On being petty

Today I'm going to be petty.

I've resisted (somewhat) the complaining online about recent cuts in pay we graphic designers and artists have "suffered" at the hands of CafePress. Here's the story, for those who are not familiar with the set up.

We (the graphic designers, photographers, real artists, and such) design and create the words and pictures you find on items offered in our stores - in my shops, it's the designs on the mini bookplates, along with the interpretations of favorite booklover quotes or simple things like "Grumpa" found in my Nana's Alley shop. We spend hours doing the art, and rather than sell them in real world stores, we upload the graphics to stores on-line called POD's (print on demand) where they are sold for us.

It's a sweet deal - we provide the art and the POD business does all of the tiring stuff - the printing, processing orders, shipping, customer returns and problems. For many of us, the money that's come in has been anything from a little pocket change to a huge portion of our income. We've come to depend on it. In some ways, because I run my own business with bookplates, where I have to do all that tiring stuff myself, I think we the artists have become a bit spoiled by the POD folks!

However, it was a shock to us all this past April when we were suddenly told that any orders not coming from our own websites or links that we had were being drastically cut on commissions. Now, again, I don't think the commissions we are now getting are all that awful, having worked as a sales rep years ago, and then having overseen sales reps - 10% commission (to a sales rep) isn't bad. To an artist, however, I think it's something different.

Bear in mind, many of the artists selling their wares are awesomely talented folks. Their work is beautiful - many of them sell the real deal in the real world (framed and fancy stuff) and just use the POD's to supplement their income -- t-shirts, mugs, bumperstickers -- so having someone tell you suddenly that your artwork is only worth 10% commission has been a bit of an insult.

I haven't felt terribly insulted - my work is creative, and fun and I'm getting better at it, but it isn't exactly Van Gogh. Or Grandma Moses.

Not until this week, when I noticed what happened when a customer of mine,ordered one of my products (coming from my website), then cancelled that order, then reordered another similar product. She either called the second order in, or went in through Cafepress - I'm not sure what all happened but -- the folks at Cafepress decided that she was their customer now, not mine.

So, my commission got cut in half. I wrote and disagreed, but their basic response was, "too bad".

I am feeling a bit petty. CafePress has been very very good to me. And I'm sure they are just trying to stay alive, which I certainly want them to do.

However, what they are doing is .. peculiar at best.

Here's how it works.

Let's say an item is marked as at cost, $10.00 (this is what the seller would see - no doubt that's marked up, and it really costs a lot less - but let's leave that aside).

I can take that Item and decorate it, charge $14.00 for it and make a nice $4.00 profit. That's provided a customer buys it from my website.

If they do a search and find it through the CafePress Marketplace, the story is different, both for the customer, and for me.

The same exact $10.00 item may be marked for anywhere from $10.00's to $30.00 by CafePress.

Let's make it $20.00. Another customer buys the same exact item for $20.00, costing them $6.00 more than if they'd bought it from my website.

I get $2.00 commission.

You do the math.

So, my feel grumpy over my lost little commision may be petty but it's my pettiness.

I am not leaving CafePress, although a lot of artists have. I've found an additional POD, and I'm trying to convince customers to enter CafePress from my website (the search engines, may I add, are overpowered by CafePress -- do a search for any of the items I sell by name, and CP's entrance comes up long before mine)

Just begging, in all my pettiness, if you see something you like from any of my shops, please enter through my stores. And if you have to call in an order, please tell them your purchase was a Shop purchase. Make sure the price I quote is the one you get (if it's the lower one).

Alright. Done whining for now.

Peace!

The upside of the downside

Recently -- very recently - some very bad things happened in My Little World, things that are disconcerting, to put it mildly.

There's the Economy, of course. I know I'm not alone in that. For some reason I was blithely meandering along, thinking the shake up we had back in 2000-2001 was the Big One. Denial was not my middle name, but my first name, all the way through October when I suddenly realized, my finances were not good and I really should try to find outside work.

I was also in denial about my Age. Like many of my fellow Boomers, I didn't think my being.. um.. older.. was going to have any kind of negative effect on my marketability - I have all this knowledge, experience, wisdom - surely someone would appreciate it! Several months of job seeking have given me a fresh view.


Realizing that in today's Economy, those few jobs that are out there are going for the younger crowd, I realized I needed to work harder at my own Little Business. Now, I felt smug back in 2000 when I found a niche market - bookplates are a niche market, but my niche market within that niche market was small order bookplates.

Last year my main supplier, The Antioch Company (formerly Antioch Publishing, and before that, The Antioch Bookplate Company) was sold, and along with it my supplier of bookplates. Fortunately I have a good deal of bookplates in stock but I realized I needed to get more serious about the bookplates and sidelines I've been designing.

Except - the Economy. This April, one of my secondary sources of income decided to cut the commissions paid to the artists (or graphic designers, in my case) who provide the art sold on their lines - commission checks starting with next month's check will be about half of what they've been.

Yeeeee gads. I found a secondary source for selling my graphic designs, but it's slow work right now.

To add insult to injury, my oldest computer, the one where my fonts and old records were stored, decided it had had enough, and died on me, followed by my newer family computer, where I do a lot of my design work - the motherboard died. That all happened within a 10 day period and required some technical help to pull out some records and reload them onto the remaining computer, another work computer.

But that wasn't enough. After things were running again, the wireless router decided it had had enough, and went out. On a Friday. We were essentially down and out until the following Tuesday, when someone could make it round and set us up with a new one, though we had sporadic access and work did get done.

Because this is a slow season, this happened at the best possible time for me. But not for some of my customers, who found their orders taking longer than usual and me more frazzled than usual.

So, I'm now down from four computers to two - frightening in some ways, because I don't have the resources (because of the Economy) to buy a new computer if something happens to either of the remaining ones.

This also is the year my youngest gets his driver's license, and my car insurance rockets up again. I'm having to pick up his health insurance, and he's looking at the colleges he'd like to go to, and I just want to go lie down for awhile.

On the bright side, because everything fell apart, I ended up deciding to revamp my website as long as I was having to prepare a new site for my new POD supplier.

There's a silver lining, yes?

Minimum wage would be a raise!

It's 12:04 a.m.. Do you know where your website business woman is? I swear, I am working for a dime an hour, though I don't mean to complain. I enjoy this, I just wish somebody was paying me!

Spent several hours working on the main web page, not ready to upload any corrections yet. The FAQ page is updated, as is the section that answers questions about problems on the site.

But trying to lay out the bookplates and work with the Miva software in a way to make the whole thing more palatable for customers is taking me years! I'd rather be making new stuff!

Tried to find a way to allow customers to type in their name and test run the fonts, but it just isn't feasible for me -- I know my competitors have it but I don't have the money or the techie knowledge. Perhaps I should put a little jar out on the store front for donations and ideas. It would be cool, but...

Inviting customers and others to read my Blog - and mixing business and personal life on Facebook and Twitter - is an odd feeling. Pleasant in some ways, it has a feeling as though a small business inworld can be something like a local shop you go to, where you know the shopkeeper and they know you, at least a little bit. That kind of business setting suits me more than the impersonal, behind the scenes type of business that I think has been on the internet for sometime. We are going back to a friendlier way, more like it was when I first "discovered" the web in 1993.

Facebook, especially, is like a big small family. I like the way I can see my sons' lives, their friends and comments and find out what's going on with them, without being intrusive or being left out. I posted baby pictures of them on my photo album there, titled "Why You Don't want your Parents on Facebook" - only viewable to friends, but they were well received. Though I wonder, as us elder folks start logging onto Facebook, will the younger ones find another place to hang out? I hope not.

I'm really enjoying the way the internet feels these days. I hope it continues.

When there's nothing happening

What do you do when there's nothing happening?

Summertime is a slow time for retailers, even when the economy hasn't crashed and crumbled around you. There's a usual slow down this time of year in orders, but I seem to be more aware of it because we are home more.

Usually we go somewhere around this time, and I put a warning up on the website , notifying customers that they can place orders, but nothing will be shipped until we return.

My customers are so wonderful, most go ahead and place their orders and patiently wait the week or two until we come back without a word of complaint.

Only we're not going anywhere until late July, and that for only a few days over a week-end, so the dribbling in of orders is painful. Not just with bookplates, either - which are slow anyways. But my Cafepress orders are slower than usual, and of course, Zazzle - which is new to me - is painfully slow!

I don't think this is because of anything permanently shocking going on. And it isn't just the Economy. It's the Economy Plus Summertime. People are on vacation, puttering around outside, enjoying time off work or the nice weather, even if they don't have a lot of money to spend - it's too nice to be inside, shopping.

So, rather than panic, what should I do, what should I do?

I could clean house or work on the yard, which I am certain is the weediest house on the block. Nawwww, it's too hot and there are other things to do. Besides, my youngest son's girlfriend is coming for a few weeks. She's promised to help with all that stuff.

So I'm spending my work time (which for me is usually a good 8 - 10 hours a day) on my laptop outside or inside, depending on my mood and the heat, working on:

1) Fixing up my website.

I redesigned the main page and added a couple of new ones that look fresher to me.
I'm going to bravely look into a different shopping cart, a major change. This is the time of year to do that, before fall and the (hopefully!) Christmas rush.

This included stuff like redoing advertising and working with SEO's, techie stuff I never make time for.

2) Cleaning up inventory and old junk out of my CafePress shops shown on my main page.

3) Opening up a new shop on another POD shop (Print on Demand), also shown on my main page.

4) Creating new graphics, learning stuff I've learned over the past two years while creating things on Second Life. And here I thought that was a waste of time, just something I was doing to escape reality and have fun! Turns out, I was educating myself!

5) Wrote a little descriptive piece for Squidoo that I hope will help people who want to make their own bookplates

6) Joined Twitter which I don't really understand, but OK, follow me.

7) Got myself more active in Facebook, which I do kind of understand. I use it both to keep in touch with family/friends, and for business.

8) Started this blog, which seems mostly a place for me to write down some of the thoughts in my head.

I need to get outside more, walk around and spend time with friends. I'll put that on the "To Do" list I started. I figure if I keep a big TO DO list here, I'll do some of the stuff and check it off!

Of Pies and Books

My friend Pat and I had to meet somewhere between here and there to plan the bookstore for our Yearly Meeting next month. I suggested a bookstore with a coffee shop, thinking something like Barnes and Noble with Starbuck's. I have little imagination sometimes. Pat suggested Readmore Books in Richmond, Indiana.

I drove my 72 minutes or so to get there and felt a bit doubtful, the closer I got to 901 East Main Street in Richmond. This is downtown Richmond, where the buildings are old and a little tattered looking. A block or two from Readmore was an area where you might want to lock your car doors. I've lived in places like that, when I was young, pretty, poor and guarded by my own perception of reality. Now I'm an aging female with illusions of wealth and a paranoid streak. I lock my doors.

Readmore was on a corner - no parking, which I think was a good sign for downtown Richmond. It had seemed to me most of Richmond was off in the outskirts, parked in the fancier areas where the fancy bookstore is. Not the one I'd suggested, but a discount chain bookstore with miles of books, many of them remainders - and in the back a large somewhat impersonal coffee shop with decent coffee and an offering of decent pastries and sandwiches.

Readmore doesn't look anything like that. Small, cramped in the corner, with signage that was hand done. Not some cutesy store bought to look hand done, but real stuff, painfully handwritten on plain white paper and taped to the door.

I stepped closer, expecting the sign to announce "Out of Business". But no, it was today's lunch specials. In I went and found myself in a tiny shop with a lot of magazines and a few books, a lot of tables and some smiling people, among them my friend Pat.

Pat and I spent a good three hours there, our papers spread out over two tables, our laptops plugged in around the corner behind the magazine rack (we were shown how to do it carefully so it would be less likely someone would trip on the exposed cords).

For my food, time and electric usage, I spent a total of $7.35 and forgot to leave a tip, for which I feel awful. (I'll go back and leave a big one, that's for sure - but in my mind, I was treating it like a bookstore, where I never leave tips, when in fact it is mostly local small corner restaurant, and a very good one!)

We ate breakfast, drank tea, talked on and on about the books on our ordering list (and other topics not on the approved Quaker discussion list).

While we were sitting there, someone came in asked if there was any rhubarb pie today. He was told there wasn't any today and then asked when he'd be back in.

"Well, most likely Thursday" the visitor said.

"Alright, then, there'll be rhubarb for you on Thursday," the woman behind the counter said.

I didn't need any pie, the breakfast - definitely homemade - was filling. Still, when I'd looked up the directions to get here, there was mention of the pies. Driving all this way, the least I could do was look at the pies. No rhubarb, of course. And I do like a good rhubarb pie. but there were a couple of pieces of apple pie still unclaimed, some kind of pie with nuts across the top and an uncut creamy pie that looked dreamy.

So when I ordered my slice of apple pie (which, by the way, was a generous slice indeed), I asked that friendly young woman behind the counter if the pies were homemade there.

Oh yes," she assured me. "Homemade pie is the best."

I had to agree.

Pat had something else, I'm not sure what. I was so busy moaning and stuffing my mouth with chunks of fresh apple pie, I didn't take the time to try to figure out specifically which pie Pat was moaning over.

Today I was trying to explain this to a young friend - he seemed to understand and I didn't have to apologize for loving a small bookstore that was more a pie shop to me than a bookstore.

"Hmm," he said, "would you rather go to a bookstore with a lot of books and no pies, or a bookstore with few books but great pies?"

Good question - and I think we all know the answer.

I hope many people stop on in.. I live over an hour's drive away in another state, but I'm planning to go back again real soon. Not so much for the books, but for the ambiance, the friendliness. And OK, the pies.