Saturday, April 30, 2011

T-Shirts, Posters, and Other Merch

Well, after my giveaway last night, and the sales bump I've received since lowering the price of The Door to Canellin to 99cents for a promotional sale, I've climbed quite a bit in the Amazon sales rankings. I broke the 10,000 mark! Not that I really understand the math Amazon uses to figure out the sales rankings...

But, that's not what I want to talk about today.

My three sample t-shirts arrived, testing the design for the Kickstarter backer rewards. Man, are they nice! And comfy, too, I love mine. The cover art looks great on the navy blue shirt, and the text on the back came out fine. The sizes are dead-on, unlike some companies where a large is really a medium. So I'll be ordering the t-shirts for my backers, probably tomorrow!

But the question that brings up for me is this. I've put a lot of work into these promotional items, specifically the t-shirts and posters, designing them and finding a reasonably priced way to have them made. And they really have turned out fantastic! the marketing poster is something I wouldn't mind having framed and hanging on my wall, and the t-shirt is one I'd definitely wear in public and not think twice about it. So a thought occurred to me. With a minor modification of the text on the back of the shirt (it currently says "I helped make it happen! www.kickstarter.com"), I could put these shirts up for sale.  In fact, getting rid of the text on the back would make them more affordable. And for the posters, like I said, they turned out beautifully. I think they might actually sell, at least to people who become fans of The Door to Canellin. And both of the places where I had the work done have the option of putting your items up for sale. So, a little re-designing, and that's what I'm going to do!

But what about other merchandise? Coffee cups. Pencils and pens. Hats.  What else?  Umm... tea cozies?  Who knows? But there are ways to get this merchandise up for sale that mean minimal, if any, cost to me, so why not?

Okay, let's be honest here, do I expect to make any money off merchandising? Eh... probably not. You need a much larger fan base than I'm likely to build in my lifetime.  But if nothing else, knick-knacks with the cover art by Barnaby Bagenda will make nice Christmas presents this year!

3 comments:

  1. I would be interested in buying a t-shirt, a hat, and a poster.

    Naturally, I'd need to actually see what they look like first, but I certainly would be interested in getting merchandise like that.

    Let's face it, who doesn't want merchandise with that dragon on it? Dragons are awesome.

    On another note, I am curious as to how many copies of The Door to Canellin you have sold to reach that sales rank.

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  2. Well, I figured it was free, so why not set up a shop for Door to Canellin merchandise? It's nothing special, I decided to try Cafe Press. If I don't like it, I can always go find another way to do merchandising! It's here if you wanna check it out:
    http://www.cafepress.com/doortocanellinmerch
    It took about ten minutes to set up the shop. It looks like I don't get a lot of monetary return on items sold there, but I'm not really in it for that! :)

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  3. Okay, that's some pretty cool stuff on there. Once I actually have the money, I'll have to go ahead and buy a shirt, or maybe that wall clock.

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