Well today’s lesson in self publishing, boys and girls, is the wonderful world of chotchka. Or, the more polite term is "merchandising."
When I thought about creating some t-shirts to promote my books, Madeleine Crouch, (Association Manager extraordinaire) guided me to the café press website. And sure enough, it is a veritable black hole of things to do. T-shirts, sweaters, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, all with your own design on them.
Here is how it works:
1) After the usual sign up process, you can take any design you own (or create a new one), and upload it to café press. They will put it on a shirt or sweater or coffee mug or bumper sticker and ship it to you. Prices are equivalent to buying a similar shirt in a retail store– like, $19.
That’s just if you want one shirt for yourself for fun. The next level:
2) GO COMMERCIAL You can have them put your designs on shirts and have them sell them to other people. You can select a markup amount, usually $5, so a t-shirt you designed and had made for yourself for $19 will cost someone else $24 (if they want that t-shirt with your design on it).
You can also do CD’s.
This is certainly a marvelously clever concept on Café Press’s part– they are able to offer and sell the unique work of thousands of designers, at no cost to themselves. Plus the get all the money from what is essentially "print on demand" work.
So here are the hoops and conditions:
Obviously, you must create the artwork. This is preferably saved to PNG format which was a new one to me but easy enough to do in photoshop once I figured out it was under "file/ save for web." That is 90% of it.
(Note, no cost savings for single color or B&W, all designs are same price as full color.)
Next thing to consider: there are 2 grades of "membership": free and $5 a month.
Here is how that membership thing works: Let’s suppose you have 2 designs that you want to put on a dark t-shirt and you want to put them out there for sale to the world. Well, uh-oh, in the free membership, you can only pick ONE design to put on that "product category" of dark t-shirts (black, dark blue, red t shirts are all in that one category of DARK t-shirts).
You can put your second design on a coffee mug (but now you’ve used up another category with that one design). See how it works? If you just have one design, or maybe you have no commercial ambitions and you just want them to make up one shirt for you, then order another single shirt with the other design, great, there is no fee involved. But if you’re at all prolific and are thinking of going commercial you’ll need to pay the monthly $5. I will be doing that soon, once I get all my designs up on the site and the kinks ironed out.
What happens on the site big picture is, freelance designers all over are making up designs – for presidential candidates alone the number of designs are amazing. Some of the Palin for VP shirts are downright near indecent. So there is a real reason to shop for t-shirts on the site, as there are so many designs to choose from.
Best of all, they fulfill all the orders and handle returns and customer service.
They also do POD (that’s "print-on-demand") with CD’s, so I am probably going to offer "Fitness Fairy Tales" thru them as well. All I have to do is upload the artwork and send them a CD master, no other up-front costs. It’s just the up-front time involved in doing the artwork. Just fyi, their FAQ’s re: the "CD master form" are confusing. The form appears AFTER you have started the process of actually adding a CD to your store.
My shop is here:
http://www.cafepress.com/JustinLocke2
I have only sold one t-shirt so far, but I have yet to really start promoting. I will update you on this adventure in a future post.
www.justinlocke.com
