A long time agoMonths? Years? I have no concept of time.<\/span> Patreon began offering merchandise. At the time I ignored it because it was USA-only, but now they ship worldwide so I thought it was worth considering.<\/p>\n It’s actually a pretty neat idea. Lots of people want mugs, t-shirts, posters, etc from their favorite creators. On the other hand, merch is a pain in the ass<\/strong> on a small scale.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Welcome to the world of selling merch. You’re going to hate it. You’ve got a little audience of people who dig your indie games \/ dubstep music \/ cosplay \/ paintings \/ programming tutorials \/ woodworking videos \/ Tuvan throat singing \/ ridiculous obscure blog of pedantic video game criticism and Mass Effect<\/em> rants. Those people dig your work, and wouldn’t mind having a T-shirt with your catchphrase on it. At first, this seems like a money-making opportunity. You’re about to discover it’s really a part-time job.<\/p>\n First up, you need to sink some money up-front to buy it in bulk. Then you need to figure out where to store all this crap in your residential space. It’s amazing how fast inventory gets out of control when you’re dealing with Ndesigns<\/sup> \u00d7 Nsizes<\/sup> \u00d7 Ncolors<\/sup>. And if you’re offering clothing items that require male \/ female options, then stick a \u00d7 2 on the end of that. Now multiply that whole list times the number of different items you want to sell: Shirts, hoodies, mouse pads, mugs, bongs, hats, phone cases, chainsaws, or whatever your audience is into. In the end, you’re going to end up with several large cardboard boxes packed with various goods that your audience can buy from you.<\/p>\n Er, once you set up the website. Maybe I should have mentioned that first.<\/p>\n Websites with a shopping cart front-end are completely turnkey these daysDoes the Epic Games Store know about this? Can someone swing by the EG office and install the latest version of WooCommerce for Tim Sweeny?<\/span>. But it’s still something that needs to be set up, monitored, and kept up-to-date. In your mind you’re going to imagine a five-minute setup process, but what you’re actually going to end up doing is spending five minutes installing the storefront, then two hours learning how to use it and entering all your inventory, then six hours endlessly fiddling with the theme so it looks reasonable.<\/p>\n Now you’ve got a bunch of capital tied up in goods that might get damagedPeople with kids \/ pets know what I’m talking about.<\/span> before you can sell them, so be sure to worry about that on a regular basis. Next you need to set aside several hours every week for processing orders, printing labels, packing goods, and taking them to the post office. Anecdotally, I hear it’s common to dedicate a desk \/ corner of a room to order processing.<\/p>\n Just so you know: You’re not done just because you dropped that package in the mail. You need to keep track of stock so you don’t run out of fast-selling items. You need to deal with lost or broken items, handle returns \/ mistakes, and keep track of the flow of inventory. Don’t forget to be careful with your data. You really<\/strong> don’t want to be the source of a security breach that exposes the personal details of your fans!<\/p>\n Eventually your audience will be sated with goods, sales will drop off, and you’ll be stuck with a bunch of overstock goods that are never going to sellOne particular size \/ gender \/ color of shirt will end up selling far less than predicted.<\/span>. You’ll still get juuust enough orders for the store to nibble away at your time without making much money.<\/p>\n Now let’s jump to the end of the year. You run the numbers and discover you made a few thousand bucks. That seems nice, but was it worth it? Going by the number of dead merch projects out there, probably not. You probably made something minimum-wage-ish. You got into this gig because you wanted to create stuff, and you ended up spending a bunch of time doing some very dull, unrewarding work. You probably could have spent those hours on a part-time job and gotten the same money with a lot less stress.<\/p>\n Services like Printify<\/a> can make all of this easier, of course. The print-on-demand services have gotten pretty good over the last few years, but it’s still something that requires a certain degree of attention, care, and headspace.<\/p>\n So now Patreon is offering to handle everything for its creators. It makes sense. My supporters get more merch, and I maybe get more supporters. My supporters don’t have to share their details with yet another site, since Patreon already has it. This is all basically fine.<\/p>\n In the image above, you can see I have to give them 3% of my Patreon income for three months. You can see what I make on my Patreon page<\/a>, but to save you the hassle of doing the math, it comes to about $150. That’s not much, but it’s also not something to be spent lightly. <\/p>\n So now a Telltales Walking Dead<\/em> – style prompt has appeared. I can add merch, or not.<\/p>\n If I add merch and nobody wants it, then I’m out $150 and I possibly annoy \/ confuse existing Patrons with unwanted merch offers.<\/p>\n If I don’t add merch and people DO want it, then I’m passing up a chance to make more money. This isn’t a just about money, either. If I could bump up my income, then Heather could drop one of her jobsOur dream is that she could quit all jobs and stay home to help me, but barring super-stardom I doubt that’s in the cards. I’d settle for her having a day a week she can spend painting.<\/span> and I’d get more time with the person I love most. So there are real quality-of-life concerns here.<\/p>\n My one concern is how this will change the perception<\/strong> of Patreon support.<\/p>\n Let’s say someone donates $25 a month for three months. They’re doing this, presumably, because they like my work and want it to continue. But if I offer a shirt for Patrons who give $25 a month for three monthsThis is Patreon’s suggested setup.<\/span> as a bonus reward, then I worry they’ll stop and go, “Ugh. $75 for a shirt?!? What a ripoff.” Putting money into the hat of a street busker is different from paying to see a concert, even if the dollar amount is the same. There’s a whole psychological dimension to these sorts of decisions and I don’t really understand how it works. <\/p>\n Anyway, here are the products available:<\/p>\n I’m not a visual artist, so neither of the first two make a lot of sense. (I have an idea for a “But What do they eat?” poster, but I’d have to commission an artist to draw it. Firstly, I wouldn’t want to start with an expense like that. Secondly, 12″ x 14″ isn’t a very big poster. Thirdly, I kinda feel like “But What Do They Eat?” started out as Bob<\/a>‘s catchphrase and I’m not sure what the etiquette is in these situations.) So that leaves us with mugs and shirts. That makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of witty or amusing things I could come up withThinkGeek was selling a “Help, my Dice are trying to kill me!” shirt for years, and I’m pretty sure I came up with that first<\/a>.<\/span> to put on those. And there’s always the old “Put the site logo on a thing and call it merch” style of merch.<\/p>\n Like I’ve said before, I’m in this crazy internet game for the blog writing. Video games are fun, YouTube videos are okay sometimes, and Livestreaming has its charms, but when given the choice I’ll take long-form post-writing every time. If offering merch makes the blog more successful without requiring too much of my attention, then I’m all for it. But if it annoys people or causes problems, then I’d just as soon give it a pass.<\/p>\n So… do any of you support Patreon creators that do merch? Do YOU do merch? What do you think of it? Any cautionary tales? <\/p>\n Are you into merch? Anything you’ve been wishing for?<\/p>\n I’m basically an Ent, and not prone to doing anything hasty. Consider this topic the first step in a long process that might eventually convince me to make a decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I’ve said before, I’m always very shy about making changes around here. I don’t want to be seen as the kind of jerk creator that’s always doing promotions and partnerships. I don’t want ads crowding out my content. I don’t want to be hawking products in exchange for money. Some people have been supporting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49415"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49437,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49415\/revisions\/49437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Oh, So You Want to Sell Merchandise?<\/h3>\n
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<\/div>Let’s Let Patreon Do It<\/h3>\n
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