Serial Merch - Topatoco for writers!

All right, now, some of you would have received this letter already, and some will be getting it over the next few days (there's a lot of stories out there, and I'm not a robot...unfortunately. ).

Early next year, Wibbly will start producing merchandise and selling it through our site, and we want to offer our services to the the web serial community. You may have considered, or even be using services such as Cafepress or Zazzle, but find the costs and low payouts to you troubling. I can assure you our prices will be more than competitive and have outlined the differences below.

In the first run of merchandise, we will be making t-shirts in black or white, and badges. If there is a demand for more colours for the shirts, or different sizes in the badges, we will look at accommodating this in future releases. For a smooth start to our business, we want to keep the options few and simple as we learn the ropes.

What’s in it for me?
Primarily, you will have merchandise for sale. You can create t-shirts with your own characters’ quotes or pictures on them. You can have in-universe logos on badges. Whatever you want, with only sensible restrictions, such as no racism, hate speech, bigotry explicit material and so forth.

Additionally, there will be very little effort on your part required. Once we sign a contract (so everyone involved is protected), you send in your designs, you inform us the amount of commission you want on each, and that is about it. You have the choice to buy from us (at the base price, plus shipping) and sell them through your own site, or simply link your customers over to our store and we will take care of everything else: production of the merchandise, handling of payments (technically PayPal will do that) and shipping of the awesome shirts and badges.

Ok, I haven’t stopped reading it, how much is this going to cost?
Your soul. And a kitten. Jokes aside, nothing. As this is an effort to band us together, to provide a central place to sell our merchandise from (which also allows, for example, a person who likes Legion of Nothing* to make a superhero shopping trip and pick up half a dozen Shimmer badges at the same time).

*Just an example, we haven’t signed Jim on yet.

There will not be any set-up costs, hidden fees or any of that tiny small print that ends up costing you dearly later. We are going to be upfront about everything. It is a cliché, but honesty is the best policy. The only catch is that we have a limit to how much you can charge as your commission on products sold through our store (this does not apply to selling our products yourself) for the sake of consistency and avoiding buyer complaints for prices we are not responsible for.

It will not cost you anything, but we are not promising to make you rich. It will still be your responsibility to send your readers to the store and enthuse them for your merch.

Ok, sounds all right, give me some figures.
Note: For all examples, amounts are given in Australian dollars (and the equivalent USD at the time of writing). Figures may shift a little between now and the opening of the store. We are still confirming suppliers whilst seeing how much interest there is in this project.

All figures are for a black t-shirt with a full-colour design on it (up to A4 size - 8.3 × 11.7”).

[We will allow up to $20AUD [$18.25USD] commission for products sold in our store. For these examples, we’ll use $5].

Wibbly Press Shirt
Base cost – $17.50AUD [$15.97USD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $5AUD [$4.56USD]
Total – $22.50AUD [$20.53USD]

Zazzle Shirt
Base cost – $25.15AUD [$22.95USD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $5AUD [$4.56USD]
Total – $30.15AUD [$27.51USD]

CafePress Shirt
Base cost – $27.40AUD [$25.00USD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $5AUD [$4.56USD]
Total – $32.40AUD [$29.56USD]

Something important to consider is that all of these shirts are of similar quality. Being cheaper does not mean we will supply shirts that fall apart after the first wash.

If you look over the prices you will notice that our proposed prices are quite a bit cheaper than the other options – the example given shows that our base plus the commission is less than even the next most expensive base price. Even if you made a shirt on Zazzle without giving yourself any commission that would still be more expensive for the buyer. With us you can allow yourself a greater commission without pricing yourself out of the market.

For a further example, during research of of existing serials with merchandise, I noted a black CafePress shirt for $31.50USD. Under their pricing scheme the author would be making $6.50; under our system that same author would make $15.53USD – over double the profit.

That’s the shirts, you said something about badges?
This one is slightly harder to compare. Neither CafePress or Zazzle have direct analogues for our 1.5” size, so I shall provide the closest sizes.

Wibbly Press Badge – 1.5” Badge
Base cost – $1.50AUD [$1.37USD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $0.50AUD [$0.46USD]
Total – $2.00AUD [$1.82USD]

Zazzle Badge – 1.25” Badge
Base cost – $1.59AUD [$1.45UD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $0.50AUD [$0.46USD]
Total – $2.09AUD [$1.9USD]

CafePress Badge – 1” Badge
Base cost – $2.19AUD [$2.00USD]
Your commission (e.g.) – $0.50AUD [$0.46USD]
Total – $2.69AUD [$2.54USD]

The prices speak for themselves even more than for the shirts, taking into account that our badge is bigger than both existing options listed here.

Ok, I’m interested, how do I proceed?
The simplest thing to do for now would be to send back an email saying as much – we will not start production for the next two months. We want adequate time to prepare, involve many interested authors in the initial roll out and build an awesome-looking and streamlined store.

An idea of how many products you will want to sell would be useful to add to that email. We don’t need anything more than an estimate off the bat, just to allow us to make an educated guess at the size of our store. On that subject, an indication of whether you’d like to use our store or sell the products yourself would also be useful.

Yeah, but...
If you do have any questions, feel free to email me [wibblypress (at) gmail (dot) com] or just ask here.