Recently, my literary agent got in touch. He told me a mutual friend had tried to show my art work to a potential buyer – wanted to share a piece so they could purchase it – and went to my website to find… nothing.
No shop. No way to purchase. Just a space where the work should have been.
Oops. It’s one thing to quietly stop selling because the technical side is a drag. It’s another to realise people are out there, trying to give me cash, and finding a dead end.
I wrote a note to myself: set up a shop (again).
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Bit of context
Some people reading this know me as a writer. That’s been the constant, for decades: journalist, writer of books, courses, blah blah blah. Others found me more recently, through the art: original works and limited editions. Others still may have come across me because I did a talk or ran a course.
And some people are here for all of it, which is nice (hello you!).
I’ve been making a living from all these but the work has been scattered across platforms that don’t talk to each other. And I’ve been on a mission lately to bring things back to this site. Reposting work that only lived on social media, complete with all the comments, linked back to the people who left them. Pulling things in from Substack so I’m not cannibalising myself. Trying, in short, to make a proper go of it with one place that holds everything.
Textpattern1 has been the home for my writing since 2003. It’s solid, straightforward, does what it’s meant to do. The only thing it hasn’t done is sell things. And that’s because I couldn’t figure out how.
I chose this software a long time ago, back when I was mostly putting out words. (See this: The quiet pleasure of an unfashionable choice.) It’s been patched and adapted and occasionally browbeaten into doing things it was not designed for. Some things worked. Some things didn’t. And the things that didn’t – like a proper shop that lives alongside the writing – I simply couldn’t fix.
For a long while I had a separate WordPress site for the art, which I set up to work in combination with all kinds of other things, including but not only WooCommerce. Still do have that Wordpress Art site, but it’s largely hidden. There was nowhere to put books and courses in a shop that’s supposedly about art. And anyway it never made sense: two sites, two logins, two sets of headaches. So I let the whole thing slide and went back to “email me if you’re interested.”
Which worked, after (but only after) a fashion.
Recently I’ve been using some AI tools to help me think through the structure and the necessary coding. Nothing builds itself, but for the first time I can describe what I want and get back something I can actually use. Things that felt impossible a year ago are now merely time-consuming.
So I’m doing it properly. Finally.
The shop will live here, on this site, alongside everything else. The art will be there. The books will be there, and the courses – in one place, so you can actually find them.
And because it’s me handling the orders, every print gets checked, every book gets signed, everything gets packed properly before it leaves.
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One thing I’m working on alongside the shop is a limited edition book – a collection of related artworks with a thread of story running through it.
I’m going to make it in public: writing about the work as it develops, sharing the process, letting you see it take shape. If that appeals, I’ll be sending a short email series to anyone who wants to follow along – the book, the building of the shop, all of it.
Nobody gets those emails unless they ask for them. If you’d like to be included, just email me and I’ll add you to the list.
What I’m hoping for
This is a technical process and I’m not pretending otherwise. There will be moments of swearing, probably. There will be test transactions that confuse me / us. But I wanted to tell you what’s happening, and why, and to ask for your patience while I get it right.
The shop link will appear when it’s ready. Until then, the old ways still work – if something catches your eye, just email.
This is just a note to myself, really. A way of marking the moment. But if you’ve read this far, you’re part of it now.
More soon.
1 Textpattern. A content management system (CMS) that prizes simplicity and clean code over feature-packed complexity. Offers a lightweight, predictable foundation that gets out of your way, unlike larger systems such as WordPress that try to do everything out of the box.
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