Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.
It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way that wasn’t useful; they could service clients in Europe or American at a reasonable price, but shipping POD products to Australia was…well, prohibitive.
But the nice thing about the new job is having the spoons to dig and research/try stuff out, rather than staring at my to-do list in abject horror. Over the last few weeks, I dug into POD merch options and found a place that actually ticked all the boxes I had around POD products. And since Eclectic Projects exists to try out stuff, serving as Brain Jar’s R&D, I’ve been testing just what I can do with flash fictions, my beloved Futura font, and a plain white mug.
Of course, the point of doing something like this isn’t “oh look, I’m going to sell a billion of these.” The point is to do it, and figure out just how simple it is, because once I’ve got a handle on it there’s so many interesting possibilities. A huge number of writers have a vast back catalogue of pithy, interesting ideas under their belts that they haven’t even thought about monetising (I refer, of course, to Twitter feeds and Facebook Feeds and even Instagram images, plus short forms like poetry and flash fiction); the speed of something like a mug is quick, compared to producing a book, so it’s possible to take something that’s got attention today and offer a product based on it within the space of a few hours.
And, of course, we all have books that are full of pithy, interesting pull quotes that might sound interesting out of context. Books that can suddenly have merch once we wrap our head around the idea, and start thinking about what the world looks like when that’s built into our business model as creators…
Three panels, one story. Get a slice of fiction emblazoned on the side of your coffee mug with The Year The Zombies Came For Christmas, a seasonal horror tale from Peter M. Ball. When two young parents who grew up without pets buy the son a dog for Christmas, they think it’s a quaint tradition and a can’t miss gift.
Be a shame if a zombie apocalypse changed things on them…
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