A good café. Budapest, 1930.
I have a new shop portal page, a deliberately low-maintenance affair which links to Etsy (where a few problems still need addressing), Redbubble (a brand new account), and the page here for Skull Print T-shirts. All the former links to CafePress have been removed. I’d been wanting to move away from the unsatisfying CafePress service for some time but before doing this I needed to arrange suitable replacements. Last weekend I finally disentangled my website from CafePress, something that involved stripping links from more pages than I expected, after which I closed my account there.
I opened an account at CafePress in May 2001 so I must have been one of the first users of their print-on-demand service. This was always a sideline not a business, a convenience for people who wanted something of mine on a print or T-shirt without having to pay the costs demanded by high-end printers like the one I use for the Etsy prints. My earnings from this were minimal at best, usually $50 a year. The rare exception was when my Alice in Wonderland calendar received a mention at Boing Boing during the time when that site had a substantial readership. After a short-lived spike of interest things returned to the usual $50 a year but even this meagre sum began to decline when the pandemic hit in 2020, becoming so sporadic it became evident there was little reason to keep the account open at all.
Beyond the meagre earnings there were others reasons for shutting things down. The front end of the site has always been dominated by the CafePress brand, while the back end, where sellers have to upload artwork and maintain their “shops”, never improved very much from its crudely designed beginnings, something I suspect was a legacy of CafePress having been one of the earliest successful print-on-demand outlets. After I’d got in the habit of putting together a new calendar each year they went and removed that product format, changing it to one that didn’t suit my work at all. And in later years they developed a bad habit of plastering your artwork on products you hadn’t approved of, so I’d find something of mine layered across a shower curtain, say, with no thought given (because none had been applied) as to whether the artwork or its ratio suited such a thing.
I’ve only been with Redbubble for just over a week so I’ve no idea whether I’ll earn anything from their service either but the seller process is a lot quicker and easier to set up than CafePress. As before, this is mainly for people who’d like a print of something at a reasonable price. I still have to add more designs so I’m open to requests. I used to have T-shirts available at CafePress but from now on I’ll only be doing these through Skull Print, a genuine small business who I’m happy to support. I’ll be adding more designs to the T-shirt page as well.
In other consumer news, the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is now on sale in the USA and Canada, with the UK edition being officially published tomorrow. Take a look if you see it in a shop somewhere, it’s a beautiful thing.
Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic..ordered from Oz..no idea when it might arrive.
As an aside, are you in any way, shape or form into the London gay/trans folk scene?
Shovel dance, the goblin band, milkweed…..?
I am back in the UK around Easter next year, really hoping some live performances are on at that time..
Have had a redbubble account for years. The cut is meager, but it is real. Money will go into your paypal account. Side note: I got eighteen dollars from Café Press in the Federal Trade Commission settlement!!!
PJ: Thanks, I shudder to think what the long-distance postage is on a thing of that size.
I seldom follow scenes of any kind, my interests are always pretty fragmented. Oddly enough I did see the Shovel Dance Collective mentioned in the latest issue of The Wire. I’m usually looking for new forms of electronic music, whatever package they arrive in, although I tend to be picky. I’m in London at the moment so tomorrow I’ll be picking up the new Hawksmoor album from the Soul Jazz shop.
Ken: And after writing the above I’ve made a sale at Redbubble which has earned more than I used to get from multiple sales at CafePress. So it’s already proving its worth.
Would you be adding any designs / pages from Reverbstorm / Hardcore Horror 5 to your shops at all, John?
Also, the Moon and Serpent is a wonderful joyous thing of wonderful joyful beauty all-round… WELL worth the wait!
Glyn: Thanks about the book, it was much more than another job for me, more like a labour of love.
I think the only Lord Horror piece I might still do as a print would be the Harry Clarke pastiche from the end of part 6 of Reverbstorm. It was supposed to be an illustration within the story, and there was a lot of detail in the drawing which demands to be seen at a larger size.
The thing with the Lord Horror stuff is that there’s never been much interest in it for prints and so on, probably because it’s never had much of an audience compared to other things I’ve done. Also, a lot of the artwork doesn’t really work out of context.
Might you do a calendar for 2025? If so where would you sell it? Thanx!
It’s a bit late for a calendar now, I usually tried to have them completed by November. I think I’ve exhausted most of the easy options for recycling my own work so anything new would have to be fresh material which takes time to create.
The question of where to sell such a thing would also need to be resolved. I think I still have an account at Zazzle where I did a couple of calendars but I didn’t like the quality. They also didn’t sell at all. It’s still an idea for the future, however. I like calendars in general and enjoyed putting them together.
And, yes, I do still have an account at Zazzle where there’s still a calendar for sale:
https://www.zazzle.com/lovecraftiana_calendar-158299922828230388
One thing I liked about the Zazzle calendar format was they allow people to choose ones with dates that refer to their own public holidays and the like. The CafePress model was US dates/events only.
John, given the dribble, as it were, from CafePress, maybe (*gulp!?*) you should consider a Patreon. Or, worse, a Substack?
I thought about Patreon a while back for other purposes but the project I was working on which might have been done through Patreon fizzled when I started work on the Bumper Book, something that was occupying most of my waking thoughts for three whole years. I always seem to have too many irons in too many fires to justify asking for payment for a single thing in that way.
As for Substack, I have a couple of friends who write there but I don’t feel tempted to join them. This blog has been operational now for over 18 years; I value the continuity and being able to point back to older posts so easily. I own the website, I maintain the software myself and the only rules are those I set for myself. If you’re not asking people for payment you’re much more free than if you are if you feel obliged to offer your readership something substantial for their money. Rather than join Substack it would be much easier to add a plugin to the blog that allows people to donate to the costs of the site ($63 a month, if you were wondering) but I’m reluctant to do that as well. When everyone is continually scrabbling for micropayments elsewhere it’s good to keep offering something without rattling a cup while doing so.