How Do You Use the SurLaLune Site?

My question for you is--especially if you are an educator that uses the SurLaLune Fairy Tales site--what pages are important to you? 

The SurLaLune Fairy Tales site turned 20 years old this past December. It has been lying fallow for about two years as I have been pulled in several directions both personal and business. SurLaLune is not how I support myself. I am lucky that I can pretty much call it self-sustaining, but that's it, and all of my work on it is pretty much in the status of "voluntary." So if I have to step away so I can pay bills, I do. I wish it sustained me, but as many authors know, that would put me firmly at poverty level of living. All the same, SurLaLune is my passion and I plan for it to live at least as long as I do.

Behind the scenes, during the past year, the site has been going through a redesign that if all goes well will launch in the next month or so. It was supposed to happen end of 2018 but I lost my primary developer and have been recovering ever since.

For a preview, the Annotated Cinderella page is going to look like this (click on the image to see it larger):

Instead of this:

The site will be mobile responsive. It will be modernized. It will have somewhat different navigation and features. Some will come with the new launch. Some will hopefully comes in the months to come.

This also means some areas will be going away. My question for you is--especially if you are an educator that uses the site--what pages are important to you? 

Please comment here, Tweet, email, whatever and let me know how the site is used in your classroom. And please don't expect direct replies from me, especially if the overall response is large enough. I am going to read every response and take it all into consideration but being only me, with lots on my plate, I am going to spend more of the time trying to figure out how to get the site launched and still the most viable for its visitors. With thousands of pages on the site, it is impossible to recode all of them. I plan to archive the current site online in some way but it will not be readily promoted. I hope the new site will fulfill most needs.

And on that note, the new feature will be a Folklore tales database--the site will launch with over 5,000 tales in a database that will have classifications by ATU Classification, Author, Country of Origin, Title, etc. More on that in future days since I am debating volunteer work to help grow the database into at least 10,000 tales. 

And yes, the 49 Annotated Tales are not going away. The Illustration Galleries are on the brink of the chopping block for more reasons than I can enumerate here today. But the rest of the Annotated sections will be intact. So will the Introductory section.

Thanks for the feedback ahead of time! 

New Fairy Tale Designs on CafePress

Fairy Godmother

I finally got the image editor to work on CafePress so I have loaded the new designs hubby John made for me earlier this year. These designs are available on many products and the images here are representative of some of the shirts.

Prince Charming with Crown

Talks to Wolves (also available in Red Lettering)

Talks to Wolves with Phone

SurLaLune Shop Debut: Property of Prince Charming

The hubby made me some new t-shirt designs for my birthday. Which was in May. It's not entirely my fault it has taken this long to get them online and available. There were technical glitches that frustrated me with CafePress in the spring so I gave up for a while. But now it's October and every October the best selling design in the SurLaLune store is the Prince Charming t-shirt I designed eight years ago. I imagine it's one of those "Here's my costume, you're lucky I'm wearing this, and it's funny so I'm charming--says so, right here on my shirt," things for Halloween. I was reminded of this when I saw that the first and only sale of the month was, no surprise, a Prince Charming t-shirt!

So now we have Property of Prince Charming, too--perhaps a bit trite but the hubby says you will like it--and it is now available for ordering. I plan to debut his other designs next week, but wanted to get a head start today.

And folks, I don't make a lot of money off these--I really do it more for fun compared to time vs. financial return--but every little bit helps defray my costs of running SurLaLune. The $ amount these days is actually so low that I have considered taking down the SurLaLune Shop altogether. I did that with Zazzle last year after some repeatedly bad customer service experiences with them. But to date, the products I have received from CafePress have been good and the customer service has been fine despite technical glitches I have on the creation side at times. So it's still here. And I will be adding more designs this month. Because I have some and should share them so perhaps John will make us more, yes?

Bargain Shopping: Zazzle Coupon

We all know that I have a Zazzle store to help support SurLaLune. I started it when Zazzle launched the ability to design shoes with artwork on them. I wanted my own pair of shoes featuring Elenore Abbott's Aschenputtle/Cinderella. I've had them for well over a year now and love them.

Anyway, the shoes are not cheap--either in price or construction--I was delighted with how well made they actually were when mine arrived. (There was squealing and I am not known for squealing, quite the opposite.) The shoes rarely get a coupon discount on Zazzle, but this week the site features a "tax day" promotion which gives 10.40% off the net sale price with the coupon code TAXDAYZAZZLE through April 15th.


If you are interested in the shoes, here's about the cheapest you'll ever get a pair. A discount like this happens only a few times a year. On that note, if there is an illustration you would like which I don't have designed already, contact me privately and I will oblige if the illustration is usable. Some quite simply don't fit on the shoes well.

And I can design other items for Zazzle, too. The SurLaLune CafePress shop is much larger at this point--I haven't had time to devote to building out the Zazzle one--but I can make many of the same things available on Zazzle, too, if you want a tie, bags, mugs, shirts, etc. The ties are not available on CafePress actually. I haven't tried fully designing those--the auto designer has done those so far--but I've been considering it. With all the shoes I spent many hours designing since each panel required consideration.

Here's the official coupon info:

10.40% of the net sale price will be deducted when one or more Zazzle products are purchased and the coupon code TAXDAYZAZZLE is applied at checkout. The net sale price is the price of the product (excluding shipping and taxes). Offer is valid from April 12, 2010 through April 15, 2010 at 11:59pm PT. This offer does not apply to past purchases and may not be combined with any other Zazzle promotional or volume discount offers. If a volume discount applies to your order, you will receive either the discount set forth in this offer or the standard volume discount, whichever is greater. Offer valid on Zazzle.com only.

Now back to our regularly scheduled fairy tale stuff...