On the 4th of August I left Fremantle, Western Australia bound for Tokyo, Japan. The purpose of the trip was to catch up with an old friend who moved there and a holiday… as well as some light Fountain Pen shopping and checking out shops! Japan has a lot of Fountain Pen stores and a lot of Sailor products. Sailor produce my favourite inks and pens so the exclusives were definitely a focus of my visit!
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Site Update: Donations and Online Store
At the request of a few people (after I suggested the possibility) I’ve made a small change and will be making a more major change down the road (but have begun work on it). I appreciate everyone’s feedback and especially the support following the 2 year anniversary of this site. Thank you!
Donations
First up is the minor change. I’ve added a PayPal donate button for the blog. As of now I've hidden the button on the About section and my reasoning for doing so that it isn’t too pushy and that the yellow PayPal button is a little ugly and eye-catching/distracting. I’ll eventually make a custom button image for button and I might move the donation button to a more prominent position (but not in a way that detracts from the site’s look or is too explicit). I, of course, don’t expect anything but if you do donate anything you have my sincere gratitude!
I'm still considering patreon but I don't expect to do anything with this in the short to medium term.
Shop
You can see up in the navigation menu that there is a new item “Store (soon)” (currently password protected). On this store I am going to start selling limited bundles of ink samples from inks I review. This bundle will include the reviewed ink, three inks that were compared to it in the review, and a mystery ink from my collection. Five samples in total at 2ml each. I’m still looking at pricing but the pricing will likely be dependent on which inks are in the bundle. I think this will be interesting because there are some inks (such as Sailor Store Exclusives in Japan) that people can't easily get samples of otherwise. For right now there are no plans to sell anything else than the bundles but who knows, that might change. If I sell pens I might put them up there as well.
Next month is still going to have some reviews in it but as I am traveling to Japan for a couple of weeks I’m going to be writing about my experiences there, relative to Fountain Pens and stationary. I’m pretty excited!
What this means
For me this is not a money grabbing exercise. I wouldn't mind it if the blog was able to pay for it's own hosting (that'd be amazing!) but the main reason for this is to solidify the future and reiterate commitment to this site for the long term. For readers and for myself. There's more of an incentive and a motivation to continue, not just in terms of any money that I might receive but because if people have donated then I now owe it to them to continue. It also frames the blog, for me personally, as something I'm serious about and reinforces my commitment (regardless of if I receive any donations!). I don't want to burn out (which I'm very aware of as a risk) so I don't think I'll increase the output but I will keep it consistent at 2-3 publications a month.
This will be the last meta post for a while. You don't read this blog for this sort of stuff!
Thank you again to everyone! Not just readers but also to those in the community that promote the works of smaller blogs. You're work is definitely appreciated!
Two Years of Macchiato Man
Five years ago, October 2013, I bought my first fountain pen; two years later I helped Jonathan Deans with co-founding Fountain Pens Australia; and two years ago today, July 15th 2016, I started this blog, Macchiato Man. I started with fountain pens fairly slowly, and somehow avoided jumping head-first down the rabbit hole. By October 2014 - one year after my first pen - I had 6 pen (but three of these were hand-me-downs) and 4 inks (one ink came with my first pen). Unfortunately the slow start was just the beginning of exponential growth: 6 months laterI had 9 bottles of ink; another 3 months, 32 bottles, and fast forward another 11 months to July 2016 and I had around 300. Boom.
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Melbourne Pen Show 2017
On Sunday was the Melbourne Pen Show. It’s a small show but it has a 20 year history and this year there was quite a few interstate visitors (and even at least one international). The Melbourne Pen Show isn’t the DC Pen Show; it isn’t the London Pen Show; it’s a small regional pen show. But because it’s small and regional it’s very people focused and I expect offers a different experience to that of the bigger show.
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Sailor Pens and Inks Facebook Group
Sailor inks have been my favourite inks for a while now. They frequently satisfy the characteristics of inks that I appreciate but are also very collectable. They have limited edition pens and inks as well as difficult to acquire Store Exclusive inks. This makes hunting down and collecting their inks fun (and pricy) but much of the information on the inks is non-existent or very limited, difficult to search for or not in English (which is understandable). I have created a Facebook Group to help fill this gap.
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