Bye-Bye, Etsy: Jumping Rails is Jumping Ship

You may have noticed something different about my blog. Probably not, because let's face it, if you actually do follow me, I haven't been posting here enough to draw attention to any changes. So, instead of making you guess (if the title of this post wasn't obvious enough), I'll point it out. Over to the right, in the sidebar, there used to be a little button that said, "I sell on Etsy!" I was so excited the day I added that button. I loved that I was getting into my painting and wand-making enough to justify joining the ranks of Etsy sellers. I was so excited to have come up with the name Jumping Rails for my shop -- a name that reflected my tendency to constantly jump from one art form to another.

The image that represented Jumping Rails.

But two days ago, I closed my shop. Jumping Rails is no more.

"Why?" you ask.

The biggest reason is that I'm tired of paying listing fees for items that don't sell online. They sell, sure, but in person. It's not like I'm off doing art shows every weekend or anything, but the few I do per year are the places where my art sales happen. Online, not so much. It may have looked like it because I used an Etsy app to mark off the things I had listed when I sold them, but those sales did not come about because of Etsy. So why should I list them there at all? Why pay them fees for what I'm doing myself, in person?

Am I blaming Etsy? No. Well, not exactly. I do think they've allowed certain products to be sold there that don't fit with their original vision and that has made the marketplace a bit unwieldy. And there are just so many sellers now. But I take full responsibility for the fact that I've done very little to promote my shop. Art is something I love, marketing is not. Which actually ties into another life decision I've made but won't go into in detail here. Suffice it to say, I've come to grips with the fact that my art and my writing must be hobbies right now because homeschooling my now-teenagers takes top priority.

What I want to say is, I'm not just giving up on art, and I'm not going to stop having my art available for purchase outside live events. You can follow me on Facebook and see the work I post. If something suits your fancy, message me. I always have matted prints of many of my paintings (4x6 prints in 5x7 mats) for $10 including shipping, and generally if I don't have one on hand I can print it quickly. You can purchase various sized prints of some of my work on FineArtAmerica.

So, while Jumping Rails has jumped the Etsy ship, I've not left completely. And maybe someday, things will have changed (either with Etsy or with me, or there will be a whole different ship to board) and Jumping Rails will be revived.