Profile of Poet Toni Wynn

Today, in honor of national Poem In Your Pocket Day, I take great pleasure in introducing you to poet Toni Wynn.

Color Voices Place

Poetry of California’s Central Coast.

Toni Wynn, Carla Martinez and the late John Sousa.

Sea Moon and Mille Grazie Presses.

A few months back in these pages you met Kayla Garelick, a wonderful abstract photographer and mixed media artist profiled in my new book about selling artwork and crafts online. Including a profile of Toni, who’s also a writer, arts educator and museum consultant, helped me broaden the scope of the book beyond the usual list of suspects: fine artists, photographers, craftspeople, etc. Many people don’t realize the vast opportunities to market and publish writing online, including on venues often seen as limited to the visual arts.

Toni places her poetry and other writing online in a few different ways, with more in the works as time permits. (Can you relate to that?) When the Shakespeare Press Museum (SPM), which published Toni’s book Ground, a hand-bound, letterpress, limited edition of original poetry about the earth, stopped selling the book online, she realized that she needed more control over selling her work. SPM was selling Ground on Etsy, and Toni plans to open her own Etsy shop to sell it and other limited-edition broadsides (single sheets of original poems paired with visual art).

Toni has all the basics down. She designed her own website (above shows part of the home page), which she maintains through Squarespace. The site includes a list of her publications and a page of her poems.

Her blog, “Call Your Mother,” is both on Blogspot and hosted directly through her website. She writes on the blog with great heart and humor about a range of topics, including her amazingly talented and adventurous children.

Toni also hosts a blog and runs a Facebook page for an arts + STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) project called “Jam: Jazz and Visual Art in Engineering.” “Jam” is a collaboration between the Hampton University Museum and HU’s School of Science, Engineering and Technology.

Toni enjoys dipping into others’ work and thoughts online, and even at this early stage, likes being a part of what she poetically calls “borderless communities.” She has a profile on Goodreads, and she frequently posts comments and reviews on the site.

Are you a writer interested in sharing your work online? What sites have you found?

If you’d like to learn more about selling your work online, check out my book Sell Your Artwork & Crafts Online: An Insider’s Guide to the Worldwide Arts Market.  And please join the facebook page I started for people to network with other artists interested in selling online, where you can post questions and comments, share your progress and frustrations, and find the free tips that I post about selling online.

Introverts of the World! Go to Your Rooms

You know the truism that when a woman decides she wants to have a baby, all she sees around her are pregnant women, strollers, and kids kids kids? No, I don’t have an announcement about my family planning – just drawing an analogy to what has jumped out at me as the newest “thing” — introversion. Have you noticed?

No, not me - a t-shirt I designed on zazzle

First, a quick recitation of my introvert creds (since many of us don’t like to have attention focused on us for long): when I was a girl, the standard response to anyone’s query: Where’s Heidi? was: In her room, reading. And my nature hasn’t changed – the Meyers-Briggs psychological assessment still puts me at the very top of the scale for introversion. If this is greek to you, a quick explanation of terms. According to Meyers-Briggs, “The first pair of psychological preferences is Extraversion and Introversion. Where do you put your attention and get your energy? Do you like to spend time in the outer world of people and things (Extraversion), or in your inner world of ideas and images (Introversion)?” (That’s not a typo, both extravert and extrovert are accepted spellings).

Another truism. I’ve heard that when something new is in the air, it takes 3 exposures for you to realize that it’s a  phenomenon. So number one — a new book that’s getting a lot of attention. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, is already a New York Times bestseller. Cain writes that the “single most important aspect of personality … is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

I just started reading it, and will report back with a review.

Number two — check out this great Facebook page, The Introvert Entrepreneur, run by Beth Buelow. It’s a wonderful resource providing advice, support, observations for business-minded introverts. She also posts fun t-shirt slogans. Here’s one, a t-shirt (from ThinkGeek) that she recently put up:

The third? Another new book. This one was written by Devora Zack, a consultant and self-described “off-the-chart introvert.”

Networking for People Who Hate Networking : A Field Guide for Introverts, the Overwhelmed, and the Underconnected is a dynamic, interesting, helpful book. Even if you’re not interested in networking, it’s a great guide to just plain relating to people – many of whom are extroverts or value the characteristics stereotypically associated with being an extrovert (friendly, outgoing, talkative).

Devora provides countless real-life tips and suggestions to help you navigate the world of networking, meeting, and connecting with people, while preserving your sanity and energy. Her concise description of the difference between introverts and extroverts is really helpful:

“Introverts think to talk” while “Extroverts talk to think.”

“Introverts go deep” while “Extroverts go wide.”

“Introverts energize alone” while “Extroverts energize with others.”

Of course, there are people who are strongly one or the other category, and people who are more of a mixture, to which the term “centrovert” may apply. Also, not all introverts are shy. Devora does a great job in this book of addressing many of the stereotypes and misconceptions about introversion. I highly recommend it for anyone who identifies as an introvert and struggles with issues of networking or connecting with people.

Have you thought about these issues? Taken the Meyers-Briggs test? Any other INFPs out there?  (If you don’t want to identify yourself, I totally understand).

Profile of Kayla Garelick, daydreaming artist

In 2004 I made my grand debut selling my photo arts and crafts by participating in Pro Arts’ East Bay Open Studios. For a novice’s first foray into the rough and tumble of art sales it went pretty well. I sold some and learned a ton about the importance of self-promotion, because in the end, only a couple out of dozens of people who came by my studio found out about me through the Pro Arts catalog.

By far the best thing to come from the entire experience was an email I got even before I opened my studio. A fellow photographer, Kayla Garelick, liked one of the images I put up on the website that Pro Arts provided for us. Kayla and I emailed back and forth, we met, we clicked (photographer pun intended), and we’ve been fast friends ever since.

"Leaves" gallery page on Kayla's website

I haven’t done an Open Studio through Pro Arts again, although I still hold my own open studios once or twice a year. And Kayla has gone on to exhibit in a wide variety of shows, galleries, and at Open Studios in San Francisco.

Along with selling and showing her work at many venues in the Bay Area, Kayla is an accomplished web designer, and has had her own website in various forms since the 1990s. So when I decided to include profiles of a few artists in the book I was writing about selling art online, as examples and to inspire, Kayla was the first person I asked.  Okay, enough introduction, here’s the profile of Kayla that’s in the book, slightly edited because I have more space here!

“Daydreaming artist” Kayla Garelick is an abstract photographer who creates her images and photobased mixed media art pieces with extreme technical precision and rigorous attention to detail. Kayla’s writing, on her blog and website (see links to all of Kayla’s sites at the end of her profile) and on the many other sites where she appears, consistently displays her generosity, spirituality, and passion for art and life.

Part of the homepage of Kayla's website, daydreamingarts.com

An accomplished web designer, Kayla has had her own website in various forms since the 1990s, has extensive technical training in building sites, has taught web design, and has designed sites for non-profits. Currently, Kayla uses her artistic vision and web design training, which she keeps up to date by taking online courses, to make her website uniquely her own. She uses hand coding to control elements and functions that she could not achieve using automated tools, and also uses free-of-charge open source scripts. When she needs a tool to, as she puts it, “ease some of the pain of repetitive stuff,” she uses Adobe Dreamweaver, a popular web development program.

Kayla began blogging in 2005 on the Blogspot platform. The screen shot above is of her current blog: http://daydreamingarts.wordpress.com/blog  She recently moved the blog to WordPress, partly because she gets more comments on her WP blog posts, and partly because Blogspot lost one of her posts. She also has a Facebook fan page (also known as a business page), where she posts about the shows and galleries that she appears in, promotes other artists’ work and publicizes opportunities for artists, discusses art classes that she’s taking, and posts her photographs.

Kayla's facebook fan page, http://facebook.com/daydreamingarts

She doesn’t sell her work directly through her website or other online venue. Her first goal in being online is to have her art seen and remembered, to promote her shows, and to be invited to show her work at other galleries or art shows. Her second goal is to sell her artwork at shows and to sell the rights to her work. Kayla is active in a large variety of artist groups, both online and off. She always takes the opportunity to show her work in her groups’ online galleries, which greatly increases and broadens her exposure to potential audiences.

To see her sublime photography and read her articulate, heartfelt words, visit Kayla’s links:

Website: http://daydreamingarts.net
Blog: http://daydreamingarts.wordpress.com/blog
Facebook fan page: http://facebook.com/daydreamingarts
Art sites:

http://agesonginstitute.org/poesis/kayla-garelick http://missionartistsunited.org/artists/378 http://frankbettecenter.org/artist-galleries/artist_kayla_garelick.html http://artspan.org/artist/kayla-garelick http://mesart.com/artwork.jsp.que.artwork.eq.32486.shtml http://artslant.com/global/artists/show/158265-kayla-garelick http://missionartistsunited.org/artists/378 http://theartexplosion.com/art/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=534 http://artsforhealing.com/object3.shtml http://cityartgallery.org/gallery/gallery_garelick.html

Interested in learning more about selling your arts & crafts online? Check out my book Sell Your Artwork & Crafts Online: An Insider’s Guide to the Worldwide Arts Market.  And I’d love to invite you to join the facebook page that I started for people to network with other artists who are selling their work online. It’s there for you to post questions, to share your progress and frustrations, and I’ll post lots of free tips about selling and marketing your arts and crafts online.

New book: Sell Your Artwork and Crafts Online

One New Year’s resolution down! Actually, it was a resolution I made New Year 2011, but who’s counting? I finally finished the book that I’ve been working on for, oh well – way too long. Enough buildup, here it is …

I was teaching a workshop to help artists and crafters figure out how to sell their work online. When I decided to expand the written materials into a book, I had no idea that the 6-page handout would grow to 72 pages, with 28 photographs and screen shots to show readers what their options are and how to decide what venues are best for their work, like this shot of the front page of my Etsy shop:

Or this illustration about how to resize the images you post online so they’re not as easy to steal:

I also included profiles of six of my favorite artists: a photographer, painter, mixed media collage artist, printmaker, natural perfumer, and writer — who are all at very different places on the continuum of using the internet to sell and market their arts and crafts. I’ll be posting some of the profiles here, so you can meet them and draw inspiration from their art and the work they’re putting into showing and selling it online.

In conjunction with the book, I started a Facebook group where artists can network and support one another in selling their work online. You’re welcome to join it, whether you buy the book or not.

And now for the tip of the day, which isn’t in the book (already working on the second edition!) Yes, you may sell the same items in your Etsy and Artfire shops. If it’s a one-of-a-kind piece it can be nerve-wracking to list in both, because if it sells from one store you need to immediately remove it from the other. But I list my ebooks in both shops. If you have duplicates of anything that you make, it’s good to get the exposure in both venues.

And a related tip: don’t use the same description in both listings. From my research, people advise that you change at least 30% of the language, because Google’s search results ranking, released in February 2011 (called Panda) penalizes duplicate postings.

I listed the ebook on Etsy yesterday, and just now put the listing up on Artfire. If you’re curious, you can check out how I changed the descriptions. I’ll check my Google Analytics to see whether I’ve been Panda slapped — that’s what they call it when your traffic goes way down because the Google algorithm is displeased with some aspect of your website.

Kindle-Garden Delights part 2

When last we met I promised to let you know about my adventures in making my ebook into kindle-ready form. To cut to the end of the story … here it is!

If you’re thinking of kindling yourself (no, that’s not a dirty suggestion), rather than paying someone to do it for you, the best place to start is Amazon’s own help pages.  When you run into problems, you can also check with the related Community forum – lots of questions and answers, and you can post your own queries.

My first obstacle – I don’t have Microsoft Word on my computer. My husband has it on his, but I have WordPerfect instead. One of the critical steps in kindle-izing a book requires saving the file as filtered html, which you can’t do in WordPerfect.  Now, it’s not just that I’m lazy and didn’t want to walk upstairs to his computer. Switching to the other computer meant that I’d have to load some new programs onto his computer (and that makes him cranky), and that I’d have to transport my document and image files (not a big deal, but l was so exasperated that even that small task made me cranky).

Anyway, I stubbornly decided to try the process without using Word.  This decision at least led me to a great resource —  Judith Tramayne’s videos and materials to help authors self publish books on the kindle and other ereaders.

Judith has a series of comprehensive videos that seem very reasonably priced to me, and she offers a lot of her content free – including a series of macros that make it much easier to correctly format the html document that is the best way to get an ebook kindle-ready.  I watched her free videos and downloaded the macros, and took her advice to install Crimsoneditor, a free source code editor.  From the quality of her free videos, I think that paying for the series would be well worth it.  I decided not to because I was so far along in the process that I only needed a bit of trouble-shooting to finish.  But if you’re at the early end of the learning curve, it looks like a good option.

Since my ebook was written in WordPerfect, I had to copy and paste it, paragraph by paragraph, into Crimsoneditor.  Using Judith’s macros to add the correct html coding made the process much easier.

Images are another thing – the kindle is really designed for books without a lot of images. The basic kindle is only black and white, and you can’t really do much fancy with images.

I found the html code to include images, and quickly resized all of my photos for the book in Photoshop Elements.  Unfortunately, the images turned out to be my first big challenge.  I took my nice neat html document made in Crimsoneditor and ran it through MobiPocket Creator to build the book.

For a moment I thought all was well – I scrolled through the ebook in the kindle previewer that I had downloaded from Amazon. Chapter headings … check; text … check;  and the images were all there!! Yes!! But then I got to the last page and found, to my dismay, that all 60 images in the book were also duplicated in a long long row at the end of the book. Yikes.

I looked for some answers on the community forum but never found any satisfactory explanation, and certainly no cure.  The duplicate images weren’t included in the html coding.  Instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out a fix, I decided to do what I should have done in the first place.  I put the html document and image files onto a flash drive, trudged upstairs to my husband’s computer, and fired up Word. I saved the html document in Word as filtered HTML and ran it through MobiPocket.  It worked! No trailing images. Now one thing that is puzzling — still more comfortable on my computer, I took the filtered HTML file to my computer and ran it through MobiPocket there – alas, I had the same duplicate images problem.  (Insert sad face here)…  So it actually could be that the problem was not caused by not using Word, but due to the fact that I’m saddled with Vista 64-bit on my computer (I know, I can’t stand it either). I read somewhere during my desperate search for help that Vista may cause problems with parts of the kindle-izing process.

To wrap up this saga, there was some more wrestling with the Table of Contents, but suffice it to say that I finally followed the directions carefully and after pulling out some more hair I managed to generate a clickable TOC! It’s not pretty but I’m damned proud of it, so here it is ..

Anyway, the bottom line – if you have Word, some familiarity with html coding, and a lot of patience and time, go for it and try to do it yourself. It’s very rewarding when it finally all comes together.

Kindle-Garden Delights part 1

Amazingly, I have emerged from my adventure in making my ebooks available on Kindle (that’s Amazon.com’s ebook reader, for the uninitiated) with at least some of my coiffure intact.  I have been in the hair-tearing-out stage for the last several days. But first, some history. I had little trouble making my two ebooks, Inkjet Printing on Lutradur and Inkjet Printing on Fabric, into pdfs that I’ve  had available through my Artfire and Etsy stores. The next challenge was putting them up on Lulu, where they are also available as pdf ebooks, or as printed books.

I got through that okay, so let’s move on to the next step. Are you thinking of writing an ebook (or have you already)? What’s the 200-pound gorilla?  Amazon.com, of course. And therein lies the goal that has been on my to-do list for at least a year: get the ebooks formatted for kindle to sell on Amazon. And therein languished the goal month after month, sliding down to the bottom of the list.

What do you think Amazon says about publishing your own book for kindle? I’ll tell you: “Welcome to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the fast and easy way to self-publish your books for sale in the Kindle Store.”  Yeah, right.  Even just looking through the guides and help topics was enough to send me back to the to-do list.

So although I really like to learn new things and do most things myself, I realized that those ebooks were never going to be kindle-ized unless I got professional help.  I was lucky to have a free phone consultation with the inspiring creative-arts business coach, Jane Button.  Jane suggested I contact Joy Randall, who, among other things, helps writers publish theirs books and ebooks through her business Wisdom House.

And Joy was exactly what I needed! She took my WordPerfect file (more on that in part 2) and transformed it into a file that I could upload to Amazon for the kindle. I’m sure she has heard it so much that she’s sick of it, but Joy was really a joy to work with. She patiently answered my questions, she did exactly what we agreed to, and she delivered days earlier than her initial estimate. So ta-da! My first kindle ebook, Inkjet Printing on Fabric, went live on Amazon.com last week.

If you’re thinking of publishing an ebook that involves a format other than pdf (which can be tricky in itself), and you don’t want to learn how to do it yourself, I’d definitely recommend talking to Joy. You can contact her through her website.  There are many other options but I can’t vouch for them since I haven’t tried them.  Anyone out there have other services they’ve used and liked (or not)?

Anyway, getting that first kindle ebook made was easy – Joy did all of the heavy lifting.  But of course I had to pay her for her hard work. And you know (because I just said it) I do so love to learn how to do things myself. So therein lies the hair-tearing-out, about which more soon!

Inkjet Fabric Printing – step by step instructional ebook

I just finished my very first ebook, on my most favorite subject: inkjet printing on fabric.  After writing an extensive booklet for the workshops I’ve been teaching, I decided to put it into ebook form so people who can’t come to my workshops could get the same information.

I take you through the entire process to quickly and successfully begin printing fabric on your inkjet printer. You will learn about types of inks, differences between treating fabric yourself or printing on pre-treated fabric, how to prepare fabric for printing, printing the fabric, post-printing treatments, and more.

The information and tips I’ve learned over years of printing on fabric will save you hours of time and much wasted ink and fabric. I have included many illustrations, questions and answers, and trouble-shooting tips.

Illustration: peeling off backing

There’s even a gallery of my original fabric creations to spark your imagination and creativity.

Gallery: butterfly art hanging

There are many books on the market about printing on fabric, but because the technology is moving so quickly, a lot of them are outdated. My guide is up to date, and I will revise it as often as needed to reflect changes in the field of inkjet fabric printing. Also, most of the books give general information that might not apply to your personal printer/ink setup. I tell you how to figure out what kind of inks your printer uses, and I can also answer by email personalized questions about your setup, or other problems you run in to when you print fabric. I also discuss the pretreated fabrics that are available commercially, and share the results of my extensive experimentation with printing using the different inks.  In the second edition of the ebook, now available, I added information about using two great products with fabric, inkAID and Golden Paints Digital Grounds (both coatings that make any surface inkjet printable.)  I’ve written a lot in this blog about Digital Grounds, and I wanted to expand the book to include these coatings – most appropriate for art fabric uses.  I also deemphasized the use of Bubble Jet Set 2000, a liquid solution that is the most common product used by people who want to treat fabric themselves for inkjet printing.  BJS contains formaldehyde, and I know a lot of people are concerned about any potential danger.  If you’re interested in the subject, the manufacturer addresses the issue in an article (read it by clicking here).

My ebook is in the format of a PDF file, which you can open and print using Adobe Reader.  I’m offering it through my etsy shop or lulu.com for $10.  Click here for the link to my ebooks section on etsy. If they are sold out and you would like one, please let me know and I will post more copies.  Or click here to see a preview and get it through my lulu shop.