"Strait Jacket" can be worn as t-shirt or dress. Patriziabel Sito

Cottage industry is on the rise with the success of online store fronts like Etsy and NOT JUST A LABEL (NJAL) is just such a site taking it’s existing social network of rising fashion stars and enabling them to sell one-off designer peices via the launch of a new online store.

Based on market research by the company showing that “today’s consumer is looking for unique and one-off designer garments” the new store will feature items selected by the NJAL team plus key industry figures. The idea is a new concept to showcase design talent by selling fashion which may not normally be considered commercially viable.

Will it work? New, exclusive, limited, alternative – sounds like a recipe for fashion success to me.

Personally I like the fact that even as she’s about to hit the big time she does all the MySpace / YouTube / blog stuff herself. It allows her intelligence and sense of humour to come across, and you can’t help warming to her. Of course if she really makes it that’ll all be handed over to a lackey, but at this point it’s an example of how pop stars can use “social media” to promote themselves beyond just bunging a few tracks onto their MySpace. Or making videos that make them look like dicks.

Is it all pointless once marketers get involved ‘helping’ maintain social media platforms on behalf of artists? Or, is this just something we need to stop being precious about, much in the same way we accept stars have been media trained and not every autographed pic will be signed personally. What do you think?

[How to promote your music via social media]

At this rate I may never have to think of an original thought again!

Both new and established creatives are lucky; they don’t need to wait for help from fancy agents or publicists and can take hold of their online self-promotion today with these masters sharing their best tips.

This is a follow up post to How to promote your book via Social Media. In that post I mentioned a chidren’s book called The Mousehunter.

Now you can read the author, Alex Milway, explaining what he’d recommend for self-promotion in his own words (which, you know, is probably better than me trying to paraphrase here because he’s like a proper writer and stuff).

[Using the web to promote children's book]