Justyna Dorsz – Page 27

Make your first sale in the next 3 weeks

Tomorrow is Black Friday and after that the best 3 weeks for all the artists who sell their art online.

Everyone shops for gifts and so artists make the majority of their income in November and December.

Conversely, January and February are very slow months and I earn very little in those months. Good thing that all the income you can earn before Christmas more than makes up for it.

You need to take advantage of this busy time.

If you haven’t yet, then you definitely should open your store. I recommend:

Threadless – which is my favorite one, and
TeePublic – which has the easiest and fastest system for uploading artwork.

You can also publish your art in a few other places. Wherever you submit your designs remember to add tags!

Usually, when you open your store you have to wait for weeks or even months for your first sale. Internet is full of people who complain that they get no sales and then they get discouraged and close their shops. But if you open your store now and upload even just a few designs, you have an amazing opportunity to make your first sale in the next few days.

Can you make money on Threadless?

Friends, family, and other artists often ask me: can you make money on Threadless?

I’ve been a designer for 8 years now and I’ve been selling my art on Threadless for the past 5 years so I think I can answer that. The short answer is: Yes! You absolutely can make money on Threadless. Nearly every month I earn a substantial part of my income from Threadless.

When you are just starting selling your art online it might seem daunting. I know – I was there. So here are a few things that will help you if you want to earn money on Threadless:

Make a lot of designs. You never know which one is going to be popular.
Don’t get discouraged when no one buys your designs at first. Just keep designing and publishing.
Try to find your niche. I make a lot of designs with cats and space because that’s what I like to draw. Maybe you like dogs or hiking or pizza? Draw that.
Post about your new designs on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. The more people see your designs the better.
Tags! Add tags to your designs so people can find them. I try to add at least 8 tags to each design. It’s a good idea to also write a short description.
Submit designs both to your Artist Store and to Design Challenges. Even if you don’t win a challenge, more people will see your designs and you will gain new followers.
When you add a design to your store make sure you enable it on other products, not only t-shirts. Customers often buy hoodies, masks, tote bags, and pillows.
If you haven’t yet opened a store, you should open one now! I have no affiliation with Threadless, I just like them a lot and earn a lot of money there. If you don’t know how to name your store, here’s a short guide.

Hope that helps. Here is my store if you want to take a look.

My most popular design ever

Today I wanted to show you the most popular design that I ever made. Here it is:

I don’t know how many designs I’ve made in my life – a few hundred probably. This remains my best selling one.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s really quite simple. My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that they too could design something and sell on a t-shirt. But as you can see it’s absolutely possible.

The important thing is to just have an idea.

Eisenhower Matrix

If you don’t know what an Eisenhower Matrix is, it’s a tactic to decide what to work on next. You can put each task into the correct category based on whether the task is urgent or not, and important or not.

So for me writing a blog post is urgent and important each day. And sending a design to a client is both urgent and important as well. But buying a Christmas gift is important but not urgent so I schedule it for a specific day. Same with a dentist appointment.

According to the matrix everything that is urgent and not important you should delegate, meaning hire someone to do it for you. But I mostly do everything myself so I don’t delegate but schedule those tasks too.

The most important part, and the thing that completely changed how I handle my to-do list, is the rule that tasks that are not important and not urgent should be deleted. That was a new thing for me. I had almost never deleted anything from my to-do list so it kept growing and growing until it reached a few hundred tasks. There were things like ‘play Terraria‘ which I still want to do but it’s neither urgent nor important so I deleted it. Same with my ideas for side projects – I moved them to my ‘Ideas’ page in Roam. There’s no reason for them to be on my to-do list when I am not even sure which of those ideas I will work on.

Now my to-do list is much more manageable. It’s also helpful to ask myself if the task that I am working on now is truly an important and urgent one. Or am I procrastinating and working on something easier but not important?

I like all the reminders that I should blog daily

I’ve started writing my blog a few weeks ago and it’s been difficult to keep going.

When I was learning to draw a few years back I remember how tiring it was to draw ANYTHING. And when I started making designs for t-shirts even designing the shortest text was taking hours. Nearly 15 years ago I was learning to program and that too was so exhausting that I took breaks every few minutes but somehow I forced myself to write one small program after another.

Now drawing is fun and programming is my favorite activity. So I suspect that writing gets easier with time too. I just like to be reminded because it sure doesn’t look like it right now.

Seth Godin wrote:

For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.

I am waiting for it to be fun! I can’t wait for the day when I sit in front of my computer and instead of panicking I think: “I get to write another post, what fun!”

How long is it going to take for writing to get pleasant? Well, Seth Godin answers right in the title: The first 1,000 are the most difficult. He also says:

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.

That seems doable — just 180 more to go until I am glad that I blog.

Step out of your comfort zone

I was thinking about my first two jobs and that it was a good thing that they were just a bit too uncomfortable and forced me to find something else. Nowadays I like stepping outside of my comfort zone. That’s why I make games and why I started this blog. But back then I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to leave comfortable employment without an external push.

A few weeks ago I took a Self-Couching course and in one of the reading materials was a sentence which I liked:

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

I am lucky that my first two jobs sucked

When I was in my third year at a university, I got my first serious job as a programmer.

I wasn’t very good, but I was just good enough to have my contract extended a few times so I stayed there for three years while getting my degree in computer science. The first two years were fine, but then something weird happened with our boss. Initially, those were small things: he would get irritated or impatient, when he asked me to work on a Saturday and I couldn’t he got offended, he called me in my free time even when he knew I was meeting my family. From what I knew those were common things in any job so I accepted all that.

But then one day he slammed the door to the room we worked in. And I don’t mean lightly pushed the door so it closed without using the doorknob — I mean he used so much force to slam the door that the frame shook and I jumped startled.

After that day he never closed the door the normal way again.

He often left the room to make calls, go to the restroom or the kitchen, to go to talk to assistants, IT guys, HR, or others in the company. On average he would go out of the room every 20 minutes. He would walk fast, open the door and slam it. A few minutes later he would come back and slam the door again, so the glass in the door and windows rattled.

Was it my imagination at this point that the whole room and my desk and computer all shook? Yes, maybe. But I started dreading the job, my head and ears hurt, I could not concentrate, and every day I sat anxiously awaiting the next door slam.

What are you supposed to do in this situation? Should I have told him not to slam the door? I was shy and scared so I never said anything. Is it even possible that someone doesn’t know not to slam doors? Or was he doing it on purpose? I started suspecting that he wanted me to resign but didn’t want to fire me directly. But I couldn’t leave right away.

Finally, I got my degree and found another job — and it too was a bad place to work.

That was enough. I never worked for another company ever again.

If I had a slightly higher tolerance for noise and rude behavior, or maybe if he closed the doors a bit less forcefully, I would still have a regular job. I was lucky it was so awful for me and that I never got used to it or I would not have made the jump to freelance.

My experiences are not some horror stories, of course. I have a friend who cried after work and a friend who had to work overtime without pay. And another who got fired and not paid at all for his work. What did he do next? He looked for another job.

The thing is, you get used to people yelling at you, demanding you work evenings and weekends, you answer phone calls on vacation and accept that you are not being paid fairly. So get out now. Because working for dishonest or rude people builds tolerance. After a few years of this, when someone humiliates you in front of your colleagues or takes credit for your achievement, you will think that it’s not that bad. At least you get a regular paycheck.

Our worst game

After the success of our first game, we decided to make a sequel. Making a second game should be easier, you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, right? Well, not only did we repeat a lot of mistakes from our first game, but we also added new ones.

black cat in a graveyard — Yes, this is a graveyard. In a game about kittens.

The game is Hidden Paws Mystery. Here are the 4 worst mistakes that we made:

1. Scope – As before we planned too big a game, way bigger than we could make in a reasonable time. And we made even more levels than previously.

2. Topic – Our first game was about winter, it looked lovely: islands covered in snow, pine trees, little houses. We decided that our second game would be Halloween themed. The problem is that it’s difficult to make Halloween cozy and beautiful and cheerful. What’s worse — we actually planned to make it all weird and scary. But this was still a game about finding little cats. It didn’t match up. Players didn’t know what to make of our game.

most unsettling! — Yes, that’s a comment about our game.

3. Promoting – since our game didn’t look as pretty as the first one it was more difficult to promote on Twitter and got fewer wishlists on Steam.

4. Art style – our first game had a cute low-poly look. Our second game has more real looking graphics. Not only does it take longer to make a game with this art style but it was completely unnecessary for such a simple game.

swamps with hidden kittens in Hidden Paws Mystery

Not surprisingly it sold poorly. It has very positive reviews though so that’s good.

Don’t let the dead fish fool you

My favorite book from childhood is “Summer Lake” though I have it in Polish. There’s a dead fish on the cover, but other than that, the book really is lovely.

Brigitte Schleusing - Sommersee (Letnie jezioro/ Summer Lake) — Brigitte Schleusing – Sommersee (Letnie jezioro/ Summer Lake)

Or at least I think this was my favorite when I was a child. Maybe I had another book that I loved more, but I forgot about it?

Anyway, this book is wonderful, it has everything a good children’s book needs: beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, lots of details, nearly no text so you can invent your own stories, little animals, tiny yellow ducklings.

The drawing that I like most is on the last page. Do you see the fish net full of flowers? It’s magical.

It’s been out of print for years, but you might still find it.

I’ve been browsing children’s books lately because my brother and I will be drawing our own book this Christmas when we meet at our mom’s house. The previous Christmases we made games.

Why haven’t you opened your TeePublic store yet?

I’ve just finished uploading over 30 designs to my TeePublic store, and there’s still more to go. I am a little behind with it, but now definitely is the time to keep all my stores up to date. Black Friday’s approaching, and it’s the best day to sell t-shirts online, and everyone’s doing their holiday shopping now.

If you haven’t opened your TeePublic store, then definitely do so soon. You can use this affiliate link to open the store 🙂 But either way start uploading as soon as possible, preferably before Black Friday.

Really, November and December are the best months for earning money online. And one thing that I love about TeePublic is that it’s so fast to add a new design, less than 2 minutes. Much faster than any other website.

Also, if you’ve been procrastinating opening your store because you couldn’t think of a name, then I wrote some advice here and here. And remember that your designs don’t need to be complicated.

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