Important Notice: Closing My Store

This isn't a decision I have taken lightly, but I have decided to close my digital download store. I will cease selling content on Thursday, September 10th. The store website will remain online until the end of September to allow anyone who may have made purchases to download and back them up. After that, the store will be taken fully offline.

What about your blog?

I will continue to write my blog and continue to cover the same kinds of subjects. I still love photography, and I'm not abandoning it by any means. I am just going back to doing motion graphics as my primary business, and that will support my photography writing. I will have another post about this soon.

Just to reiterate: this website, and my portfolio and photojournal aren't closing. I will continue to blog and write about photography as normal. I am only closing my store and supporting infrastructure

I have however shut down the Streets of Dublin website, but that had almost no traffic as I hadn't been actively supporting that project in a while.

Why am I doing this

There are two main reasons that I am doing this. The first is that due to the pandemic, sales have fallen off a cliff. This is entirely understandable, given the global situation. Running an online store costs quite a bit of money, and since March of this year, the drop off has been substantial. It has become no longer economically viable for me to keep it open. At this point, it costs me more to keep it online than I'm making from it, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

The second reason is that because of changes in global taxation rules for digital downloads, it's becoming a minefield for individuals like myself to sell digital downloads in this way. Ever since the EU enacted its "Vatmoss" system, more and more countries have been adding their own digital tax laws, and these have become impossible to navigate and manage. There are services which will do this for you, but they are very expensive. And so, this is the second, but equally important reason I have decided to shut down.

Will there be any closing down offers?

Yes, I am offering 50% off all final sales for the last few months. You can use the following voucher at the checkout to get 50% off: closingdown2020

What will happen to your eBooks and Presets?

For the moment, they will be unavailable after September the 10th. I may look at alternative measures to make them available in the future, but this won't be until next year at the earliest. There are some systems such as gumroad, which take care of everything for you, and I may look at this in the future, but for now, I need to scale back and regroup as it were. For future eBooks, if I decide to release any more, I will do it through Kindle and iBooks, rather than release them myself. I will still be offering downloads for Patreon members.

There will be no further updates to any of my current eBooks. If I do release future versions, they will be new editions and will be substantially different, and new ebooks. They will also be released through Kindle or iBooks, as mentioned above, but I have not made any decisions about this yet.

The help centre website will also be shutting down. This is currently run on zendesk, and it's another cost that I can't justify, given that there are only a handful of users using this.

What about your customer data and privacy.

When I completely shut down the website, all personal data will be permanently erased. The only thing that will be kept will be the minimum necessary information about sales to comply with local government accounting and taxation regulations. All other data will be erased, and the database removed permanently from the servers.

What about the Newsletters?

I will also be stopping both newsletters: the one for my blog and the store newsletter. The reason for this is that it costs money to maintain these, and I'm just not using these enough to justify the cost. For those who rely on these, I apologise, but there are plenty of other ways to get regular updates, including RSS, Twitter and Facebook.

Anything else?

As I said at the start, this wasn't a decision that I took lightly. I have been mulling over this for several months. I'm sure this might be disappointing for some people, especially as I won't be doing further updates. Still, it's no longer remotely practical or even possible to continue to keep my store online. At the end of the day, I'm just a single individual, and I have to earn a living. It's no longer practical or possible for me to put in the effort and costs that would be needed to keep my store open, nor is it viable as a way to make a living. I sincerely appreciate the support everyone who has bought products from my store over the years, and I'm sad to see it go, but unfortunately, its time has come.