Webcomics Community
Main Content => The Business of Webcomics => Merchandise => Topic started by: ScottLincoln on January 08, 2011, 01:41:41 PM
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I know many web cartoonists create a lot of their content digitally and sell prints of their comics, but is there anyone with experience selling original art on a Comicpress based site?
I tried a plug-in called Artpal which looked like the perfect thing, but I didn't like the price of the art showing up on my index page. Does anyone know of another plug-in that might be effective a a bit more discreet?
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The few people I know who do this either have enough money that it's built into the site (Sheldon) or they use a different site to sell their items and just promote it on their store (which is what we're slowly working on). Starline Hodge (Candy (http://www.candicomics.com/)) and Danielle Corsetto (Girls With Slingshots (http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/)) both use Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/) which is probably what we're going to use as well.
Star's site is kind of a mess and she promotes her Etsy shop sales through her blog or Tumblr feed that both pipe in under the comic (her site started out as a Keenspot site and when she left Keenspot she simply transferred the code over to the new host... in fact it still has Keenspot's privacy policy at the bottom.... so it's kind of messed up... but I imagine that's because she's so busy with her very successful graphic artist career right now that she doesn't have as much time to focus on her also pretty popular webcomic... what problems to have huh?).
Danielle on the other hand uses a Wordpress/Comicpress site and she just has a button to the shop hard coded into the site design under the comic with all the other nav buttons.
Short of paying someone to integrate a shop into your site... which from what I understand is a nightmare (Chadm1n is working on integrating a button store into our site.... for a long time... and it's been a real struggle with no clear end in sight) the Etsy shop and a coded nav button seem like the best solutions to my mind.
Good luck.
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Hey does anyone do hi-res prints of individual comics? I've been thinking of setting something up like that as an easy/cheap merch thing seeing as Neko's drawn at much higher resolution than it appears online. Would that be Etsy too?
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Hey Gar, if you are using Comicpress I believe there is an option to sell prints built in (2.7-2.8), if not I would guess Etsy, Ka-blam or other ODP is the way to go.