Dad: Hardcore hiker and photographer. Taker of a thousand flower pictures. More, probably, but I'm afraid to count. There are only so many times I can stand looking at that one yellow flower, no matter which angle it's photographed from. That said, he's the one who gets the prettiest shots most of the time.
The Camera: A Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, with three different lenses. I just got Dad the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro USM lens for Christmas, thereby ensuring that frequency of the flower pictures will increase a dozenfold, have mercy on my soul....
The Graphics Software: Photoshop CS4 Extended. (Enjoying my student discounts while I still can.) I've used Photoshop-lite (Elements) for several years, but it was really old Elements--2.0. I've used GIMP as well, but the inability to dock tool windows drove me mad.
The Photograph Collection: Several thousand pictures of Nevada, with a few other regions thrown in--Massachusetts among them. A disturbing percentage of these are flower pictures, but there are some very nice shots of the Nevada landscape included. Most taken on hikes in the Reno-Tahoe area in northern Nevada (Mount Rose, Lake Tahoe, the Galena Forest, and other nearby trails), but a fair number come from Highway 50 through eastern Nevada, the many trails near and around Ely.
We've printed posters from photographs before. I have a few of my favorites decorating my dorm room walls, and Dad's coworkers were impressed enough with the pictures he posted to the newsletter that the company ended up decorating a new conference room (the aptly named "Summit Room") with several framed prints. Dad didn't charge for the pictures, but it was quite clear that people liked the photographs.
Armed with that encouraging knowledge, I hit the search engines to see what the rest of the internet has come up with. I flirted with the idea of going the micro-stock photography route, but ultimately decided against it. (Decision helped along by the Do Not Want lists posted on several sites, on which flowers and general nature photography features prominently. Flowers I could definitely sympathize with.) I'll talk about some of the options I considered in the next installment, along with why I ultimately decided upon CafePress.
Decision made, I rediscovered an old login I had with CafePress from ordering a geeky linguistics tee for my roommate and hit the CafePress forums. I lurked until I felt confident enough to start preparing some photographs for uploading. Now all that remained were a few questions:
Premium shop or many basic shops?
The forums were pretty overwhelmingly in favor of premium, and with good reason. Being able to only sell one of each product in a basic shop wouldn't allow for using more than one photograph in the shop, and while that can be gotten around by creating a new basic shop for each photograph, it wasn't very conducive towards consolidation and I am really bad at naming things. The thought of having to think up dozens of store names alone would have been enough to convince me that a premium shop was the way to go. There are lots of other useful things about premium shops I've since discovered that I'll address in another post, because while CafePress's basic shopkeeper help pages are useful to the beginner, they're also, well, basic.
Niche shop or general?
The photography collection itself answered this question, since the bulk consists of Nevada photography.
Which products?
This one was tougher. Most of the people who come to CafePress are looking for t-shirts, so choosing only prints and posters (which, the forums informed me, do not sell very well at all unless advertised off-site) meant slashing my potential customer base by a significant amount. On the other hand, I can't imagine many people are interested in buying shirts with a rectangular photograph printed across the chest. I decided against t-shirts, with a few potential exceptions. I decided on most of the print options (posters, framed prints, cards, etc).
Shop name?
Here is where I froze in mute terror. Thankfully, Dad came to my rescue with "Sagebrush Strokes." I inherited a love of horrible puns from him, so I immediately loved it. And, okay, it's not the most clever thing in the world, but it was a thousand times better than what I would have come up with left to my own devices. I tend to go with single, three-plus syllable, obscure words whenever I'm forced to title something. Or I pun. Badly. My former Rhetoric professor is probably still groaning over the essay I titled "Just A Position."
Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide blogged for thirty days in late 2005 about trying to get a CafePress store on breastfeeding, the amusingly titled Lactivist, off the ground and making money within thirty days.
It was marketed initially as a following the experience of a beginner starting from scratch, but came under fire from critics due to Laycock's extensive and well-applied knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) and network of friends in that area. I sympathize with the position that it isn't really an accurate representation of your average new shopkeeper--who probably, like me, hadn't even heard of SEO until they hit the forums--but that's actually what made her posts so interesting to me.
I know what I wanted to read when I started her account: I wanted to watch a bumbling, relatively clueless shopkeeper's stumbling journey towards success, rising from obscurity to popularity--or something like it. Don't we all love those rags-to-riches fairy-tales, after all? But her experience ultimately proved far more informational: it's sort of like the difference between reading a beginner's primer and later buying a detailed book devoted to what only made of a single, mostly glossed over chapter of the primer. I learned a lot about SEO from her guide that I wouldn't have while reading about the blunderings of another beginner.
So while I wasn't convinced by her defense of the blog as being true to its "Zero Cash, A Little Talent, and 30 Days" title (for one, I think she has more than a little talent and definitely lots of experience, in the SEO world at the very least), I'm glad she didn't try to force the story to fit tightly into that mold. It wasn't the story I set out to read, but in retrospect, it was the one I think I would have wanted to. For anyone interested in the SEO angle, I highly recommend reading the blog. It's a long read, and a bit intimidating (I don't have anywhere near that much drive and marketing savvy), but well worth it and both informative and entertaining.
I've started my blog too late for it to be a proper daily account of a newbie shopkeeper, and with my last semester starting up next week, I'm not going to have time to go daily anyway. But I thought it would be fun to keep an account of my successes, failures, and lessons I've learned along the way. As well as share some Nevada photography, and other photography odds and ends.
