Yes, it’s true. There are altered books listed for sale on Etsy. Please do check them out in my shop and share them with your friends. An independent artist is only as successful as the audience who is willing to support and share their work.

Since the altered books have returned home from the show at Art Space Vancouver, I’d been going back and forth about whether or not to list this work on Etsy. I was questioning if there is an audience for them there, whether a craft-focused site was the right fit for this type of work, and had my doubts about people purchasing work from Etsy that is of a higher price point. But it makes sense to have them there because I need to let people know they are for sale and it’s the simplest tool in which to do this. I’ve sold six of these books but I need to reach a wider audience of buyers.

I decided to rephotograph each book for listing on Etsy, to show different angles and how they look framed. I used studio lights instead of the on-camera flash I typically use when I document work for posting to Flickr and my blog. I realized as I did all this how amazingly simple the whole process of documenting artwork has become thanks to digital photography. I had the first few books on Etsy in a matter of hours, which is pretty damn awesome.

I’ve been extremely well organized about documenting the altered book work as I go along, and as I was creating the listings on Etsy I realized how valuable this is to treating my art as a business. I photograph and blog about them as soon as one is finished, and I also track them in an inventory spreadsheet in Google docs. Having so much information already on hand and online made it incredibly easy to put together the listing description and (voilà!) have new work listed for sale in an efficient fashion. It really pays off to be an organized artist, which is something that has taken me a really long time to learn.

As a side note, I’ve just started sending out a monthly newsletter with updates about upcoming exhibitions (my own and others) and new work. You can subscribe here, and I promise to keep things fun.