Fandom Trumps Hate

Every year, we get emails and comments from people who make physical fan crafts or art who want to list their creations in FTH. There are a variety of reasons that non-digital fanworks are not a good fit for the way we run the main FTH auction, but we’ve always been willing to signal boost for fan crafters using their crafts to raise money on their own.

This year, we’re finally formalizing this process with the

FTH Fan Crafts Bazaar!

If you are a fan crafter:

You will set up your own “stall” for the bazaar - that is, a page (on whatever site is convenient for you) with all the details on what you’re offering, prices, how to contact you, etc. You can use an auction format if you’d like, or you can have set prices, or any other pricing system. Our one requirement is that you do not take payment directly but, as with the main FTH auctions, you ask buyers to donate directly to one of our organizations and send you proof of their donation.

Once you have your stall set up, fill out our form and let us know all the details.

At the same time we put up auction pages for browsing week, we’ll create our Fan Crafts Bazaar page with details about and links to each crafter’s stall.

After the auctions are over, we’ll email you to find out how much you collected for each of the organizations so we can add it to our total.

If you would like to donate in exchange for fan crafts:

Keep a look out on Tumblr or Dreamwidth for our Fan Crafts Bazaar page. You’ll be able to browse all of the stalls with descriptions of what they’re offering and in which fandoms.

You can click through to each crafter’s stall for full details, and from there you will contact them to work out donations and delivery.

Note: FTH will not be involved in craft transactions beyond this point. We pride ourselves on the amount of followup we do in our main auction. We can’t force anyone to follow through, but we work throughout the year to encourage communication between bidders and creators and to ensure that as many creators as possible meet the deadline. We will not be doing this for fan crafts. These transactions are 100% between the bidder and the crafter. If you don’t receive your craft, by all means let us know so that we don’t include crafters who don’t follow through in future Bazaars, but that is as far as our involvement will go.

First: Please probably don’t make the post right now. If many people do that, it will probably just lead to confusion.

Instead: The Fan Crafts Bazaar will go live at the same time that auctions go up for bidding week, February 17th, and close at the same time auctions do on the 28th. But we will keep the signup form open until auctions open on the 24th. We will continue to add crafters to the bazaar as they sign up.

So you can wait to make your post on the 17th and then sign up. You can probably also get away with making the post a day or two early to get signed up before it goes live; that probably won’t cause much confusion. We just won’t be advertising you until the 17th.

If you’re putting up a page somewhere other than Tumblr, where you can, say, make a private post and then unprivate it on the 17th without the URL changing, or on your own website where you have control over it, then feel free to sign up at any time!