Johne Cook <johne.cook at gmail.com> writes: > David, how does Cafe Press work in practice? The merchandise is of good quality, and their service is good. The prices are somewhat high -- they're making a good profit on it I'm sure, and doing one-offs isn't cheap. They're easy to work with. You upload graphics, apply them to products, and they do the rest. There are free shops and "premium" shops. Free shops are limited to *one* of each product -- one t-shirt, one white hat, one black hat. Premium shops aren't, and cost $7/month or $60/year. If profits are small, they tend to delay paying you, or encourage you to use it as credit instead of taking cash. I've currently got $6.25 pending from them; I won't get a check until it reaches $25. Just having their page with your products out there will not get you sales. But of course the mailing list lets us reach many of the people who are potentially interested, and dragaera.info some more (I could see listing merchandise on dragaera.info). If somebody wants to take this and run with it at the level of trying to make it commercial (which would mean, I guess, selling to a lot of people beyond the mailing list), that might take precedence over some kind of group not-really-for-profit project. Of course a commercial approach would have to pay artists and pay Steven for permissions. (Well, artists certainly could choose to work for free, and Steven could give permission for free, but that isn't the way to bet for a commercial project). If what we're really looking for is a way to get some cool gear for ourselves and some friends on the mailing list (and I think it is), then we can do a little with a few free Cafe Press shops, with some kind of deal with Steven. And you'll notice Christmas is coming up, if we move *quickly*. Because of the limitations of free shops, we can't have like zillions of t-shirt designs. It does look like you can have *multiple* free shops -- so there could be a Jhereg shop, and a Tiassa shop, and a Dzur shop, and a Dragon shop, say, and thus there could be 4 different t-shirt designs, one per shop. I haven't tried this, the limitation reads as per-shop, and the "premium" status is per-shop, but it seems like creating infinitely many free shops is such an obvious way to get around the premium charge that they'd have some way to block it. Black t-shirts are not a possibility at Cafe Press; I believe their printing technology isn't opaque enough to work on black. I'd suggest we offer Steven $1 per product sold and see if he'll go for that. Perhaps the artist who designed each product should also get $1 per product? That does complicate the accounting, though, and I'm sort-of half volunteering to coordinate this so that would be my problem. But artists are important to this project. Payable only after Cafe Press pays us :-) (which means $25 profit, that's the lowest level they will pay at). Then we kick around design ideas or actual designs on the list, and settle on a small number of each product that seem most popular, and get them up on shops, and I'll link to them from Dragaera.info. The obvious products of interest are t-shirts and mugs, it seems to me. They do actually have *18* different kinds of t-shirts, but they're not at all equivalent. Some are colored, one is in infant sizes only, etc. But there's a "women's t-shirt" that could have the "bitch patrol" design, say, and we could still use other plain t-shirts for other designs. There are hats, and buttons, and magnets, and bumper stickers, and license-plate frames. The "value T" is $8.99 base, but the organic cotton T is $16.99 base (and has more printable spots on it). For really small demand items, there's a way for people with accounts to order custom merchandise not through any store; so I could order small batches of individual designs without setting up a store for them. So let's kick some ideas around! -- David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd-b at dd-b.net>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/> RKBA: <http://noguns-nomoney.com/> <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/> Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/> Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>