A primer on how to make money off your artwork on today’s internet

Ads are pretty great, right? You get anywhere between a few cents to a few dollars a day in exchange for making your website look kind of cheap and trashy. We just can’t love them enough, so we stick them all over everything because there is nothing that your comic needs than some gaudy eyesore right next to (or above or below) it to draw attention away from it.

Yeah, I’m not a real big fan of using ads. You can make five dollars in a month on Project Wonderful ads, or you can make four times that by selling just one t-shirt or print. I’ll tell you which one I’d pick.

I’m aware of the ongoing argument about shirts and other merchandise – there’s the contention that if your primary source of income is merch, rather than the comic itself, that you aren’t truly making a living as a cartoonist. And, uh, I don’t really care. I have to confess that I’m a lot more personally invested in getting that paper than I am in scoring points on somebody else’s totally arbitrary purist credibility scale.

If you’re of the same mind about turning your artwork into cash money, let’s continue.

I am going to assume you’ve heard of Cafepress. Let’s not talk about cafepress. You may have also heard of Zazzle. I’m not going to talk about Zazzle, either. In my experience it seems like these two options tend to be about as far as the webcomics crowd is willing to investigate as far as merchandising options go, with maybe Topatoco as being the aspirational destination.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a bigger world out there.

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