Be Your Own Editor

It’s been right under my nose all this time: a fun and effective tool for promoting yourself, your published book, or your book idea. I just didn’t see it because I was too busy ordering that mug that said “MEH.” on it. CafePress.com sells mugs, T-shirts, mouse pads, and most any other article of clothing or other small item that can be printed upon, with most any words or images one could think up printed on them—so why not the title or cover image of your book? Oh, and they can even help you self-publish.

CafePress features thousands of products created by them along with brilliant designers just like you. Without paying anything up front, you can provide them with a design—text or image—and they’ll create products using that design and display them in a “shop” (i.e., page) within their website, devoted only to you. The products include everything from clocks to audio CDs to print-on-demand copies of your book. Here’s an example of a CafePress “store” belonging to a shopkeeper called “The Write Snark.” How can you not want a T-shirt that says, “If I’m staring at you, it’s not because you look good. It’s because you just helped me figure out how to off my villain”?

Their book printing options are probably not so much for the serious self-publishing author—it’s a fun way to produce some bound copies of your book that won’t empty your bank account and can be sold right on your CafePress page. You have several options for size and binding. The “base price,” which offsets CafePress’s costs, is about $10. You choose the retail price, and you earn the difference. If you’re interested, as with any self-publishing company, you should order a book or two in order to look at and handle a sample before you decide. Click here to learn more.

For all this stuff, CafePress also handles the purchasing and shipping process. So you have no excuse not to put the title of your novel on coffee mugs across America. (Or the name of your blog, if you have one. Anything that will expose you to the masses.) People can find your products organically on CafePress’s site through a web search for anything that relates to writing, gifts, T-shirts, etc.; if people come across one of your products on CafePress’s site, they can link to your store site. You can also find ways—which you should learn about anyway—to drive online traffic to your store.

Personally, I’ve found it to be a lifesaver in the gift-giving department. Just visit their Marketplace and search for your giftee’s favorite topic. Look at all the goodies that appear when I search for writing!

If anyone has experience (good or bad) in dealing with CafePress, especially their self-publishing program, please do share.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Book Marketing, Self-publishing, Web & Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.