I've listed a greeting card on etsy!
Also, the zines I made last year.
I always forget how LONG it takes to list things on etsy -- it's really simple, but it does take time to get everything neat and tidy.
1. First I have to psyche myself up to it, which honestly takes some doing. It's not like the individual listings are THAT expensive, but it gets me down to remember that it costs money to list things, particularly since I have a bad habit of waiting until I have about ten things to list. Silly Kumquat.
2. Then I take pictures of things. Sometimes. Sometimes I just rely on the scanned digital slide, but for things like zines and greeting cards that really doesn't work because natural light on a real object is much different than computer light on a flat object. When I have my wits about me I even like to have both scanned images AND real-world images of my paintings, so one can get a sense of what something "really" looks like. It's so hard with different computer monitors giving people different ideas of what an image's color is. So far (bless my soul, knock on wood) etsy people seem to understand that with the handmade and rough hewn comes a certain amount of variance, but I'm always worried someone will give me negative feedback because something wasn't explained well enough. (That alone can keep me from moving forward at step one, honestly.)
3. Then there's the photoshop session of weeding out the bad pictures, editing the good ones. Making sure they aren't huge, making sure the colors look as real as they can.
4. Then there's the listing itself, which is a five step process of drop down menus and tags and descriptions. I usually write my descriptions in a text file first so I can read it and make sure it flows okay. I also work out the pricing of things in a text file, taking into account what it cost to make the thing in the first place. Those text files get saved in the big ETSY LISTINGS 2010 folder on my hard drive, so if I list something similar later on I can pull up my notes and make sure I am staying consistent. It's all about consistency, people. And I have better things to do than remember what I priced my bird postcards at last year. I'm sure you do too.
5. Then the big reveal! There it is! I'm so proud! And now there's the running around to the various web-places to tell them that I listed something, because it seems like each new person who stops by to say "hi" stops by from a different place. And I would be embarrassed to leave anyone out.
I have recently decided to only do behind-the-scenes type work on my websites only twice a week, becuase while tweaking things to perfection is very important it is also very tedious. It's so strange -- I used to be able to happily peck away at the keyboard for hours and write my html and basic css from scratch. Then again, I also had a desk job, or had an hour to waste between classes at a university teeming with terminals. These days it seems like I spend all my time crawling back to my desk, and using that time for anything other than picture making seems like a sin.
So I tend to stockpile etsy things and then have to set aside an afternoon to just go for it. I got started at 5 (the initial gathering props for the photo shoot) and am just now finishing three hours later. But it's done! All the new things are listed. Now if you'll excuse me I have a campsite to paint.
