Without the state

The long tail and original art

One of my aims when I opened my Etsy shop selling vintage graphics was to have as wide a variety of images available as possible. It took me a while before I realised this was tapping into something called the 'long tail'. The graph shows how this works. The area in yellow is the same as the area in green, but represents a large number of distinct items sold in relatively small quantities, rather than the small number of items sold in large quantities represented by the green area, which is where the best sellers like the Dan Brown books or '50 Shades' series are to be found.

By aiming for wide variety, I am targeting this long tail. At first this was an accident, now it is a deliberate tactic. Note that this is not the same as catering for a 'niche' market. As a strategy, niche marketing is aimed at being a big fish in a small pond, concentrating all your efforts on a small but specific and well defined segment of the population. Catering to the long tail is the opposite. Because I print to order and therefore don't have to either anticipate what will sell or keep large stocks, I can spread my efforts very widely. As a comment on the Longtail blog linked at the end of this article put it "The market is a mile wide and an inch deep".

I'm not alone in this of course, this is the Amazon model where over time products with a low sales volume collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, provided that distribution channel is large enough. This is why I wouldn't attempt this approach on an independent web site. Etsy as a brand already brings huge numbers of people to their site and I can tap into their searches to make my sales.

This possibly also explains why original art doesn't sell so well on Etsy or similar sites. The market for 'things to hang on the wall' is huge. That part of it looking for original works of art is much smaller. Out of that smaller market the proportion who will like your style and subject will be even smaller even if they find you. In addition, since the search process relies on using words to find images, the search terms for original art are very much harder to pin down, especially for abstract art. There are visual search tools but they do not have the reach of Google text searches. In my case it is even more difficult because Etsy's failure to properly differentiate between reproductions and originals or even between a downloadable file and the physical image once printed, makes the search results whether on site or via Google, hopelessly contaminated. 

Based in part on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

I didn't find it until I'd finished writing, but see also this site:

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/faq/

New name, new domain

In a few hours time, you will be able to access this blog using a new domain www.withoutthestate.com. The old typepad domain will still work, but I will be using the new domain in all links etc from now on. This coincides with the new name and strapline.

The inspiration for the name is twofold. First is my strong belief is that the state is taking to much to itself, crowding out what should be the normal activities of civil society, working 'without the state'. That doesn't mean buying in to the empty rhetoric of Cameron's 'Big Society' masking as that does an anti-social agenda of priority to corporate interests over the personal.The second is the related idea of working outside the state - 'outwith' in the Scots usage - as an end in itself in a process of building institutions one by one as in the strap line, which is the old 'Wobblies' slogan.

 COLIN WARD (Image via Wikipedia)

Although I would not describe myself as an anarchist this is all heavily influenced by the work of the late Colin Ward, in particular his book 'Anarchy in Action'' who was in turn influenced by Gustav Landauer.

This will also mean an end to the arts based posts on this blog. These will move to a new blog still under development, which will combine a broad based arts blog with a new sale site for my own artwork. The domain name for that will also be new, although it currently redirects to a site hosted by Clicpic.

The decision to do this has developed out of work on a business plan for my art business which is testing out a process in e-book on business planning for working artists. I'll post details of that site when it is ready.

The other big change will be the removal of many of the sites in the blogrolls here and their move to the new site.

There'll be some changes made...

They say don't change the old for the new
But I've found out that this will never do
When you grow old don't last long
You're here today and then tomorrow you're gone.

from : There'll be Some Changes Made by W. Benton Overstreet / Billy Higgins

Watch this space for some changes to this blog and my other web 'presence'. The changes have started - see the new strap line in the title) but coming soon will be a new domain name (although the blog will still be accessible through the Typepad URL) and a return to the roots of this blog in localism and community based action. You can see more of what I mean by following the category 'reclaim the state'.

I am also setting up a new arts based blog which will incorporate a shop for my prints and other art work. I'm building this from scratch using Joomla, so don't expect that tomorrow, but that will mean many fewer arts based posts here, unless they have a political angle too. That will also have its own domain name.

More soon.

Apologies

The widget that automatically generates a post from my new Delicious links appears to have gone seriously wrong yesterday, posting multiple copies at hourly intervals. I have deleted the multiples, but they will probably still show up in RSS feeds, about which I can't do anything. They also showed up on Twitter and Facebook. I'll try to delete the Facebook ones, but Twitter slides by so fast I will leave them.

Changes afoot...

I'm currently trying to make this blog do two things. I want to carry on writing about the things that interest/annoy me and I also want to share/promote my prints and photography. At the moment I'm not convinced it works, although from my perspective my art is part and parcel of being me, just as much as the politics and polemic.

I would be interested in getting feedback from my reader on this. Do the politics put you off the art or vice versa?

[Temporarily, this post will be held at the top of the blog, so new items will appear below it]

Restraint of Trade?

From Ebay

In February, we reduced the visibility of UK items on eBay.com, as they had reached a level where they were significantly impeding domestic trade on eBay.com. We are aware that a small percentage of sellers, who relied in whole or in part on US buyers, were significantly affected by this reduced visibility.

Since then, we have been planning how best to display some UK items on eBay.com and some US items on eBay.co.uk so that cross-border trade can thrive without impeding domestic trade on either site.

It seems to me that there are several ways to read this. One is that US sellers are worried about competition - especially with the slipping $ to £ and $ to € rate of exchange. References to 'impeding domestic trade' tend to reinforce that interpretation.

On the other hand I've noticed - for example on Etsy - that many US sellers seem frightened of selling internationally. Having looked at the US Postal Service Web site I can see why. Sending anything out of the US seems to be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Some US sellers however seem almost to be unaware that there are people outside the US borders who actually buy things. This shows up a great deal in forum discussions of all sorts. I remember being accused of being 'Unamerican' back in the days when I had an AOL e-mail address for example, the person concerned clearly having no idea that AOL was an international company. I suppose, given the huge size of the USA, this isn't entirely surprising, since making any international journey takes much greater effort than travelling within Europe.

EDIT: It occurs to me that it is always possible for the buyer to exclude non-local sellers so I suspect my less charitable conclusion has some merit.

 

MyThings U.K.

Just as LibraryThing allows you to keep track of your books, so MyThings U.K. now allows you to keep an online record of your valuable belongings     and track their values. Stolen goods can be reported to a Trace service, said to be "the leading global registry of lost and stolen valuables used by police departments, auction houses, and second hand dealers."

Time Goes By - What it's really like to get older

Via Ronni Bennet at Time Goes By.

We went to breakfast at a restaurant where the "seniors' special" was two eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast for $1.99.

"Sounds good," my wife said. "But I don't want the eggs."

"Then I'll have to charge you two dollars and forty-nine cents because you're ordering a la carte," the waitress warned her.

"You mean I'd have to pay for not taking the eggs?" my wife asked incredulously.

"Yes!!"

"I'll take the special."

"How do you want your eggs?"

"Raw and in the shell," my wife replied.

She took the two eggs home.

There's another nice story in the comments too...

A very self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

"You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one," the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear. "The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon; our spaceships have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light-speed processing  and...," pausing to take another drink of beer.

The senior citizen took advantage of the break in the student's litany and said, "You're right, son. We didn't have those things when we were young........so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little twit, what are you doing for the next generation?"

League of Gentlemen (and women)

I'm not a huge fan of 'link swapping', but the basic premise of this scheme is one I can subscribe too - I find lots of blogs with huge traffic and I wonder why these?

EDIT: I like the 'Carnival' idea much better and this one - the 'Carnival of Citizens' looks as if it could be good. Deadline for the next one is December 15th - more here.

Alternatives to flickr

I'm looking into alternatives to flickr - not because I don't like it, I do - but because its policy towards anything other than plain vanilla photography is pretty poor. Th emain alternative seems to be Zooomr at the moment although nothing quite matches flickr's 'social networking' aspects.

This is the first - and so far only - image I've uploaded to Zooomr. I'm preparing a longer post on the various sites available, so expect more.

Edited because I missed off the Zooomr links