No more holiday craziness

With the day job and personal life taking such a huge chunk of my time, there's been precious little time to work on the business stuff. I did manage to squeeze a couple hours here and an hour or so there to make some important changes to www.lunasgathering.com. The focus of the site has officially changed from my CafePress store to a more broad audience. I don't have any of the product up or major content, but the beginnings are set. I have a snazzy new logo, the shells of most of the new pages and have removed all the excess shirt design pages. I even have the beginnings of the new site for the farm. I'll be back again soon with more details.

News and new designs

With help from my new roomies, I have about 7 new design ideas basically done and ready to upload and add to products. I've already put up two so far, one for each store. I've begun to see an increase in sales for this holiday. I was averaging about one sale a month until a couple of weeks ago. From there it was one or two a week. I am now seeing at least one a day, occasionally two. It is exciting when people choose my design over so many others. After work, I will add two more designs, possibly three. I am having a harder time coming up with original ideas for the DHQ store than for Luna's Gathering. Though right now I think the best thing for DHQ is to find ways to promote the designs I have now and worry about new designs later. Finding a way to market my designs above others is the only way I will be able to get my stores to succeed. I know the designs are solid. They just have to be seen. When there are over three thousand designs for the chosen tags and categories, there has to be another way to stand out. The designs on the first page of a search are the ones that sell. But how do you sell if you can't reach that first page? Finding the right keywords is only a small part of that conundrum. Ok, now to the news. :)

Luna's Gathering is now officially a business, registered with the state, tax ID and all. I also found a couple of wholesalers who dropship. They are suppliers of Pagan wares. I can add the items I choose to my site, take retail orders from customers, and they will ship the items directly to my customers. Pretty cool for starters. I eventually would love to have an actual storefront with space to just buy wholesale and sell in-store and online. I've also started compiling a list of good wholesalers. I think this is the only way I'll ever get a storefront. I'll have to save capital myself with an online business to start the bricks and mortar store. And I'll have to keep my "day job" so we don't starve. Things are starting to come together slowly but surely. Baby steps to success! And to the left, my newest design, appearing in my store tomorrow night.

NaNoWriMo 2008

Today was day one of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writers Month. It is a challenge to writers to get 50k words of a story written in thirty days. No editing, no serious planning. Just lots of writing of words to get the jist of the story down. As usual, I'll be getting a late start. With so many other things going on, not much thought has gone into the new Supernatural story I'll write this year. Today I at least chose which of my story ideas to use. Now I have to decide when in the series it will take place and where. Once I have those two basic pieces of info I can start busting out the story. The spirit in this one feeds on hidden fears and insecurities. This is the main reason I have to narrow down a time frame. Each of the seasons had a whole new set of fears for both of the Boys to deal with. Though Dean's insecurities are still basically the same. I also need to choose a setting not so close to home. I don't want to end up setting all of my stories in Texas. Now to go find a good haunted college. :) The sooner I can start writing, the easier it will be to catch up from the word count deficit.

Following Through

As I said in my last post, I needed to update both of my websites. I can finally say, "I did it!" I still haven't done the major overhaul I want to Luna's Gathering, but the content is fairly fresh and the dead links are gone. The major reworking will come soon. And even better, I got the new issue of Demon Hunters Quarterly up. It lacks only a completed main story (which should be done in the next couple of days), but other than that it's complete. For the first time since I started the site I don't have empty spaces with the "coming soon" promise. I added a featured author to the fan fiction section and a few smaller things. Now that my sites aren't stagnant I can start producing a few new designs. I need at least 4 more to get ready for the Christmas rush (if there is one with this economy). I'll post the new designs here as I add them to my stores.

Oh, and the move was successful. Now to the unpacking. :D

Super excited!!

I know it's been quiet here. With all the packing and the moving (which finally started in earnest on Tues) I haven't posted anything. Here's some good news on the creative front. I finally decided to break down and open another Cafe Press store. It is called DHQ Apparel, to go with my Demon Hunters Quarterly website. I moved all my "Supernatural inspired" designs there and added a couple of new designs. One is a logo design for the website. The other is from a line in the Season 4 premiere. Which was freaking amazing, btw! Yesterday I sold a WWDD mini button, and just 20 minutes ago I sold one of the new designs, not the logo but the one called Chew Toy. I couldn't believe I sold that so quickly. It's barely been up a couple of days. This good news tells me I need to take the time to fix both websites so I can get more customers to my stores. I have to promote myself. No one else will do it for me. Just need a little sleep first. ;)

Must watch video

Regardless of who you are planning to vote for in the upcoming election, there are some facts that EVERY American should be made aware of. We live in a country that claims to be a democracy. It even gives a decent illusion of being such. But this video, called Hacking Democracy shows how quickly and easily an election can be purchased. Just as it probably was the last two elections. When the CEO of the company that supplies the computers to tally the votes freely admits to vote tampering, we have to wonder if an election will even matter. The election will go to the highest bidder, which most likely means the Republicans. It begs the question, "If the last two elections had not been helped along by a greedy corporation, would we have had to suffer through these two debilitating terms under Bush? What would the economy look like? Would we already have the beginnings of a greener way of life?" Why the hell bother to vote if they can tweak a computer in seconds to fix the results?

I hadn't intended to put this on my business/creative blog, but I wanted to reach as many people as possible with the link to the video. Not that I have huge readership here, but what the hell? One more person reached is a step in the right direction.

My second fan fic

I've been working on a story since November. One much longer than my first one-shot. I've put off posting any of it until I had an ending. Which, I realized, is what I've done. Put it off and put it off. It was the perfect excuse not to just post it and hope for the best. I know now that the only way to learn from my writing mistakes is to put them out there and let others tell me what those mistakes are. I have 7 chapters posted so far. The story should end up with maybe 2 more chapters, 3 if my muse starts adding more like it has since last November. I also figured out that I work better under a deadline. With bunches of readers bugging for an ending, maybe I can finally put this one to bed and work on the next story, a sequel of sorts to my first story. I have almost the whole first chapter done on that one. Here is a link to my fanfiction.net profile, lunasgathering39, which includes links to both of my stories. I also plan to finally finish an InuYasha story I started well over a year ago. It merely lacks a better ending. It seems the end of the story is my weak spot.