Welcome Welcome to the New Indyish!

Yes, we love to welcome new artists to the stupendous ship of fools we call Indyish. We know the muchness and madness here can be confusing, so I figured I’d breakdown membership for you in a nutshell, arright? This is info for all the new artists accepting their invites in the past day or so, and also for anyone interested in how we’re doing things these days and why.

First, you get your invite - maybe you asked for it, maybe not. Maybe someone over here just thinks you’re awesome. If you accept, you create your account with a name (which becomes your profile URL like: indyish.com/author/risa) and password. Then tell us a little about yourself in the profile description, link to whatever you like (how to’s for links here) put up a photo that will appear alongside your comments on the site, and if you want you can put in a feed from another website. At this point you can also chose to activate you Indyish podcast channel. (Yep, everybody gets their own podcast on Indyish.com/podcast). You can also start to create albums on Indyish.com/gallery.

Next Step:

When you’re done profiling for now, go to Account > Upgrade and click to be made a Contributor, ie; able to draft posts for our group blog and draft products for sale.

When a draft is ready, Submit it and an Editor will either get in touch to help you add links or tags or offer other technical tips, or, if all’s well, we’ll just publish it for you.

When you’ve published ten posts as a contrib, you can return to the Upgrade page for the final leap to either Writer or Artist - both able to publish directly into this collectively created space of ours, no middleperson. Indyish editors will continue to read the published posts and if they see anything they think is awfully objectionable they’ll flag it and bring it up for discussion on the forums. The forums are our space for public communication between indyish members.

We use this click to upgrade process, and the contributor stage, as a way to be in personal contact with everyone. Our network is still small enough to be able to have tons of one-on-one relationships between administrator, founder, team types and brand new members. I think this sense of real community is real valuable, and it’s tough to do on the web but it’s possible goshdern it!

With a sense of an indie arts community that is reading your blog posts and checking out your products we hope every member will start to blog as regularly as they can about life as artists - the challenges, joys, questions you are facing, the art you’re making, the people you work with, the issues that concern you. The idea is to make visible how many people are going this road, and to help each other along it.

The thing about going an indie or indyish route is that you’re kind of always making it up - for me, this is what I LOVE. Going my own made up way is the only way I’m happy, but man oh man, does it ever help to hear from others, and even nicer to get helpful hands and high fives along the lovely lonely road. In fact, the main thing I’ve found defines the “indie” community is their willingness to help each other out - it makes sense, with no industry infrastructure people improvise their own organic systems of support. But it’s still mind-blowingly cool and for us, creates a happy feedback loop that just keeps getting bigger. So yes yes, Welcome I say! And thank you so much for joining us!