There will be an absolute TON of cool local art and artists, from painters and printmakers to ceramicists, sculptors, photographers, and textile artists! Everything will be $60 and under with most art being $30 and under. Family and pet friendly. Don’t miss it!
[Side note: these are all tracked on my Upcoming Shows page in the top website menu]
This does not take into account at least 3 other events I have planned, that I’m just waiting for confirmation on. I’m also continuing to self-publish Cradle of the Worm on Kindle Vella and drawing issues of The River People while continuing to collect stories and plan updates and articles for the website.
WHY THE CHANGE IN MOMENTUM?
In this case I can pretty definitively point to the Indiana Arts CommissionOn-Ramp Creative Entrepreneur Accelerator Grant Program. I got a 3 day class about being an artist and business person, met a bunch of really great artists with inspiring dreams and ideas, and obtained a grant that allowed me to apply to more conventions and art shows than usual this year. The big new one I got to apply to was Horror Con, and they did a lot of promotion, meaning that many new people learned of my existence.
This began to snowball.
OTHER conventions and shows reached out to me after seeing I was doing Horror Con. When I was the one approaching, people were now more receptive because of my IAC funded River People Project. To obtain the grant, I had to have an extremely clear plan, budget and timeline for the project. Being vetted by the Indiana Arts Commission coupled with my body of work and trackable goals gave people the confidence to deal with me.
The On-Ramp class was extremely helpful on its own, grant aside. It may sound simple to say “block out plenty of human time for laundry or a date just as you would block out work time and medical appointments,” or “to budget, don’t start with a number, calculate how much you REALLY NEED to do what you REALLY WANT and then do anything you must to make THAT amount of money,” but these are things I, at least, needed to be taught.
I’m going to be real, most of my Human Time will be spent doing this. ^^^
I do not know how far this will go or how long it will last.
I can tell you that since that May 2023 On-Ramp class, I’ve already done so many things I never thought I’d do. These are all fiddly little things that are mainly significant to me, but in my art/life they were extremely important leaps.
I finally bought and began using a print wall backdrop. I’ve always had tons of art to display, but for some reason I had a mental block that I wasn’t “big time” enough to have one. Of course I should have one! I have a TON OF ART PRINTS!
I started involving other people in my art process far more. Now it’s very common for me to go to my friend’s house and we chat all night while carving and rolling block prints side by side. I also collaborate with them on shirt designs now.
This also goes for making sure to help each other set up our art booths, and tabling together more and more. With them, I feel like I can handle doing more shows. That gets us noticed by more new people.
I also made one of my much more business minded friends until my social media manager. He comes up with great promotional ideas that I use all the time now.
I started making simple shirt designs the second I had the idea or it was suggested. I still don’t always do this (who could) but I make it a more of a priority. Doing it and forgetting it is a much better approach for me with commercial designs when I have the energy.
I started doing a lot more traditional art, including doing a large traditional painting and a different piece with chalks after over a decade of not touching most of my paints and chalks. I was extremely happy with both of these even though they turned out differently than I conceived, because I gave up control and just enjoyed myself.
In the same vein, I began making hybrid digital art. This is where I start with a digital painting and keep going, drawing, stitching and/or decoupaging on top of it to make something totally unique. I’ve been blown away by the new ways I can contextualize my digital paintings like this, and other people sometimes enjoy collecting the hybrid pieces more because they are one of a kind.
I started releasing my novel on Kindle Vella and began learning how to make tiktoks and stories from excerpts to introduce new people to it. I also handed out cards with my novel’s QR code at all the events I did (my social media manager’s idea!).
I made The River People Book 0 in record time using one of the most stark and powerful nightmares out of the gate, leaving me feeling extremely accomplished and proud of how effectively I had captured the horror of my dear friend‘s dream. This was another piece of art I just drew how I wanted without trying to make it “perfect,” and it was so much better because of that.
I posted more (any) stories and reels and updates about all of my art projects and progress. If I made a ton of art in a week or in a day, then I proudly made a ton of posts to showcase it. The truth is, even at my most prolific I can’t post enough to bother people nearly as much as the now endless ads everywhere they look, nor will they even see most of what I do anyway since I don’t pay to boost it. Self-editing to not “overwhelm your followers” is a more imaginary fear than ever.
I started treating being in a group art show as just as important as selling at a convention or table show. Because it is!
If I needed a program, or a supply, I just bought it. If I wanted to have a larger run of prints or comics I just ordered it. These are things that IAC grant made possible. For once I didn’t have to scrimp and wait.
I did a panel at Horror Con about The River People! A real panel with a screen and microphones and everything. And I agreed to speak at New Harmony Gallery and Bluestocking Social as well!
I started thinking of and tagging things in terms of who the real audience is, what they really want, and who I want to meet and talk to. Before I minimized or cleaned up my tags and terms since I wanted to come off as “professional.” But my goal is to find my people, it’s not to impress other business people. Formality is actually worthless for me to pursue.
I began trying to think of what other people wanted in professional conflicts too. Once I realized there are reasons for everything, I could be empathetic and actually meet the other person in the way they needed from me and not how I thought everything should go. Constructing scenarios of how I thought things “should” happen has been a problem of mine for my entire life, but I only recently realized that this was limiting my genuine interactions with people.
I started tailoring what art, pricing, and table configuration I brought to each show. Because of this, setup and takedown of shows is getting shorter and shorter, and people seem to freeze from indecision a bit less because ALL of my stuff is not out ALL of the time. Instead, I think of it as a fun way to show off different aspects of my work each show.
Here are some examples of all the new things I did.
After many wonderful years of being Evillecon‘s program artist, it’s time for me to lay down my stylus. But I’ve never been one for ending on a whimper! Accordingly, my entire table at Evillecon, all 3 days, is $5 and under. That’s the big poster prints, EVERYTHING. It was the best way I could think of to thank all of you for all of your love and support over the years.
Additionally: bring your past or present Evillecon Minion/Staff badge to me for one free medium or small art print.
This is not a drill. This Friday through Sunday March 15-17, 2024, Old National Events Plaza.
This is all going to be $5 or less. All weekend.
EVERYTHING.
Well I suppose that’s enough price slashing for one day. If you want to keep track of all the crazy sales and things I do, feel free to subscribe here:
Horror Con is this weekend Saturday March 2 and Sunday March 3! And I will be there. Here are some of the items I’m going to be selling.
11×17 Poster Prints and framed 4×6 and 5×7 art
Scary blockprints
Covering “Agnes/Adam” in an old proof of my “Wild Birds” lino plate
cryptid stickers and more
Evil Eye and Cat Skull Brooches and Spooky Jellyfish
Indie Horror Comics
The Red ScarfPhysician Heal ThyselfTales from the Clarkside
Scary Original Drawings
I have to admit that when I put a lot of my horror art together like this, it makes me deeply happy. What a nice side effect of letting y’all know about this show!
If you’d like to keep up with all my shows and endeavors, please subscribe here:
Sandpaperdaisy ART and my partners in crime, ETC Artistry, are at it again collaborating on a MASSIVE ART UPDATE for three bangin’ new shows!
First up, we will each have a table at Myriad Brewing Co’s FIGHTING SEASONAL DEPRESSION art show this coming Saturday, February 17! We’ve been working hard making crazy new prints in cheerful eye-melting colors and are pretty darn happy with how we did.
Next up is Horror Con on Saturday, March 2 and Sunday, March 3! Not only will we have creepy cool new stickers there, but we also made a ton of awesome new pins!!
And as if that were not ENOUGH love, we’ll be rounding out March by going to Evillecon from Friday, March 15 thru Sunday, March 17 and selling everything at THE ENTIRE TABLE, ALL CONVENTION LONG, FOR $5 OR LESS.
Yes. Really.
Want to keep up with all the crazy stuff we do? Subscribe to the blog for updates!
To recap, the novel is currently being released as episodes on Kindle Vella. If you need a refresher on how that works, I’ve got a tutorial here. The gist of it is: if you’re new to Vella you can click up top right to get 200 tokens free to explore the site. The first 3 chapters of all series are free, and after that they’re all a few tokens to read, which equates to as many cents.
I’ll be releasing chapters twice a week, every Monday and Thursday, through May 2024.
One month after the last chapter releases, I will make it into a single eBook (and paperback and such) and put it on KDP select so any of you on Kindle Unlimited can have a crack at it.
It has to stay on there for 90 days and then I can take it off and put it on Nook, Apple Books, you name it.
And that’s it! You can use the excuse to explore Kindle Vella if you’re curious about it, and otherwise I’ll let you guys know when it’s on Kindle Unlimited and sundry.
If you want to keep up with updates through your email, feel free to subscribe here.
If you want a foretaste of the kind of dreamlike foreboding that you’ll see in the stories of The River People, come on down to the Alexandrian Public Library any time from February 4 to February 29 and check out my solo show! I’ll be displaying 8 vibrant and unsettling works right as you walk in the building.
Naturally, it had to have a palindrome name. So I called it Spectre ert ceps. Check it out!!
If you wanna know how I made this mess, all of my patreon supporters get access to all my WIPS.
So are you a total nerd for Brocken Spectres or Fata Morgana? Or some entirely other cool weird thing? Tell me in the comments and don’t be shy! I like to share such things on my River People tumblr.
So first off, here’s Kindle Vella. In two weeks, I will be launching my novel The Cradle of the Worm on there and updating it twice a week through May 2024. …NOW WHAT THE HECK IS A VELLA.
I’m pretty sure “Vella” comes from the world novella, since the idea here is bite-sized reading. Vella was launched in April 2021 and it’s Amazon’s place to read serial or episodic fiction. Some folks take a completed novel and release each chapter one at a time on there, as episodes. Other folks write big long series of hundreds of chapters’ length which might later be published as several novels in a series.
searching and discoverability
As you can see at a glance, Kindle Vella is very romance heavy and it’s not set up for you to use a search bar and find specific authors or titles. Instead, it’s all about browsing the provided categories and the featured series. (You can use your Amazon search bar up top, but I’ve heard it’s kind of hit or miss.) While romance is king (queen?) on Vella, you can find everything from science fiction to nonfiction on there.
vella Pricing: is it a good deal to read by the chapter?
The other thing to know about Vella is these little dudes in the top right of your page.
Those little golden keys are “tokens” and that’s how everybody pays for each chapter. You get 200 free tokens to start out with when you try Vella out. A token is about one cent, so that’s about 2 bucks worth of tokens. Vella is only available to Americans right now, so I very much mean 2 dollars. One token gets you about 100 words, so an episode that’s 800 words will cost you 8 cents to read, and an episode that’s 2,000 words will cost you 20 cents to read. The first 3 episodes are always free on every series.
I calculated that my novel The Cradle of the Worm would come in at between $6 and $7 USD total to read on Vella. This is a good value when stacked up against the average Kindle book being between about $10 and $18, but it’s high compared to a Kindle book that goes on sale for $2.99.
why should you read on vella?
I personally think you should read on Vella, or Tapas, or Radish, or Wattpad, or whatnot, if you like the format. On Vella specifically there’s a few interesting little reader mechanics like getting one “crown” a week to award to your favorite story, and the option to answer polls and chat with authors in the comments under each chapter. These are things I really like about Tapas as well.
Alternately, you might like to read a novel earlier than its release as a kindle book or printed book. And of course, maybe an author you love has a Vella-exclusive series or something. To me those would all be valid reasons.
I won’t be trying to get anyone to “buy into the platform” though. My goal has always been to give my readers, just like my art customers, a variety of ways to get my stuff so they could choose the one they like best. Making them use one platform or another (or even asking them to) kind of goes against that. For that reason, anything I release on Vella will be made into an eBook afterwards.
why am I writing on vella?
I’ve got 5 reasons.
Fun interface. Vella is actually a pretty clean, easy interface for me to use for the WRITING part. Now, it has the typical Amazon update and review process nightmares. But insofar as uploading your story, making a poll and writing an author’s note, it’s really enjoyable. I think it’s actually FUN.
Forcing better writing. Vella is forcing me to finally do the final edit on The Cradle of the Worm, and really consider it from the point of view of a READER. Am I being confusing? Boring? Redundant? Too much exposition? Too little? This is the most critical and intentional I’ve been with my writing so far. I want to keep that up.
Inspiration. The episodic format actually made me think of a lot of other stories I’d enjoy making into novels or novellas. I always thought that I was going to be a “one and done” author with Cradle of the Worm, but for the first time in a very long time I’m full of new stories.
Readers. Now, rumor has it that most of the readers on Vella are my fellow authors. (I’ll go into that more below.) But authors are readers too. I’m an author and guess what I love to do? Read. So frankly, even if I only ever get my first 3 FREE chapters read by 1 little “organic reader,” or an author or two I spoke to in a Vella Author group, that’s immensely more than the zero readers I am currently sitting at.
Having to learn to do writer stuff. Since discoverability on Vella is so dreadful for authors, I’ve had to learn all kinds of things about promotion and self-publishing to even think about doing a Vella series. And since I knew it was going to be an eBook after that, I had to learn even MORE things about how to promote and publish eBooks. I find few things more absorbing than learning, so it’s been a pretty exciting process.
about that rumor you mentioned though?
There are all sorts of rumors swirling around Vella online. Is Vella dead? Did it get abandoned before it even launched? Will it be the next big thing? Will they improve searchability or promote it more? Will they pull it in 2024? Are there any “real” organic readers on there, or is it all authors reading each other?
As you can see from my current series I’m reading “How to Vella” by Rachel Messerschmidt, I’m doing my best to learn everything, of course. But in my experience, business guys don’t tell you what they’re doing until they’ve already done it. So I can’t answer any of those questions.
According to all the wild conjecture there’s a chance, however small, that Vella might close down before my series even launches on February 5, 2024. My readers would be fine since I would always make sure you had a copy of my eBook if that happened, but who knows otherwise.
And if it doesn’t close down, I can’t even send you guys to a page until that day because the only way authors can point readers to a story is with a direct link to their series. There is no such thing as a Vella Author Page, and my Vella series won’t populate to my Amazon Author Page until they’re live. For this reason, some authors find their Vella stories to be insanely hard to promote. And Amazon isn’t pushing the platform very hard.
if it’s that iffy, why even bother?
As an author, I’m bothering because of the 5 reasons above. Even if my current plan falls through, I’ll have a much better edit of The Cradle of the Worm to put on Kindle (and elsewhere), and I’ll know WHY I’m publishing my work, and WHAT I want to do with it. That alone has been worth it.
As a reader, I suspect it would be fun to go grab your free 200 tokens, raid everybody’s free chapters, and see if you find anything cool to read. At least, that’s my plan.
If 3 chapters of free Mothman erotica doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.
Want to be updated when my novel goes live? Subscribe to my blog!
After taking an intensive 3 day creator accelerator class through the Indiana Arts Commission, and then subsequently getting started on The River People (funded in part by them), I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that my existing system of comic delivery was EXTREMELY slapdash and unsatisfactory.
So, I took several days and mapped out my intentions. It’s important to me that my comics be forever free to read. However, people also buy digital downloads and paper copies of them. I want them to keep doing so, it’s a big help. But while my printed comics have something past my free comics to offer, my digital downloads didn’t really have much to distinguish them from my free comics.
I took a big chunk of time and found a lot of cool art and writings which were not on the internet, and crafted that into bonus pages for my digital downloads. Then I innocently skipped over to Comixology Submit, as I had in days of yore, to begin the process of changing my comic book file.
Here’s my entry for the 2024 Object Head Zine. But it’s not the only time I’ve drawn humanoids with objects in the place of a human head and features. Tales from the Clarkside, a comic written by musician/artist/writer Carl Clark and illustrated by myself, centers on a gentleman with a guitar amp for a noggin.
My 42 years on this Earth have taught me that virtually everyone other than me has imposter syndrome, or has been told that they have it. So I thought the other 8 billion of y’all might be curious about what it’s like to NOT suspect I’m a fraud every single time I do anything. I highly recommend it, all things considered.
It’s 3 years since I penned what might be one of my most popular articles of all time, “ARE YOU READY TO BUILD A FANBASE? YEAH, ME TOO.” I started it saying that we were in an experiment together, and ended it by saying I would see you all on the other side! Far be it from me to be dishonest with you all, so here’s the results of my experiment.
BEGINNING STATS: 251 people on Twitter, 252 on Facebook, 5 on Patreon. (Something equally petite on Instagram which I did not note down.)
CURRENT STATS: 285 people on Twitter, 322 on Facebook, 7 on Patreon, and a whopping 434 on Instagram.
What a difference three years makes!
…anyway we’re going to go ahead and declare that experiment a F A I L U R E, since those numbers do not constitute what anyone reading my first article hoped to achieve when I wrote the word “fanbase.” I very much did not build a big fanbase. Just at all. Nor did I grow more quickly than before, my pace is still glacial.
thank god.
Now, why would I be relieved and grateful that I’m a big ol’ Loser?
1904 France, Annency, old photo portrait of young woman with fancy medallion
I made this set of my creepy and pretty Victorian animals for Fall YART 2022. I’ve still got some of them available in my Etsy store as 4×6 prints drawn on and signed in metallic copper ink, and also in a digital Valentine/Print set. And otherwise, as with all my creations, they are also up in my Redbubble and Teepublic shops.
Series 1 is here and Spring YART 2023 is coming up just around the corner, on Saturday April 22nd!!
I made these guys for Spring YART 2022. I’ve got a few of them left up in my Etsy shop as 4×6 prints signed and drawn on with metallic copper ink, and otherwise as with all of my creations, you can always find ’em on my Teepublic and Redbubble shops.
In this post I declared my intentions to start uploading a ton of simple designs to my print on demand sites in the year 2022. After the explosion of AI generated images, I already can’t believe that I once wrote that I worried about the ethics of manipulating stock art that I bought the rights to use…what a difference a year makes.
Anyway… I managed to cram a total of 200+ designs into my two most frequently used print-on-demand stores before the year ended, and have been doing my best to shove more in as we enter 2023. So the question becomes: did it help?
All my art life (which is actually all my life now that I think about it) I have worked to become a better and better artist. At some point, this became practicing every day to become a more technically excellent artist. I wanted very much to have a more steady hand, more economy of line, better compositions, superior color combinations, more dynamic movement, a better grasp of anatomy, and a better command of an ever-growing box of tools, including digital tools.
Sandpaperdaisy Art 