Only Four More Days!

...'Til our fall print sale, the final Print Offer of 2010. I'm getting really psyched about it.

The reason I mention it so many times in advance is just so nobody misses it. Our print sales only go on for a very short time—this one will run for five days—and I always get people contacting me after it's over saying, "Hey, I missed it!" "I don't check in to TOP for a week and this is what happens?" "Can I still order, please?" Well, no—no you can't. We collect orders for the five days the sale is open and then the fulfillment work begins and that's it.

By the way, I'm going to run a "sticky" about the sale at the top of the blog all next week. New content will appear underneath it (everybody knows what a sticky is by now, right?), so don't be fooled into thinking there's nothing new.

Please check back here on Sunday at noon to take a look at our Fall Print Offer, Peter Turnley's Paris. It's going to be great. You'll like it, unless I miss my guess.

Mike

P.S. By the way, if you think at any point that I'm being too craven and commercial about our print sales, all I can say is I hope so, brother, I hope so, and please don't begrudge. Running a site like this is great fun (really, it is), but they chain your foot to a bench and make you tug on this giant oar all day, and then when the plate with the scraps and gruel comes around there just isn't much of it (again, really...although I'm up to 1600 calories a day now on the GAFAD*). The income is all nice, but harrowingly irregular. We need the odd drachma.

And Peter has now contributed several bodies of original work to the site without getting paid a single lepton**. Talk of New Paradigms in photojournalism is all well and good, but something has to pay the bills. This is how we hope it's going to work.

(But more about that in the future.)

*The Great Anti-Fat-Ass Diet, which I've been on for going on seven weeks now.

**1/100th of a drachma.

 

Comments

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I think the print sales are a very cool thing, even when I don't have the money in my budget to participate. (Or if I actually wasn't at all interested in one particular offering; that hasn't happened yet, it's always been budgetary.) The prices are exceptionally good, but I don't choose to spend at that level for prints much at all.

[James]

Mike,

don't sweat on the commercial aspects - we all have to earn money.

At the risk of opening a can of worms, if you should in the future need to make this a pay site, I for one would pay. Your content IMO is worth paying for - 2 or 3 interesting articles a day throughout the year is a much higher rate of interest to me than for example buying one copy of Amateur Photographer per week in the UK, and AP is probably the best British photography magazine.

I've just paid the children's school fees for the term ( "Aaaaaaaarghhhh!"), but as soon as the fiscal shock has worn off, there'll be a buck or two in your tip jar.

[Nikhil Ramkarran]

The roots of the internet, the usage from its inception and the users who first populated it have all caused a culture of free-ness to develop. Content must be free.

I am one of those who expects it all to be free. This is why I, among others I suspect, find it hard to pay a subscription, even voluntary, for content (in my case there are also more mundane reasons).

Having said that, I love this site. I check every day, and am sorely disappointed when there isn't anything new. Articles and discussions are varied and interesting, non-dogmatic, polite, eclectic and intelligent. And I am personally pleased that you have found this way (among others) to monetize the site.

Your print offers are of genuine and tangible value to the photographer's community, offering something that has a value quite apart from the cost per item.

This is a rather involved lead up to the point I really want to make (only to your p.s. really); which is that I seriously doubt that any of your many regular readers would in any way need an explanation from you of the commercial aspect of the print sales.

Firstly, even I (an unapologetic freeloader of the knowledge available here and elsewhere), could not question your attempt to extract some financial gain from the hard work you put in here.

And secondly, I think if anyone does question it, your regulars would quickly (and politely, and likely eruditely) point out to them the error of their thinking, without a response being necessary from you.

The only people to whom the explanation would be necessary are people who are less likely to visit regularly or frequently and who won't be appeased by any explanation or excuse regardless of its reasonableness.

I probably won't be able to participate in this latest print offer but rest assured I am, and will be feeling a deep degree of regret.

[Rob Atkins]

GAFAD: Get Away From Addictive Deserts

[James]

Mike,

apropos my comment above, I have just now noticed that there is in fact a "Subscribe" button. I'm feeling a bit like Homer Simpson: D'Oh!!!!. Perhaps I need specs, or at the least to glance around a familiar landscape every so often to see if something has changed.

Subscription on its' way.

[Ben Rosengart]

Whether I buy or not, I always enjoy the print sales. Please keep doing them.

[Nondas Gardelis]

How nice of you to think of the drachma and the lepta(in plural), nowdays...even we, Greeks have forgotten about with the euro Globalization

[Nondas Gardelis]

Mike,
Following this site every day the last couple of years has cost me dearly although you have earned almost nothing,but worth every single penny spend and I shall definitely follow up if it is asked to be subscribed.

[Dennis Ng]

Sponsor the artist might work better on top of any of one big print sale ...

[Neely Fallon]

Mike,

I already bought the Bruce Davidson Magnus Opus Trilogy thru TOP, was seduced into the
Nikon D3 & a Leica M9 because of you, think about my belly fat & my budget and NOW...NOW you offer up a custom print from
Peter Turnley's Paris? Have you no shame sir? Have you no sense of common decency? What next? A guest post by Sam Abell (a friend of a friend I might add) extolling the virtues of shooting film thru an Olympus OM-1n (which I still own..)? Where does it end? Or as my spouse has said "when does this frickin' photo hobby* thingy-phase end?"
*For the record this is definitely NOT a hobby. More like an obsession.