The New Way to POD for Artists?

There are a lot of advantages with the Print On Demand (POD) for artists.

• You don’t have to organise and hold stock.
• You don’t have to worry about packing and postage.
• You don’t have to worry about sales taxes or import fees.
• It’s so much easier to sell overseas.
• You don’t have to do nearly as much admin or set up of your own website to deal with sales.
• You, and your customers, have access to more product options with your art on them.
• Depending on which system you use for POD, you get the bonus of their marketplace searches and advertising.

Unfortunately, over years of selling POD products, the value of art made by the artist or designer has become non-existent. It has become a race to the bottom with most sellers resorting to competitive pricing on POD marketplaces like RedBubble, Society6, and Etsy, to have their products viewed based on low price, rather than selling based on the worth of their work.

Now with Society6, RedBubble (on some accounts), and TeePublic changing their terms to charge the artist per sale, or cut commissions, it’s obvious artists are at the bottom of the payment pile.

All their signup promotions talk about how they started, and are here, to help artists. But in reality, they don’t care if we’re there or not.

We need to start deciding to be paid what we’re worth because POD companies are obviously not going to do that for us. They’re going to say they’re the best for us, but it’s up to us to work out if they really are or not.

In the past, one platform might have been the best option, and we signed up for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best option now. And if it isn’t, we should move somewhere else.

We need to do a performance review of the companies we use. Are they ethical? Are their products good quality? Do they promote (and actually follow through on) artists being paid properly for their work?

Yes, it might take a bit of time to research and re-upload if we change platforms. But if it means we’re going from making $2 a sale to $10 a sale, that’s worth it.

And it’s not like they’re only giving us $2 because their products are cheap. Some of them are extremely expensive, but we’re still getting next to nothing.

But putting our prices up would make the product extremely prohibitive, so we sit and convince ourselves it’s ok.

But we’ve spent time uploading our art and working out keywords. So we convince ourselves that we should hang around longer.

But we’ve been using the link to a particular shop on social media for a while. So we convince ourselves everyone knows it off by heart and it would be too difficult to change some links over and do an announcement.

It’s not ok. We need to stop being complacent and do something to help ourselves.

If you really want to sell that shower curtain, find a distributor and talk to them about licensing your art. You’ll make more money and get your artwork into shops.

I’ll put it bluntly.

Platforms don’t care about us.

Only you can make the decision on where to sell your art and how much you’re worth.

If that means moving to another platform, do it.

If that means trying to sell your art in a different form, do it.

If that means moving out of your comfort zone, do it.

It’s time to change the way we use POD to sell our art.

It’s time to get creative (hey, we’re good at that!)

Remember, you’re not selling a product with your art on it. You are selling your art on a product.