Time to Pivot

Sorry about missing last week. The high winds we had led to a power outage that ended up stealing my blog time. Today is merely cloudy with rain. There was one day this week with freak weather. It was at least 75F(23.89C), and it felt so good. It's 71 now and falling. Tomorrow it's back in the 50s.

This week was more struggle on the Etsy shop. I've had over 100 visits with no sales. Part of the problem is I have very few products, which was caused by my foray into Adobe stock art. I've had over $3 in sales on that. I've been reevaluating my Etsy store. Right now I have some digital art, posters and mouse pads. Another part of the problem is that people seem to be looking for digital art they can print instead of pre-printed posters. I've decided to pivot and focus on digital art the most and, down the line, maybe exclusively. This week I tried to figure out how to resize images without warping them. It should have been simple, but the application I was using ended up not working in Windows the way it does on a Mac. I spent literally hours online working on a fix that was not to be found. I don't have a Mac and have no interest in getting one even if I could afford it. So, I finally just re-scaled as best I could with Gimp. The warping is slight enough that I think it'll be okay.

Beyond that I was working on my boilerplate sales text for the images and an instruction sheet for customers. It sounds like it would be quick to do, but it never turns out that way in real life. Nevertheless, I'm close to being done, and once I am, I won't have to do it again. I can use the same text and instructions for every digital image in the store. Except the Samsung Frame TV images. I'll need to do a simpler version for that. It's a shame I don't have an affiliate link to that $1,499 product that's on sale for $1,199. Apparently, there's a market for digital art for it. In addition to the seven sizes of digital art for printing, I'll need one for that, too.

It occurred to me only this morning that I might could've used ChatGPT to make an instruction sheet. Hmm. Another struggle has been getting a mockup image for the digital art. It sounds easy, but it didn't work the way it was supposed to. Fortunately, the fix was relatively easy to find.

Have a great weekend.

Still Working on the Stores

It was another week of working on the Adobe store. Of my current 378 images, I have 191 accepted, 60 rejected, 3 cartoons that need a model release(smh) and 124 pending. It's taken multiple minutes of time per image, so it's taken forever to process them. It took until this week for most of them to even make it into the Adobe work flow. I've made $1.58 so far.

Adobe only works a few days a week on images. It's taking a long time. In addition to the problems mentioned last week, I ran into a new one. I noticed one of my rejected images was one that had been preciously accepted but needed work on something. They didn't tell me what specifically. See last week for that communications problem. It may have been the title, which I fixed and resubmitted. Anyway, one moderator accepted it. When I fixed what I thought the problem was, another moderator rejected it for "quality issues". Not true. Most of my rejected images are rejected for "quality issues". The real reason is that they were generated with Midjourney. I'm concluding the accepted-then-rejected image was rejected for that reason or either because the moderator didn't like the image. That seems to be a problem at Adobe. When one moderator says it's good while another says the quality is bad, I've caught them in a fib. I don't know how many of the rejects were previously accepted, but it's disturbing to find out that things can be rejected on somebody's whim or bad day.

It's mentally tiring to work on all of it. My plan for next week is to focus on the Etsy store, which needs a lot of work, too. Assuming Adobe gets to my images by Monday and doesn't reject too many, I'll have about 300 images up. Seeing how those work will give me an idea of whether it would be worth the incredible amount of work getting up to thousands of images would take. I'll probably still be submitting images to round out my categories but not many.

Have a great weekend.

The Online Store Struggle

It was another week of working on the online stores. I did little if anything to Etsy and focused mostly on the Adobe stock art store. I've uploaded 333 images. Thirty-nine have been rejected. Over 20 needed corrections to key words or the title, I think. More on that in minute. One hundred eighty-five are "In Review", some of which have been in review for 8 days despite the promise that "Thank you for your submission, your files will be reviewed by the moderation team within the next few days." One hundred nine have been uploaded but not formally submitted because I haven't had time to do key words for them yet as well as additional research.

Adobe has been super frustrating to work with. It takes a long time to make the images and do the key words, even using the suggested key words, which are far from perfect and sometimes don't match the image. Their entire system is antiquated. Part of the problem is that they don't communicate. For the rejections, they give a list of possible reasons. What? They know exactly, specifically why it was rejected, but they won't tell you specifically. Why not tell me so I can make sure I don't make that mistake again in the future? It's the same for the ones needing possible key word or title corrections. They give a list of things it might be and let you guess what needs fixing. Why? They've identified a very specific thing that needs to be fixed. Why not communicate that? Why make me guess from a list of possibilities? Uh, why not fix it automatically?

Another problem is that their old system can't differentiate between a cartoon of a person and a photo of a person. I have multiple digital art images with human faces. Adobe wants a "model release" before they'll publish it. Um, it's basically a cartoon. Cartoons can't sign model releases. Even if I was using human models, there's no upload button for the release form! I literally couldn't upload a model release if I wanted to. Which I may do if I can find a way. Since it's a fictitious person, I don't see why I can't make up a fictitious model biography like I would do for a fictitious person in a book. Why yes, Adobe, she was born in 2162 on Jupiter Station. She signed it right there. Fortunately, very few of the images involve people.

Just for the record, I did an image search on all the submissions with faces. One of them was similar to a comic book character. Not a match but similar. I won't win that battle. I deleted it. The others don't match anyone, although one is similar to one other online face image. However, it's not a match. I'm going to fight for that one if I can.

With only 30 images for sale instead of 300+, I've had no sales. Still no sales on Etsy. I need to focus more on that, especially since Adobe seems to be doing nothing with my submissions now.

It's hard to fathom why they're so hostile to customers. I'm getting the impression they only want large customers with tens of thousands of images.

Have a great weekend.

Working on Shops

Despite having more energy than before the last dental visit, I still had some pain and tiredness this week from the sinus infection, but I was still able to work on the Etsy shop. Mostly, I was learning how to improve my listings and do things with digital images. There's a file size requirement I kept running up against. I was submitting .png files for larger images when I needed to be submitting .jpegs. Problem solved. I still have a problem resizing images for different surfaces without distorting them too much. Some images just don't resize and maintain their look.

I'm so far behind where I thought I would be. I have 13 products, some with multiple variations. It takes hundreds to make any real money. My goal is at least 300 images on multiple products each. It looks like it's going to take months. Still no sales on about 20 visits. From what I've researched, it takes about 100 visits to get 2 sales, more or less. A small number of stores do better and some worse. It can take one to four months to get the first sale. I'm hoping for better.

I've been using AI to generate images, which has left me with a lot of leftovers that don't match the artistic look I'm going for. Etsy started out selling handmade items, so I'm trying to match that esthetic as much as I can, although now there's a ton of print on demand and some AI art things there. Some of my leftovers have been spectacular. It hurts so much not to be able to sell them or have anyone even be able to look at them. Guess what? It turns out I can sell them as stock art. Yay! I've taken nearly 100 leftovers, after curating for the best ones, and started a stock art store on another site. I'm not approved yet, so there's no link this week. I made a few extra images to get up to 100 even. The goal with that store is to have thousands of images.

Needless to say, I got nothing done of the writing front this week. With all the inflation and greedflation, I need the extra income an online store could generate. It's way more work than I thought it would be, and there's no way to know what's going to happen with it.

Have a great weekend.

Shop Open

I've been suffering a sinus infection and in infected gum from a tooth that chipped. That was on top of the filling I needed. I made it to the dentist yesterday and had the filling done and the tooth fixed. I'm feeling better today but still not 100%. Any progress is good progress, though. I already have more energy.

Last week I mentioned I've been trying to set up an Etsy store. It's called Abundant Rivers. There's still a lot of work to do to get it up and running, but the ball is rolling. I need to go through and add more information to the listings I have. The digital art has no size information, for example. I also need to work on descriptions and tags and things like that both on the customer side and the back end. It's kind of basic, but I'm okay with that since it means getting it open instead of waiting until things are "perfect". It usually takes a month or more to get a first sale. That gives me some time to polish things.

My goal is to have hundreds of listings in the near term. Right now I have 11. My focus will be digital art and t-shirts. The art will be downloadable as well as on products like cell phone cases, mouse pads, etc. I don't know what's going to happen with it, but I'm willing to take a chance.

Not much new on the writing front. I've been working on the store and dragging from the infection. I did work on some cover art, but it's slow going. I've put more time into it than I have results, but something is going to give. Something is going to go my way.

Have a great weekend.

I'm Back

I wanted to be back last Friday, but I ran out of time. Since I don't have much time this week either, let's get to it. I've been busy lately preparing to open an Etsy store. My products would be digital images that could either be bought as a standalone product or could be bought for a print on demand item like a cell phone case, poster, sticker, t-shirt, etc. In addition to Etsy, I'm looking at launching on other platforms like Redbubble, a place I'd never heard of. It sounds easy, but it's a lot more work than I thought. With inflation like it is, I need to get something going on the side. I'm also still training for that Fiverr gig I mentioned a while back. I think I could get started with that right now, but there's a lot of work to do to get that off the ground. I may not go with Fiverr after all. Gotta run.

Have a great weekend.

See You in January Probably

Merry early Christmas! Happy early Hanukkah! Like professional stock traders, I'm taking December off from the blog. If something big happens, I'll make an exception. For example, I now have a list of AI image generators that could be used to make covers. If I can get that working, I'll post. If I get the novella out the door, I'll post that. But, if it's ordinary things, I'll catch you up in January. It was a bad week, so there's nothing to report today.

Have a great weekend and great weekends the rest of the month.