EmmaJane

Etsy Shop Name: EmmaJane

What you sell: I sell prints and greetings cards of my photos, and fanzines.

Tell us about your featured item:
This is one of my most popular photos. It’s Brighton Pier in the summer. I took it with a tin toy camera from the 50s called the Vredeborch Felica with cross-processed slide film to give the candyfloss colours. It looks nostalgic, and tends to remind people of their childhood seaside holidays.

How do you decide on the price of your products?

It’s harder with prints because the materials cost isn’t what you base it on, it’s the “artistic value” which is hard to work out with an equation! Basically I just picked prices similar to other people, it took a bit of trial and error to get to a good pricing scheme, first of all they were much too low because I felt a bit like I was being shameless selling my photo in the first place, but I soon got over that. I sell in GBP on another UK-based site, and my prices there are different to the USD ones on Etsy because the economies of the two countries are different, and I don’t have to work out the exchange rate selling in £££s. You get about $2 to £1 at the moment, which is great if you’re buying from the US; but if you’re selling and you just convert your UK prices into dollars it’s too expensive for people in the US. You have to be careful to sell at prices people earning in dollars will pay without shortchanging yourself.

Why do you think that most Etsy shop owners are worried about filing taxes?

It’s not an issue for me, I live in the UK and it’s pretty straightforward for me because I don’t have any employees or claim deductions on cars or suchlike, and my day job is in finance so I’m used to sorting that kind of thing out. US taxes seem a proper Josef K style nightmare to calculate though, and people who have to deal with them have my sympathy.