Selling Your Handmade Books- What level are you at?

I am now a contributor to the Bookbinding Etsy Street Team blog! My posts will be published each Tuesday, starting today... (ok, a little late on this one).

My main focus on the posts will be how to sell your handmade books online, locally, in stores, and in art galleries.

This first post is meant to help you get a bit organized by making a big decision. There are a few major decisions that need to be made when you start to sell your books. Even if you're a long time seller, and haven't yet made these decisions, making them now can help your business.  This post covers the first big decision and next week I'll cover decisions two and three, which, even if you're already established, are important things to think about and do.

Big Decision #1

What level of involvement are you at currently, and what level would you like to be on when it comes to selling your books?

There are three levels of involvement:

• Hobby Level - You love making books and want to continue but materials can sometimes be pricey. At the hobby level, you really just want to make back enough money to cover costs and help pay for future materials for more books. All your money goes directly back into the books and your creative ventures.
• Side Income Level - Since you're in need of a bit of extra income and you really don't want to sacrifice making books to get a second job, you've turned to selling your handmade books in hopes that you can do what you love and still contribute money to the monthly cash inflow.
• Full Time Level - You love making books and want to make it your full time job. Part of your sales income will go back to materials for books, with most of the income going toward your spending budget to pay off bills and living costs.

Once you've decided which level you are currently on and which level you would like to be on, you'll have an idea of where you're going. This is the first step in making any goal a reality.

If you want to take a step up to the next level, there are many things to be done. Over the next few months I'll be sharing ideas, resources and opportunities for you to create goals and sell your handmade books on the level you want to be on.

Already know where you're at and what you want from your business? If you'd like to get ahead on next week's big decisions, go ahead and calculate the time it takes you to make a book, list a book, package a book and mail it. Do it for a few books and keep the numbers on hand as you read next week's post. I'll be talking about time, pricing and inventory.

I look forward to providing you with motivation and the know how to making your business work for you! 

(ooh, that sounded so big-conference-motivational-speechy)

~Karleigh Jae

Nokiaoo.com Scam

Edit: Near the end of this post are some email security tips, which can help prevent scams like the following from being perpetuated.

Edit II: Due to the popularity of this post, there are now at the end of the post two links to books that help in recognizing scams. For full disclosure, I haven't read either book, but they come with positive reviews at Amazon.com. May be helpful for safely staying away from other scams.

I received an email this morning from a fellow book artist which I'm sure she doesn't know about. It was for a great deal on a website and I had my husband take a look. This was his reply to it, which he just posted on his blog:

Just a warning as this looks like a new one, being that there is next to no word on it when I search for it. I did find an inquiry on Hoax-Slayer's Facebook page from someone who received the same email.

The following email came from the email account of someone my wife knows. No word yet on if that person sent it, or somehow her account was hacked.

Email subject line: "Share Surprise!"

Body of email:

"A friend of mine bought a laptop at a online store [a link to the website was here], he has received it and it has very good quality,this online store also sells TV,cellphone, and etc....
Recently this online store is making their promotion, they can offer very good discounts, and this promotion will be available for 30 days! If you like, please log on their website and have a try! I am sure you will get lots of surprises there, please always remember to share good deals with friends!

Greetings!"

That whole email sounds scammy to me (english a bit off, clearly not written from a friend, and it ends in "Greetings!"). Flag one. When going to the site you see an actual site. Looks nice, seemingly well made, and low low prices. Ridiculously low. Flag number two. Click on the "About Us" and the english used is clearly from a non-native english speaker. Flag three. Claim that "all our products are produced from Korea." Flag four. Click on the "How to Payment" [sic] link and you get this line: "You can use online bank to pay, or go to your local bank or any other bank to pay. It is very easy and the bank worker also can help you." Flag Five. They provide info for paying via Western Union. Flag Six. Or pay via PayPal, but you must email them to get info for paying via PayPal "Because there are many frauds in Nigeria that use fake paypal to pay in order to deceive our products,so if you want to use paypal payment please enquire customer service MSN or email for paypal account." That's a direct quote. Flag Seven.

What a great scam. Built an entire site to enhance confidence, and because of it will likely nail a lot of people before word gets out on it. Then when word gets out, they'll now doubt port the site to a new domain and do it all over again.

Edit: A few email security tips learned from Popular Mechanics ("Securing Web Mail", 4/2009, p. 120):

Don't answer your security questions truthfully. If you do, many of the answers could often be found on the internet, even via something like your Facebook profile page.

Once sent, email can be intercepted. Info in them may also be used to hack your account if you are not careful about the info given in it. Gmail allows encryption of emails. To turn it on go to Settings: General, and scroll down to "Browser connection." Select "Always use https," the "s" standing for secure, or encrypted. Gmail will load slower, but your messages won't be so easily intercepted.

Hushmail.com supposedly offers even greater security for email.

If you use your phone for email, if it has passwords stored on it, and it was stolen, it could be related to your email account woes.

Edit: With the popularity of this post, I thought I'd offer two suggestions for books on scam recognition:
The Truth About Avoiding Scams
Scams & Swindles... How to Recognize And Avoid Rip-Offs In The Internet Age

Aging Maps

Aging the map for the front cover of Lori's Books.

I've been playing with aging the paper. I didn't want to use tea like I usually do to stain pages since the tea is acidic and I didn't want to put something acidic on a photo album that is completely archival. :)

So I used acrylics mixing cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, ultramarine blue and just a touch of ivory black to create a sort of burnt umber and then put a thin layer of that on the map.

The water colors...no idea what colors I used. They're the two far end colors that have been on my palette for years but they turned out nicely.

I'm sorry the photo of it is on it's side.

Book Arts Collaborative Project

BEST (the bookbinding etsy street team) is doing a collaborative book arts project. We're doing 4 books and the pages will be done by different book artists. I'll blog more about this as the project goes on and I'll show the process in my design work for doing the pages.

This image below is meant for those working on the project. Hopefully my little illustration will give a good idea of what you are to start with. Click on it to see it larger.

Updates on Lori's Cord Bound Books

So....the books will be finished before all the videos are posted. :) But this video below shows the big map decision process. Lori sent a few maps to be used for the covers and endpapers. The Turks and Caicos were little pin points of islands on the map and not very visable so I reached out to my fellow bookbinders around the world and they sent me a few maps for the covers that show the Turks and Caicos pretty well.

The video shows the map endpaper options as well as the start of the gold book which has since been worked on and really is just waiting on the end papers and map for the cover to be placed in. You'll notice in the video that only the front cover has been glued down and the spine has yet to be done.

You can see all the map options as well as my final design process when it comes to the stamps along with the maps. Lori had also sent another map but it's printed on photographic paper which is rather thick and does not crease well. I'm still debating on whether or not to use that and just put a border paper around it to sort of frame it. That map isn't shown in the video.

I'm leaning toward the map that the book is sitting on top of for the endpapers on the gold book. We'll see what I finally decide on though. :)