are you making enough from it to make a difference to your quality of life?
No—well, sort of. I don’t often sell any online, but I make bike designs for the Berkeley Bikestation, and I’ve done other batch orders from time to time. If I had a job, it wouldn’t be a noticeable amount, but since I don’t, it doesn’t take much to be noticeable.
how much can be done with a couple of dozen images
I do most of my sales in custom designs. My main goal is to have a really low barrier to entry for single buttons—as the site puts it,
to reduce as far as possible the obstacles that lie between “Hey, I’d like that on a button” and “Check out my cool button!”
I focus on this because it’s a service I want to exist and enjoy being able to provide, more than because it’s an especially profitable model. So I do scattered customs in quantities of 1-10, and occasionally a random internet sale of a planet set.
and an ugh field about doing much with it
Know what you mean. There are three things on this site I’m disliking dealing with right now:
Upgrading the website to provide an interface for custom button design. (I currently arrange custom designs by email with the client, which is a totally unnecessary trivial obstacle and doesn’t need to take up my time.)
Pricing. For some reason I find pricing (not the stuff posted on the site, but estimates for bulk orders) unreasonably difficult. Part of the reason for this is that my pricing cannot be competitive with mass-produced-in-a-factory buttons and still be profitable for me, and I feel lame when someone chooses to buy from me because I’m a small local shop and ends up paying a lot more because of it.
Uploading images of a new button set. The set’s done, the page is ready, all I need to do is take pictures and upload them … but taking good pictures of small round shiny things is really hard, and I keep forgetting to buttonhole the photographer friend who offered to help with it.
And, I suppose, a little bit of malaise. There’s a sense of “almost nobody sees or buys these, why am I bothering.”
I have problems with setting prices too—I suspect there’s a delusion that it’s possible to get prices right, while in fact while there’s definitely too high and definitely too low, there’s also a middle range where you might as well say something and the odds are in your favor that it will be accepted.
And I might not even be very correct about the too high and too low. For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price. I have no idea what economists would say about that.
For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price.
Shipping costs? It’s generally uneconomic even to give books away. I was going to offer a spare copy of a book here until I realized the shipping costs were such a high percentage of the cost to buy it new.
Amazon prices for Simak’s Time and Again—there’s a rough correlation between condition and price, but it’s very rough.
New copies range from $48 to $130. Good copies range for 50 cents to $23. The ratings of the vendors don’t have a strong correlation with the prices.
It took me 3 tries to get a price page like that (Heinlein’s Expanded Universe and Byatt’s Possession don’t show the pattern, but I can tell you that it isn’t rare for science fiction that’s been around for a while.
No—well, sort of. I don’t often sell any online, but I make bike designs for the Berkeley Bikestation, and I’ve done other batch orders from time to time. If I had a job, it wouldn’t be a noticeable amount, but since I don’t, it doesn’t take much to be noticeable.
I do most of my sales in custom designs. My main goal is to have a really low barrier to entry for single buttons—as the site puts it,
I focus on this because it’s a service I want to exist and enjoy being able to provide, more than because it’s an especially profitable model. So I do scattered customs in quantities of 1-10, and occasionally a random internet sale of a planet set.
Know what you mean. There are three things on this site I’m disliking dealing with right now:
Upgrading the website to provide an interface for custom button design. (I currently arrange custom designs by email with the client, which is a totally unnecessary trivial obstacle and doesn’t need to take up my time.)
Pricing. For some reason I find pricing (not the stuff posted on the site, but estimates for bulk orders) unreasonably difficult. Part of the reason for this is that my pricing cannot be competitive with mass-produced-in-a-factory buttons and still be profitable for me, and I feel lame when someone chooses to buy from me because I’m a small local shop and ends up paying a lot more because of it.
Uploading images of a new button set. The set’s done, the page is ready, all I need to do is take pictures and upload them … but taking good pictures of small round shiny things is really hard, and I keep forgetting to buttonhole the photographer friend who offered to help with it.
And, I suppose, a little bit of malaise. There’s a sense of “almost nobody sees or buys these, why am I bothering.”
I have problems with setting prices too—I suspect there’s a delusion that it’s possible to get prices right, while in fact while there’s definitely too high and definitely too low, there’s also a middle range where you might as well say something and the odds are in your favor that it will be accepted.
And I might not even be very correct about the too high and too low. For some reason, prices for used books at amazon don’t converge to a market-clearing price. I have no idea what economists would say about that.
Shipping costs? It’s generally uneconomic even to give books away. I was going to offer a spare copy of a book here until I realized the shipping costs were such a high percentage of the cost to buy it new.
Amazon prices for Simak’s Time and Again—there’s a rough correlation between condition and price, but it’s very rough.
New copies range from $48 to $130. Good copies range for 50 cents to $23. The ratings of the vendors don’t have a strong correlation with the prices.
It took me 3 tries to get a price page like that (Heinlein’s Expanded Universe and Byatt’s Possession don’t show the pattern, but I can tell you that it isn’t rare for science fiction that’s been around for a while.
Markets are imperfect. Shipping costs dominate the exchange value of books in my experience.
If anyone wants a ‘free’ first edition of The Four Hour Work Week and is willing to pay shipping from Canada let me know.