Halloween Impending

Will Write For Chocolate has been updated; click image above to see a bigger version. Halloween's in a couple of weeks! I'm excited because this is the first year that Jeff and I will be home to hand out candies. I asked my neighbour how many kids usually come by, and she said not very many -- maybe 15-20.

I'm shocked. Where are all the kids?? Part of the problem is that there is no sidewalk on the main road near us, so that it's more of a hassle for parents and kids to get to our side of the street.

I don't care if we only get 20 kids. That'll just mean we can make their treats MEGA-treats instead, right? And I finally get to use all the very silly Halloween prop stuff I've been accumulating since we moved here! The neighbours are going to think I'm crazy, I'm sure...

Cottage Thanksgiving visit plus more Snarkage

Had a wonderful weekend at the cottage. And not just because of the gorgeous fall colour, either...I had a ton of fun hanging out with my sister-in-law's kids. Jeff, sadly, had caught my cold and spent most of the weekend in bed. In addition to working on more Snarkface cards, I went hiking in the forest with the others...



We saw a mother moose with her calf as we collected leaves for our Thanksgiving table decorations. Ginny and my niece made butter tarts:



I did wire and bead crafts with a nephew. Here's one of my creations:



Even the wasps were out decorating for the autumn season:



I also did a bunch more designs for Snarkface. Jeff gave me the idea for one of them..."Guess what? I bought you some stocks for Christmas. They were on sale." I figure I'm allowed to make jokes about the recent stock market hammering since we got somewhat knocked about ourselves.



I also figured out how to do card templates, which means a customer can upload their own images into the template. Ooo, I'm going to have some fun with this. Like this cat Christmas card; the cat photo gets uploaded inside.

There's also a new personal holiday greeting card for those of you who want to include a snarky holiday letter IN their Christmas card, and a snarky card for people who have birthdays around Christmas.

Anyway, there are a pile of promotions going on right now (the 14.92% discount ends TODAY; discount code COLUMBUS2008), including 25% when ordering 10 or more cards, free shipping on orders of 65$ or more, a special "get five free cards" offer, 15% off orders of $40 or more, and free shipping when ordering 3 or more sheets of Snarkface postage.

Yes, I said Snarkface postage! Sadly, I can't do custom Canadian postage yet, but here's my holiday season Snarkface stamp:



Anyway, please do check Snarkface often. In addition to addition for holiday season cards, I'll be adding snarky birthday cards, get well cards, Valentine's cards, anniversary cards, and other snarkable topics.

Snarkface: a collaboration between Amelia Snarkface and yours truly

So in my last post, I was going on about how great Greeting Card Universe is. I'm still going to post a ton of cards on GCU (I've already had a bunch of sales -- thanks to the people out there who bought my cards!), but these will mostly be blank inside. The reason: getting some types of cards past their approval process is MUCH more of a pain than I expected.

I couldn't get my Witchy Spore Addict approved because they didn't want me to mention a company name, so I had to change "Spore" to "computer games." Then I tried to turn the following image into a Valentine's card and then rejected it, saying it didn't have anything to do with Valentine's:



Fair enough, I thought, maybe it's a tad cynical. So I submitted it as an Anti-Valentine instead (yes, there was such a category). It was rejected again! In order to be approved, they said, I had to actually WRITE something on the inside that made it clear that it was an Anti-Valentine.

Grmble. Anyway, I've decided just to submit most of my GCU cards as generic blank cards from now on so they get approved right away.



That put me in a snarkish mood, however, which got me thinking about how much fun I'd have doing snarky cards. Clearly I wouldn't be able to post them at GCU, however, so I'm posting them in my new Snarkface card shop at Zazzle instead. To help further differentiate my Snarky cards from my regular cards, I'm even using a pen name for my Zazzle profile: Amelia Snarkface. You can read my bio if you click on "About" on my Snarkface page.

Anyone looking closely at the copyright notice on the back of the card will see it's really me, but I'm betting that most people probably won't bother.

Anyway, I uploaded a bunch of snarky Christmas cards last night. It was very therapeutic. :-)

So if you're tired of my cute and happy greeting cards, feel free to check out Amelia Snarkface's contributions at Snarkface. At $2.95, their full-size single cards are slightly more expensive than GCU but still cheaper than Cafepress.



I'm having fun doing these cards. One example is the card above, inspired by those Christmas cards you get which have more than one signature but you -know- was signed by just one person. And yeah, sometimes I do the same thing with Jeff but I'm going to try VERY hard not to do so from now on.

The fact is that whenever I get a card supposedly signed by two people but actually just in one person's handwriting, I always wonder if the other person even knew that his signature is on the card...but I -do- know that he (or she, to be fair) couldn't be bothered to take the time to sign his own name.

Ahem, but I digress. As you can tell, I have plenty of snark lurking inside my otherwise sweet and cheery exterior, waiting for expression. :-)

And to you Canucks out there, have a great Thanksgiving!

Card launch plus online card service comparison

As anyone who frequents my sites already knows, I do a lot of cartoons and illustrations just for fun, as opposed to client work. With the current (and somewhat depressing) economic downturn, I'm starting to work harder at exploring different ways of making more money. One of my fantasy novels has been at the same publisher for over 8 months --the editor has already been nudged at least once-- so I've decided to send it elsewhere...sigh. I'm excited about my other writing projects, but meanwhile I need to ramp up short-term income.

And that brings me back to my doodles.

I haven't been as diligent as I would have liked to be in getting some of my cartoons and illustrations onto greeting cards. Main reason: laziness. Choosing, formatting, uploading, promoting and administering my greeting cards and shops takes time, and I've had other projects on the go meanwhile. I've resolved to devote some regular time each week from now on to gradually building up my online card shops. The more cards I have for sale online, the more I should make over time...I hope. :-)



A while back, I test out several online greeting card services: Zazzle, Greeting Card Universe and Cafepress. I submitted some greeting card art to each and ordered cards to check out the quality. All of them were fine. I realize that I could pay a lot more to get custom-made cards and even better quality, but then I'd have to charge considerably more as well.

Anyway, I've settled on Cafepress and Greeting Card Universe. Cafepress is a familiar name to most people, and I've already made sales from casual marketplace browsers. GCU isn't as well known, but the full-size cards are slightly cheaper ($2.79 as opposed to $3.49 at Cafepress) when purchased as single items. If you're buying in bulk or are after notecard size, however, you're probably better off with Cafepress ($1.59/card if you buy ten, $1.29/card for 20, $1.05/card for 20 notecards). GCU's discount doesn't start until you buy 25 or more. None of the quoted prices include shipping.

I still hadn't really focused on GCU up to now, however, because I wasn't crazy about the user interface. HOWEVER, I'm going to force myself to overcome my esthetic snobbishness and start using this service more regularly. For one thing, cards have to go through an approval process. This helps somewhat filtering out the dreck. I still make about the same amount of profit per card (around 50 cents/card for single card orders).

Anyway, the Monstrous Nerd image above is one of my newest addition to both stores. At GCU, the inside text reads "Happy birthday to my favorite nerd" but you can change it to anything you'd like when you're ordering. The witch card is available at Cafepress, and should be available at GCU as soon as it's been approved.

I'll be gradually adding more to my greeting card shops. If you'd like to be kept informed when I add new card designs, please let me know. I promise you won't get more than one e-mail a week, you can unsubscribe anytime, and I won't use the list for any other purpose.

Meanwhile, feel free to browse my two card shops at Cafepress and Greeting Card Universe. I welcome suggestions on how to better organize my Cafepress shop to make it easier to find cards or to make it more attractive to card buyers -- unfortunately I can't change much about the GCU shop.

And feel free to suggest cards you'd like to see! If I think there would be enough demand for that type of card, I'll add it to my shops.

Tired of being sick

So my cold has moved out of my throat and into my head. I'm really REALLY hoping this goes away by tomorrow morning, when I'm performing with Urban Tapestry at the CIBC Run For The Cure! Drawing this newest Little Nightmare was therapeutic. Also pretty representative of how I'm feeling right now.

After I drew it I thought, "Hey, this would make a good 'Get Well' card" and I added it to Cafepress. It'll also be appearing in my Greeting Card Universe card shop after it's been approved, which means that you'll be able to snailmail a paper version of this card online (for $2.79 plus postage).