This one is long, so let me set you up with a “Salt I just want to jump to stuff I’m interested in” links.
Snails Sell, But Who’s Buying?
The Lure of Passive Income
Ultimatums?
Doing it (My)Yourself
The Ins and Outs of DIY
Salt, You Mentioned Snails?
Lords of the Fungus – REMASTERED!
Snails Sell, But Who’s Buying?
Some time ago I released a t-shirt on one of those print-on-demand merch sites. The idea being they sell your stuff for you, and flick you a crumb of a royalty. I guess they hope that you upload your designs en-masse to their service and one of them becomes popular. That way they make a bunch of money and you keep fed with crumbs.
I’ll be completely transparent with you about this, because I think it’s important to be honest with my audience. Also other artists who might be struggling with selling their goods or understanding how it all works may get some useful information here.
If I sell a t-shirt on that site, which they charge AUD$33 for, I make $2. If they sell a hoodie which they charge AUD$57 for. I make $2. That seems to be the way it goes for most of these sites. I’m not convinced that they even handle any manufacturing all. Or if they are just “middle-men” for larger print on demand companies people could use themselves. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m always happy to be proven so.
The Lure of Passive Income
If you poke around the internet looking at articles about making money online, passive income is a term you will encounter.
The idea of it is, you upload popular designs to these print-on-demand websites, sit back and watch the regular income pour in. You don’t have to do anything other than make the designs. They take care of the printing, the shipping and everything else involved. Sounds excellent right? I thought so too. And I tried and tried. Over the past decade or so as these sites have become more and more available I have had countless products available on them.
One site I have around 50 individual products available to purchase. All with some sort of art of mine on it. All the styles I do, all different themes and ideas. Very little of it has ever sold, and I have made less money on there that it’s cost me in time creating it.
Since December 2018 I have made $243.40 in revenue through that site. That’s just over 5 years of having work available on there. Under $50 a year. $4 a month.
Ultimatums?
Now they’re asking artists to pay at least $5 a month to be able to sell more than 10 products. Until recently they had a message on there threatening to either pay up or they’ll delete your products. Needless to say I haven’t paid, nor will I, nor will I even keep that storefront active. Regardless of adding all the keywords and tags in the world in their backend, their algorithm isn’t doing me any favours. Nor is it finding me any new customers. So in the immortal words of Ringo Starr, “It’s gonna get tossed!”.
This isn’t just exclusive to this site, it happens on a lot of them, and there are a lot of them out there. To be one of the elite who get noticed, I have no idea what you have to do to hit the designs that people want. Is it the Live, Laugh, Love crew who are the ultimate target audience? People sipping water out of Frank Green cups? I’d love to know what they want.
I have no illusions that any of my work would appeal to any of that sort of crowd, just to clarify. My audience is very much the alt-dark-metal-goth-artsy folks and I’m not expecting an Ashy Bines clone to get her hair up in that fitness braid and chuck on a pair of leggings sporting a skull with mushrooms growing out of it.
Doing it (My)Yourself.
OK so don’t go into reading this part thinking I’m about to tell you I found the secret to all of this or cracked some sort of merchandise Da Vinci Code. I haven’t. But I have stopped using those sites to do this sort of thing for me. They claim audience reach, they claim to take most of the work out of your hands all the while handing over basically nothing in royalties to the artists. I’m over it. So I started my own site where I sell products and you’ll never guess what happened next!
Sales are still slow. Really slow. I put stuff up, post about it, and will maybe sell one or two things to some core regular folks and friends who support me, but that’s about it. I’m not reaching the right people. And that’s alright for now, because it’s really on me. I need to be pushing my products more and being more active with streaming, social media and even this site. And I’m trying! The fact that I set up this site and have posted more than a couple of things speaks volumes to how productive I’ve been this year so far and it feels great!
For those interested, my online store is powered by Printful. So when you order something from there, you pay me, and then I automatically pay Printful to manufacture what you order and ship it out to you. The great thing about it is they have print partners all over the world. So usually when you order something, it’s printed and shipped from somewhere close by so arrives quite quickly. The limited edition print, comics and print packs are products I personally handle, all apparel etc is run through Printful.
The Ins and Outs of DIY
There are a couple of things to note on doing it the DIY route. I talked tough about refusing to pay for a site to sell my products up above. I do have to pay to have my own storefront running on BigCartel. And it costs more than that one site wanted to charge me.
The difference I feel is that this one site that I’m trying to concentrate all my efforts on building should be the only expense I need to be putting my hard and little earned money towards in the effort to get things rolling. If I had shirts on a bunch of other sites and they all promised different things and all started charging me it’d be a slippery slope to having huge amounts of expenses related to pure admin.
So I do have some expenses involved. I do also have to do all of the product setup myself. Uploading images. Picking the shirt brand. What sizes should be available? What colours? Setting prices and shipping costs. But once it’s done, it’s ready to go and all links up with my store in the backend. When releasing products at less than breakneck speeds, it’s not a huge deal to have to do these tasks by myself. I actually find it quite meditative sometimes to just chill out and put up a new shirt. I did it this morning! More about that below. If you’re just dying to find out what happened, you can click here!
Salt, You Mentioned Snails?
Oh yeah, so I get distracted sometimes. Y’all know this. So a while ago I put a shirt on one of those sites. I’m not going to link it here for reasons you’ll understand shortly. But it’s one of the only shirts I’ve made and sold on a site like that which has consistently been able to generate sales for me. Now when I say sales, I don’t mean this shirt design bought me a summer house in the country. It sells maybe one or two shirts a month. It’s making me between $2 on a normal month and $10 on a crazy good month.
I do not understand why. People are finding it somehow. I’d love to be able to have some sort of insight to why it sells, but I just don’t know. Has a mushroom or snail Reddit community found it? Did some random popular person wear it in an Instagram post? If you know please drop me a message.
Anyway the point of all this really is to say that while it’s great that shirt is selling on a very limited but consistent basis, I would love it if it was selling through my own store, where I control the mark-up and profit margin myself. I pick what shirt stock it’s printed on and have total control of all of that stuff.
Lords of the Fungus – REMASTERED!
While I will leave the old version of this shirt up on the site it’s currently on, $2 is $2 after all and as a someone who generates my only income through artwork and art sales, I’ll never look a gift $2 in the mouth.
I have however re-inked/coloured the image and I think really elevated it to more reflect my current style and get it onto the same page as my other shirts and products. The page I control and that is part of the ArtBySalt umbrella.
It’s available in a whole range of colours like it is on the other site and while it may cost a few bucks more than the other site, it allows me to be making what I think is a fairer amount of money off of it while covering the manufacturing costs involved.
This is a design I’ve loved for years and I really hope that you all also enjoy it. I have a couple of mushroom themed designs on “the other site” that I may also remaster and add to my own site over the course of this year.
There really isn’t a magic bullet solution to figuring all this out. I’ve been doing it for years and still haven’t figured out how to even make this slightly profitable or successful, but I’m continuing to try. It’s a journey towards being able to make a living from my art, doing what I love and not working another day in my life. Actually you know that saying? Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life? Or however it goes? It’s a load of horse shit. It’s hard work and it never stops.
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