Sunday, September 4, 2011

The Western Online Mercantile

As one of the aspects of our anniversary celebration, we have added an online store that we have called The Western Online Mercantile. It's just one of the ways we are (hopefully) going to get the site to generate money so that we can pay our contributors and also be able to raise our payment rates. It is my goal for the site to be able to pay professional rates.

The way the store is set up is quite simple. The company that hosts the store handles everything. When someone orders a product, they make it and ship it to that person. There is nothing to handle on my end. When a product sells, we earn a commission. Of that commission, we pay a small fee to cafepress.com. I don't expect to earn a huge profit from the store, but I still think it is very cool to have The Western Online Flaming Steer logo on all sorts of products.

The items we sell are all quality products. I have ordered some of the items from the store: a mousepad, a tote bag, and a coffee mug. I can attest that coffee tastes much better when consumed from a coffee mug with The Western Online Flaming Steer logo on it.

If you don't like the Flaming Steer, we also offer items with the Showdown at Sundown art, which is the main banner art on the site, as well as our Cartoon. We are planning on adding new products with different art over time. If there is some type of item we don't have that you may be interested in, let us know and we'll see about adding it to the store. Cafepress offers all sorts of products that we can put our logo on.

All proceeds from the store will be funneled back into the site to help us pay our contributors. So help support The Western Online!


The New Western Online Has Arrived!





Have you seen all the new stuff at The Western Online as part of our birthday celebration? What do you think the changes we've made? Be sure to leave us a comment somewhere to let us know what your thoughts!

The Western Online Turns TWO!

In honor of the two year anniversary of the site, a plethora of changes have arrived at The Western Online.

Instead of being a "for the love" market, The Western Online is now a token market. We will offer a token payment of $5.00 per short story regardless of the length and $3.00 for each piece of artwork or article.

In addition to short stories, we will also publish novella length work that we will serialize and post on a monthly basis. Our first novella is THE CALL CHRONICLES by Kathi Sprayberry. The first story "Homecoming" has been published. It will be a seven part series.

As a way for the site to generate revenue so that we can pay our contributors, we are launching an online store through Cafepress.com where we will earn a percentage of the sales called The Western Online Mercantile. You can buy t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, calenders and all sorts of cool stuff. We will always be adding new items to the store, so check back often.

As part of our celebration, we have tons of new content. We have added a Western Book Review section to the site, where we will review anything from classic Western novels to new releases.

We have published two new historical articles, one about Bass Reeves and the other about Jesse James, a new episode of "Jud Nelson - Texas Ranger," our Western comic strip, an exclusive interview with writer Kenneth Mark Hoover, some spectacular Western artwork by Ken Consaul, and two new short stories: "A Man Willing to Kill" by J.R. Lindermuth and "The Gringo" by Steve Smith.

I have written a new edition of our editorial article, The Roundup: Bold New Changes at The Western Online. It details all of the changes and our plans for the future.

Be sure to leave us a comment on the blog or somewhere on the site. We'd love to hear from you.

A New Era Dawns Today at The Western Online