Not Enough Heads For All My Hats!

Feeling chaotic....

Some of my artist heroes are/were reclusive people who lived long into the modern age with hardly a TV or telephone (or, in some cases, even an automobile) in sight. They wrote stories by hand and illustrated them at their kitchen windows and were left alone to draw and dream and not be disturbed by technology. And their examples were everything I ever wanted to be when I grew up.

I've finally gotten to the point where I'm living that dream. Sort of. Because as much as I'd like to be spending my days happily writing stories by hand and illustrating them at my kitchen window, I can't if I expect to pay any bills. A self-employed artist these days (in my opinion) has to be a big old multi-tasker. First and foremost: they must have an online presence. And it can't be just a little one, either.

So this old dog has been trying to learn new tricks of the eCommerce variety. But good grief! Creating a virtual storefront? Adding shopping carts and checkout plug-ins? Following traffic feeds? And just what the heck is HTML and Search Engine Optimization, anyway? As far as I'm concerned, anything more complicated than sending an email might as well have a sign around its neck saying, "Here Be Dragons." And by the time this slow learner has figured out how to do something as (apparently) simple as posting a photo to Facebook, all those hours in the day that could've been spent sitting at my kitchen window drawing are gone....

Many of my artist heroes were still creating when the Internet came along, and it was their adoring fans who brought them into the Social Media age by designing their websites and maintaining their fanpages. I'm sure those artists would've lived just fine without them. As far as I can tell, every last one of them had little use for an Etsy account.

Plus, I suspect another reason why my heroes were left alone to draw and dream was because they had a host of others who did the rest for them -- the printing, the selling, the advertising, packaging, shipping, copy writing, website designing, public-relations-ing, fill-in-the-blank-ing. People like me have to do all that ourselves in addition now to blogging and tweeting, posting and linking, and being the ear-to-the-ground individual who is simply there to monitor online feed related to our happy little businesses. Not much time in a day anymore to draw and dream let alone anything else.

Of course people can be hired to do all of the above, but that would take money I don't have and employer skills I don't possess. So it boils down to just me -- the person who can hardly figure out how to add an attachment to an email. And let's not forget that some days it's hard to just be let alone be me (or, in this case, be everything); when Life suddenly adds a big dose of crazy to the mix, growing a business doesn't just become an afterthought, it goes right out the window....

At the moment I'm trying to create a new website in addition to my original one (created for me by my James and I love it, but it definitely looks its age; plus, I wouldn't know how to correct a typo on it to save my life!). And supposedly websites are so easy to make now that a person should be able to create one in their sleep. Not me....

And, of course, it's pre-Fest 'crunch time' now and printing is happening (or trying to happen). This means reminding myself why Photoshop is not always my friend.

Let's not forget my Etsy store either. Wait; it appears I have forgotten it! (Should I forget it? Things have changed there since I visited last; should I move to a different platform?)

So here's where I'd love to sum up my defense and justification of everything that I'm currently not doing (or not doing well) as it relates to Mayfaire, but I won't. Instead, I'll hand the keyboard over to my inner Beater-Upper and allow her to do the talking, as she's been trying to wrestle the dang thing away from me all this time anyway. And she says, "No one said being a self-employed artist would be easy. You know this, so suck it up already. Gah!"

She's right, of course. Guess I've been told.

...
(Note: The awesome hat in the picture is actually a Cthulhu tea cozy created for me by my friend Becca Leathers, owner of KnitNax.)