the categories I've put it in - one never knows for sure! Different reviewers seem to have different criteria!
The past couple of weeks have been really quiet on the sales front so I've been reading the forums and there are frequent complaints about the Mysteries of the Categories! But I was pleased to hear today that an awful lot of my my dragons have found new homes - 'I've sold two in the past hour,' the shop assistant told me in a very surprised tone of voice. So, thanks to a prompt from another artist, I've put the rest of the emails on hold and spent this morning organising and printing out samples of my Mothers' Day and St Patrick's Day cards, in case the newsagent, having got out an extra stand for my dragons, would be prepared to refill it with some of my other 'Spring Season' designs, once St David's Day has been and gone.
And yes, he has agreed that I should take in a couple of each of my dozen or so 'Spring Season' designs and see how they go - what a pity I didn't think of this before Valentine's Day!
He thought that my Pen and Wash ones -
- would be more popular than my oil pastels. But my survey results, so far, have illustrated just how diverse people's tastes in cards are. It probably has a lot to do with age and gender and I expect that applies to where people go to buy greeting cards as well. I think our local newsagents could be a good place to reach all ages and types of people and in terms of 'footfall', it's a real hotspot throughout the year. I don't tend to buy newspapers - not that I don't enjoy reading them. On a cross-channel ferry I will devour every inch of every column but each time I've tried buying a newspaper regularly, I ended up with a pile of unread ones. However, I do pop into the newsagents from time to time - their treasury tags, which I use in great numbers for my teaching workbooks, are by far the cheapest in town! Which is how I came to notice the stand of beautiful photographic cards that encouraged me to try my luck with my dragons.
I'll be a bit disappointed if nobody buys my oil pastel flowers - they are just the sort of thing that I would be very happy to receive - but if they aren't popular, at least I'll know what to offer for Easter. And there's always the posh coffee shop to try....
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