The past term or two have been hurly burly. Up and down. D's health and breathing have been good and then totally problematic. Nothing like a lover being unable to breath to get your attention. Yep. Certainly re-prioritizes life and how I spend time.
Part of that re-organizing thinking is centered on a home. Getting a house. Finalizing debts. Closing storage units. Getting art up on walls and out. Reestablishing identify of who and what I am and who we are and why, for many reasons, we initially melded 20+ years ago. So it makes it a bit hard to focus on work. Fortunately, I only have one prep for two sections this term. So that makes things nice.
Back to my topic: in order to get centered and feel emotionally stable, the financial elements and house have to happen. Unlike most of the past 20 years, D's agreed to sell off a few of our investments (we do not invest in stocks or other sham paper-shuffling markets that increase the wealth of the ultra-wealthy). On the low end, this means moving Star Wars figures. On the higher end, this means moving original comic art like our signed Jack Kirby original comic art.
Unlike using media and text to create learning and educational content, using images and video to sell objects is practical in a different way. I still make the video and shoot the images. The video, ironically, I gave more time to editing but I did not attend to the sound. The photos, while I took and tried to do them decently, I did not focus on trying to make them top notch. If I was making the materials for teaching, I would have focused more on sound and less on the editing/transitions. With the images, I would have focused on having as many; however, I would want a higher quality if possible. The end goal for moving product--at least in these examples--was providing as much exposure to the actual items so that buyers could assess the quality of the object(s)
My writing and description for the eBay listings were decent, but they somehow felt unmotivated. Part of me wants more personalized narrative to help make the sale. However, on these items, I am pretty sure the buyers know what they are looking for: comic fans and Star Wars folks can be pretty focused.
To support this work, I also created a Facebook ad to run during the Jack Kirby auction. Hopefully it will help. From what I can see, a single Twitter post brought in about 20-30 hits on the site. So that is good. No followers, but it's a bit early to expect that.
I'll be interested to see what kind of traffic, if any, the Facebook ad generates.
While it feels a bit sloppy or hollow in some ways, I am also glad that I am actually using my tools, software and education to potentially sell things that will get us into a home. Or at least take the edge off of the debt load.
Now listening to Faun: