I happen to know a few people who are creatively inclined in some way or other , whether it be making paintings , art on things , 3d printing etc.

I hence hear a lot of stories on how it is expensive to set up shop on a lot of websites that let Indie Artists sell their stuff . I get why that is , If I were running a site that would let people sell their stuff ,  I would ask for a small cut or some upfront payment from them . I mean there are hosting costs for the site and I would have to find some way to make money off this.

The problem

As a result of the above a lot of artists are driven to Instagram to try to market whatever piece of beauty they create. This approach has a few problems , try to sympathize me with here -:

  • Constantly trying to keep up with the algorithm.
  • No way to market stuff to people outside of Insta, unless you send them instagram links.
  • Blatant threat to privacy of the Individual publishing due to instagram's invasive privacy policy.
  • All your content is locked completely inside Instagram's silo.
  • If Instagram decides to remove your account or your content , their is nothing you can do about it.

The solution

Get yourself a corner on the web, something that you control. After that you can use SEO to market that site to the folks. Now, I understand that it's difficult for non-technical people to get their own website, set everything up from scratch etc. That's why I have decided to create something called the Free Artists network ( Free as in Freedom and not as in Free beer)

Free Artists Network

Basically I am going to write a series of wiki posts on my wiki which is going to help any non-technical person get set up with their website in a very short amount of time (and ofcourse for free). I am also going to setup a site which will aggregate all the postings for art on people's individual site. That way we can have a combined site of Indie artists trying to sell their art. Since all of this is going to be based on static sites, it's gonna cost me nothing and the same for the artists.

I am yet to finalize some more things for this small initiative of mine but if you want to get in touch with me , I go by the name @insaanimanav all over the web and mail@manav.co.in is my email address