Ready to make and sell some merch with your bookish art and designs? If you’ve got design ideas that you want to put onto physical products (for yourself, for friends, or even to make some extra cash), here are ways to put those together.
Design
With designing an image you can use on various products, you have a bunch of different choices for things you can do. If you’re adept at drawing, I highly recommend using a digital drawing device like an iPad Pro with the app Procreate. This will create a digital art file that you can upload to any service to get it printed onto actual products. If you’re new to digital drawing or you want to improve your skills, I recommend a bunch of classes from my friend Lisa Bardot over at Bardot Brush. She has a YouTube channel with tons of free tutorials in addition to her paid courses.
Another place to design some artwork, even without any drawing or lettering skill is on Canva. There are tons of fonts and elements you can use to create a design. With Canva Pro, you have the ability to sell products with the designs you make, and there’s even a function to get them printed directly onto stickers, shirts, and more. (I’ve got a link here for a free 30 day trial of Canva Pro)
Print on Demand Websites
So what kind of merch can you make? Pretty much any object that can be digitally printed on can be made into merch. Shirts and tote bags are probably the most common, but you can make cell phone cases, stickers, wall art, and more. If you want a place to very simply upload your designs and create a product, print on demand websites will handle the manufacturing and shipping. If you’re looking to sell these products to your audience, the profit margin is pretty low here, but all you need to do is create the design, promote the link, and then the company takes care of the rest.
Here are links to some common platforms for doing this sort of thing and I’ve linked an example of an item that either I’m selling or seeing other bookish content creators selling.
Etsy Shop
Another option for selling merch is to open an Etsy shop. Etsy does charge you a listing fee in addition to a whole bunch of other fees for the ability to use their platform. (If you’re a new Etsy shop, you can get 40 free listings with this link) You can integrate with a print-on-demand service to be able to automate the process of manufacturing and shipping. My Etsy shop integrates with Printful for a few items that I was testing out to see if they would sell. (Here’s a tote bag that I designed) Etsy can also be used to sell digital products you’ve made, like reading logs or checklists (See my reading list as an example) or any of your physical handmade products (like my corner bookmarks).
Self-Hosted Shop
If you’re ready to drive traffic to your own self-hosted shop, there are generally less fees and more profits involved. You can choose to integrate with a print-on-demand company to decrease the upfront costs of buying inventory (but you make less profit here), or you can choose to print a larger quantity all at once (saving money) and then carry inventory and sell/ship it on your own. One example of a self-hosted shop that carries inventory is BookshelfTees.
Overall, there are a lot of options if you want to start making bookish merch and hopefully you found this post helpful! Let me know if you are a merch maker and seller and leave a link in the comments to your products so I can check them out!
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