One of the things I really love in the hot summer is a good cold beer. I don’t drink a lot but damn in the summer a nice cold beer is wonderful. Today it’s HOT here in the northeast and I’m sweating my a$$ off.

I’ve been editing an article I’m writing for both my blog and for a prospective ‘zine. Well, I thought about the couple of beers I have in my ‘fridge and I decided to crack into one. This is a St. Peter’s Golden Ale. It’s the color of apricots and honey. It’s smooth and easy drinking, light and refreshing, perfect for the summer. It also only comes in very expensive 17-ounce containers. It also seems to be quite heavy on the alcohol…

All that stated my article is going darn well. I’ve got 22 half sized (11 letter sized) single spaced pages of good solid starting out online advice as well as hints and tips for marketing art. I’ve been devoting about 2 hours a day to working on it. I spend my evening writing up notes and ideas I’ve jotted down during my various breaks in the day and random ideas I’ve had while waiting for things to load at work. I print the pages out after all that and when I get home from work, edit the pages and fix all the edits I’ve put into the draft. Repeat process. Tomorrow I’m taking a break from the process as I won’t have free time and I’m going out after work.

So Saturday I’ll be working on it again. I’m expecting a 30 or 40 page half sized ‘zine out of this effort, in 2 or 3 weeks. I’m very very excited.

One of my coworkers has been promoted; he’s headed off to work with a subsidiary of the company I work for as a traveling coffee guru. I’m unbelievably excited for him. The job entails a great deal of travel in the North East as well as out to Colorado where the subsidiary has its head quarters. How cool is that?

As a farewell and good luck gift to him I’m making him a set of Coffee Jotters made of the packaging of the company employing him. I’ve enlisted the help of several people working in his current department. When they brew coffee for sample they are saving the packaging for me. We’ll see how many packages I get from the weekend but I was able to snag one on Friday and I bought anew package of coffee and made that into a jotter.

These jotters are cool in that I added pockets to the front of each one. One I simply folded the packaging over and stitched it in place before I made the jotter and the other I trimmed the packaging to size and used a piece of the cuttings to make the other pocket. I think they came out really well.

I also did a little experimenting on the mylar. I remembered from high school art class that mylar will tack to itself at a fairly low temperature. One of the packages had a lot of seems that I didn’t want and were too small to trim off the package it would have fallen apart. So I hit it with the iron at a very low temperature, and while it didn’t tack down all the folds and creases in the mylar and plastic disappeared. I didn’t get the results I was looking for I certainly got results that were in the end quite useful. (Cautionary note: When I say low heat, I mean as LOW as my iron would go.) Oh so in the end I ended up simply zigzag stitching over the offending seams. I like the look.

So here are a few pictures of the Coffee Jotters.

I see now I forgot to remove a logo, but we’ll all have to deal with it.

Just a quick note from my DayJob! The last few nights have been a whirlwind of working on a new ‘zine. I realized after reading my post about marketing that I should write up what I know in an article and post it. After a few days of writing it and editing what I wrote and then realizing that it needed to have more added I decided to create a new ‘zine. I have no idea what I’m going to call it. I suspect that I’ll be done with the writing and editing in a month or so. The focus is Blog and Art marketing online. Thus far I have 21 half sized pages and I’m thinking I’m going to get to 30 or 40.

There will be 1 to 200 copies of the “first edition” and subsequent versions will simply be new editions with added and updated info.. I’m thinking about pricing so after it’s all finished I’ll print off a few copies and then price them out.

I’m looking at making this a hands on and useful book/’zine for someone starting out or who has been around for awhile. Unlike some of the books and blogs I’ve read on marketing this will be real tangible advice on marketing and promoting your art or blog.

I’m really enjoying this project as it’s taking some of my already written marketing plan and applying it to what other people can do easily to up their hit count as well as recommending useful resources for the artist.

One of my coworkers is heading off on vacation, which is pretty typical this time of year what’s not typical is that he has seen some of my work and placed a custom order. He’s getting 5 large recycled journals, 8 matchbook notebooks and a set of jotters. Not to forget the notebook he’s getting for himself. One of the main requests was that I include as many company logos on them as possible, as they are going to his former coworkers. I was more than happy to do that for him. The results are some highly company branded books. I’m finished with almost all of them except for one, his. I’m hoping to get some shots of the finished work tonight and post some highly photoshopped pictures.

Also my DayJob boss bought a large 400-page journal for her best friend who was recently married. I don’t usually like to sell books at work, but I figured what the heck, it’s a one shot deal. It’s always cool to see the reaction of a person who first gets the journal. I never get to see that, because the journals almost always go off into the mail. I’ve gotten to see the reaction twice now. It’s one thing when I make them for someone but another when they purchase them from me- the reaction is similar but so very cool. Anyway, the big smile on my Bosses’ face made my day. I can only imagine how excited her friend is going to be when she sees the giant behemoth of a journal for the first time.

I listed 5 items to ebay today. 1 large recycled journal, 2 sets of jotters and 3 sets of matchbook notebooks. I lost a day of work this weekend when we spent some time at a family function but it’s all good they fed us. (The food was good.)

So you can find the eBay items here.

Its time for the notebook that I’ve been using for the last month or so to be retired. I have a particular process that I use each time.

First I reread the entire notebook, I then flag pages that need transferring to the new book. Either it’s information I’m still working on or something I know I’ll be looking for on a regular basis. I have 3 pages that I transfer to the first 3 pages of every notebook- a list of my friend’s phone numbers and volume and weight conversion info. So then I start transferring the info as needed. AS I transfer the pages I remove the post it notes.

When I’m all done I put a label on the spine of the old book- labeling what category it goes into- planner, ideas or what not. I also put a date range on the spine. The book then gets tossed into my bag for another week or two just incase I missed something in the transfer. After that it goes into my slipcase for easy reference.

When I talk about “marketing” my art I sometimes get funny looks. So I think I should clarify what I’m talking about when I discuss marketing. Marketing to me is anything and everything I do to promote my art and my website. Think about it, you probably got a website to promote your art but what are you doing to make that happen? If your response is doing nothing then I think having a website is a waste of time. If you aren’t investing a little time each week to promote yourself the effort, time and money of having a website or blog about your art is wasted. If all you do is allow Google or other search engines bring traffic to your site you’re not effectively getting the word out about your work. How can I say that? Because I spent the first year of having my website letting it sit there relying upon Google, search engines and eBay sales to bring people into looking at it. I qualified my website and blog’s dismal failure by telling people that it’s only there to show interested customers and collectors what I do.

Well, where the hell were those interested customer’s coming from? There weren’t many! Someone would email me to ask me about my work, usually from a referral from a friend of theirs who had seen my work so I’d send them to my website. That’s how it worked for quite some time. Until I decided to take it into my own hands and figure out how to get more people coming to my website, to my eBay sales and to me for custom work. Thus my blog was born. I was keeping a personal blog that drove a lot of people to my work- I saw the power in my personal blog (sadly Diary-X is dead now) for marketing and getting people to check out my work. So I started the blog about my art.

Here’s rule #1 about the art blog- it’s all about art and the trials and tribulations of being an artist. You will find very little griping about my personal life here, you will find NO complaining about my customers here, nor will you see much complaining about my DayJob unless it pertains directly to my art. I’ve heard a lot of argument about artist’s blogs and what they should or should not contain. Each blog is personal and you should make it yours however you want. But these are my rules and I’m going with it. So I keep my blog art focused. (This comes from my personal preferences in blogs- I like to read about art, how the art was made and the like; I don’t like to read about some one’s dog puking on the carpet, cooking dinner or what grades the kids got. I read other blogs for that sort of personal info.)

Rule #2 about the blog is: promote it. Trade links whenever possible, get featured on websites whenever possible. Provide links in the bottom of your every email address. The signature file of emails is a secret and powerful weapon for artists. At the bottom of every email people get form me- I provide a link to my blog. I have the address to my website on my business cards. Now if someone asks me about my art I tell him or her to check out my blog- they can learn far more about my art and me through it than they ever could have before.

Rule #3 about the blog. Use it. Post regularly. Most blogs have the feature of saving entries (WordPress and Blogger) so that you can publish them later, work on them more or what have you. This is a rule I break a lot. I’ll post 10 entries over a weekend instead of spreading them out across the week. So that’s a change you’ll see instituted on this blog asap.
Marketing shouldn’t be a dirty word for the artist and crafts person- we just need to change our thinking of it form a big corporate idea to think that it’s just thinking about how we’re going to get more people to look and buy our work.

Holy moley it’s freaking HOT here in Mass. I’ve been printing lines on paper and the paper and printed are not liking the humidity.

The printer keeps jamming because the paper keeps curling. So instead of hitting print and walking away par usual, I have to listen for the printer not printing and then come back, fix the darn thing and then go back to what I’m doing.

It’s mildly frustrating. Especially as I have a lot of paper to print- I’ve got a l;arge order lined up and I need to print it now, I’d rather wait but I can’t.

I’ve also worked on my marketing plan over the last few weeks. I’ve got a good outline of what I need to do now I’m just in process of picking out actual actionable items to add to it. I need a good plan to follow otherwise I won’t do much of anything. Essentially the plan involved 4 to 8 hours a week of additional work- over an above work on the website, making books, ebay and etsy. The goal is to get more people reading my blog and interested in my books. The plan utilizes what I already do plus some use of google analytics.

Have I written about how much I’m in love with google analytics? It’s freaking awesome. If you’re an artist trying to learn more about the visitors to your website, blog or other site you can use analytics pretty easily. There are a lot of screens to look at and see: where your customers/readers are coming from, how long they stay, what they look at, where they are from, among a large number of other things. You can also set up specific pages and entries to track. It’s highly customizable and the reports are really useful.

I’ve analyzed (yes I’m a total geek and this is what I partially do for my job) some of the reports to see where I can improve my links, referrals, and length of time spent on my site.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with how much time I spent on the plan today so I congratulated myself with a bottle of Magic Hat Hocus Pocus. I rarely drink these days but occasionally a nice ice cold beer is very nice.

It seems my little matchbook notebook re-design has led to some great interest! I’m pretty excited to say that my stuff is going to be featured on yet another blog!

You’ll be able to read more about it here:
http://craftandfound.com/

In celebration of getting a Flickr PRO account I’ve made this with fd’s flickr toys:

My creation
Originally uploaded by lessherger.

1. Stack of 17, 2. Coffee Bag Jotters, 3. Coffee Bag Jotters, 4. Jotter Cahier Volant Slipcase, 5. Recycled Matchbook Notebooks, 6. My 3 notebooks, 7. mine all mine in macro, 8. chase, imprint and mole, 9. Hedgehogs