Selling nonsense

The writer

Thomas Rabies writes nonsense prose and poetry, published in zines. The subjects are small and local on purpose: a missed goal, a granny queuing at Bettys, the rivers that run through Harrogate. Nothing much happens. Said out loud, it turns into something else.

The situation

Before the site, the work had no proper home. There had been a nonsense podcast, but it had lapsed, and when a podcast stops, the audience drifts and the work goes quiet with it. The zines existed. There was nowhere to read about them, and nowhere to buy them.

This is a common situation for writers and creatives. The work is real. The way people find it is borrowed, a feed here, a podcast there, and borrowed spaces can disappear.

What I built

A WordPress site with a small WooCommerce shop. The zines sell as ebooks, delivered as digital downloads the moment payment clears. Payments go through Stripe. Prices start at £1.25.

Digital downloads suit this kind of work well. No printing costs, no postage, no stock sitting in a cupboard. A £1.25 price would make no sense with an envelope and a stamp attached. As a download, it works, and it lets a curious reader take a cheap punt on something strange.

The typography

The site is set in American Typewriter, like a garret-bound penman. It fits a writer who treats words as raw material, and it does a second job: it makes the site feel like it belongs to a person, not a brand.

The shop is where the discipline comes in. However playful the writing is, the buying has to be completely straight. Clear prices. A plain product page. An ordinary checkout that behaves exactly as expected. Nobody types in their card details as a creative experiment.

I applied the same rule when I built my own collage shop. The work can be as strange as you like. The transaction cannot.

The result

The site is young, so I will not dress this up. It gets visits from all over the world, which the podcast never managed, and the first ebook sales have come through. More useful than either: the work now has a permanent home. If the writing finds its audience next year or in five years, the site will still be there, which is more than can be said for a lapsed podcast feed.

What I would do differently

Come in earlier. By the time this site was planned, the podcast had already been dropped. The web designer's job is to step back and look at the whole picture, every place the work lives, before anything gets switched off. An existing audience, even a small one, is worth carrying over rather than starting cold.

As it happens, the podcast going was probably right for this work. But that should have been a decision made with the whole picture in view, not a thing that just happened.

What this means for your business

Two things worth taking from this project.

First, if you make something unusual, the answer is not to make your website unusual too. It is the opposite. The stranger the work, the straighter the machinery around it needs to be, because trust is what makes people part with their card details.

Second, digital products are the cheapest way into selling online. No stock, no postage, no minimum order. If you have something people can download, a guide, a pattern, a zine, a shop can bolt onto the website you already have.

Thinking about selling from your own website? Get in touch and we can have a conversation.