Working on What Now This Summer?

Well summer is in full swing.  I am keeping busy.  Sales have been a trickle, but that is way better than a drip.  I remain optimistic.  I recently saw a commercial on one of the streaming channels for Society 6, a popular print on demand company.  One of the top 5.  In the commercial it said they had over 45,000 artists on their site.  No wonder sales are slow.  With that kind of population at all these sites I am honored to sell anything.  I hear tales of steady sales at pay your rent level, but they are usually in a youtube info mercial purporting to sell how to videos to the print on demand set.  I dislike much of the advice videos on youtube as it seems to be blind luck they are selling themselves.   So I am spreading my image arsenal out to a couple new places.  I have about half my images up on Open sea as NFT's.  If I get etherium I will cash out right away as the market has been up and down.  I also have decided to upload my whole portfolio to shopify as digital image downloads.  Very affordable way to promote an artist.  The catalog will at least give a customer a chance to browse what images there are and maybe make a request that one go on a hoodie or something.   I have been cleaning out expired products on my zazzle stores.  I use template runs to create there so thousands of products.  Only lately I have been designing one at a time and I am much more relaxed.  Starting to add to Vida, a great bulk create tool they have, but there is no way to tell what your traffic is.  I contacted Cow Cow about their shopify app and got no response and now my store is deleted.  I think I am through with cow cow.  The shopify app company called Dropship CN offers what appears to be the entire cow cow catalog and I ordered from them and the quality was excellent.  Just had to wait for 3 weeks ship time.  Yesterday I started up an etsy shop.  That is getting some traffic.  so i will cherry pick my shopify store for that.  I am continuing to add Threadless products to my shopify and was very pleased when my shopify sale on Threadless products went through without a hitch.  everything is working, we are ready, bring on the traffic.   As soon as I am done editing the vintage travel photos I think I am going to upload those to pixels to make mugs, cards, tote bags and what not.  If the words and images of my grandparents have helped me get sales then by god they are still with me.  sadly they have been gone almost twenty and thirty years now.  My grandfather whos letters I promise I will get back to by this fall, would have been one hundred last year.  Pretty amazing.  Well if you want to see more of what I do all day, scroll down to the bottom of this site where I publish my twitter feed.  Follow and if you are also in the arts, I will follow you back.  I tweet constantly and retweet good art.  I am selling the most on Redbubble and Zazzle these days.  I do new artwork on redbubble once a week and zazzle i use what I have uploaded to design one at a time things to keep the account active, although I do not know how they really work that into their search result metrics.  All I know is the search results on some sites are wonky.  I wish they would be more effective.  It would help us all.  45,000 other artists.  And I want to try to make a decent income.  It may be an impossible dream.  I want to emphasize, unless you are having good sales luck, unless you found that daily sales nexus that we all desire, this is a time consuming and futile business.  If I weren't affected by my current mental health diagnosis, I wouldnt be putting all my cookies in this day dream basket.  But here I am.  trapped at home with tv and internet and an ipad pencil.  Lets not forget a good phone for photgography and a subscription to photoshop.  I basically make enough this year to pay my phone, internet, and shopify bill.  In essence my career breaks even with the tools it requires for me to exist in it.  I live for knowing i am getting views and sales.  My art is printed and sold, every month.  Now I am just spinning my wheels hoping for a break out miracle.  My artwork is good.  Better than average, but not amazeballs.  I am talented and that shows.  Its not even about the quality of the images.  I wont even spend more than an hour on an image any more.  The rate of sale is not worth my time.   So cheers good fellows, go out into the world and spread the news of artists being on these fabulous websites where you can get cool exclusive merch!  Share and follow.  Check in.  come back, and if you do buy something I promise to make sure you get what is pictured.