Episode 150 - Hands-off Merchandising for Authors with Melissa Addey
September 6, 2022
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Melissa Addey talks about HANDS-OFF MERCHANDISING FOR AUTHORS. She discusses the difference between merchandise and products; reaching people who haven’t read our books; choosing a platform for your merchandise; the jam stall experiment; how to gain visibility for your products; and how customer data trumps sales.
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Melissa Addey writes historical fiction, has independently published 15 books, and runs workshops on writing and independent publishing. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, won the 2019 Novel London award, and her books have been selected for Editor’s Choice by the Historical Novel Society as well as featured by BBC Radio and the Evening Standard. She was the 2016 Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library and now runs monthly workshops there. Before she became an author, she spent 15 years in business, developing new products and packaging for a major supermarket and then mentoring over 500 entrepreneurs for a government innovation program.
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"I had come from a background in business where I was developing new products all the time. And then I came to being an author and I thought, oh, there doesn't seem to be as much merch around as I expected, given, if you look at indy bands, they always have merchandise, tons and tons of merchandise. Why do the authors not have as much of it around?" —Melissa Addey
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Links
Melissa's Links:
https://www.melissaaddey.com/books/merchandise-for-authors/
https://twitter.com/MelissaAddey
Episodes reference in the interview:
Episode 099 - Connecting with Fans through Merchandising with AL Jackson
Episode 084 - Using Content Legally with Kelley Way
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
https://www.melissaaddey.com/books/merchandise-for-authors/
https://twitter.com/MelissaAddey
Episodes reference in the interview:
Episode 099 - Connecting with Fans through Merchandising with AL Jackson
Episode 084 - Using Content Legally with Kelley Way
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Melissa Addey. Hey, Melissa, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Melissa: Hi, I'm good. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Melissa Addey writes historical fiction, has independently published 15 books and runs workshops on writing and independent publishing. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, won the 2019 Novel London award and her books have been selected for Editor's Choice by the Historical Novel Society, as well as featured by BBC Radio and the Evening Standard. She was the 2016 Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now on monthly workshops there. Before she became an author, she spent 15 years in business, developing new products and packaging for major supermarket and then mentoring over 500 entrepreneurs for a government innovation program.
And so I think we're going to be tapping in a lot to that last part of your bio, because I invited Melissa on to talk about "Hands-off" merchandising for authors.
And I think this is going to be a really nice companion piece to a conversation I had with Amy A.L. Jackson, back in episode 99, called "Connecting with Fans through Merchandising." And Amy had a ton of great information about how you can build relationships with your readers and followers through merchandising.
But Amy has a whole production and distribution operation going, which I think is maybe beyond at least what authors want to start out with when they're first considering merch. So I had specifically asked Melissa on to talk about when I'm calling "hands-off" merchandising.
The Difference between Merchandise and Products
[00:01:28] Matty: And I had met her by listening to an interview with Joanna Penn on The Creative Penn Podcast way back in 2016 on Merchandising for Authors. We're going to be talking about that. And one of the things, Melissa, that I wanted to start out with is that you have an interesting distinction between merchandise and products. Do you want to talk a little bit about that to start us out?
[00:01:48] Melissa: Yeah, the merchandise would be something that is directly linked to your books as opposed to products, which could be anything. So you could develop literary merchandise that isn't actually linked to your books. You could be developing it around Shakespeare or "Pride and Prejudice" or whatever. I mentioned those two because they come up all the time with literary merchandise.
So those two are just worth a distinction when you are thinking about what kind of products do I develop. If you are developing from your own books, then they need to be linked strongly to those books so that they are in a way, being recognized by the readers, who presumably have come to love your characters and the themes and all of those sorts of things.
[00:02:29] Melissa: And I originally wrote the book because I had come, as you say, from a background in business where I was developing new products all the time. And then I came to being an author and I thought, oh, there doesn't seem to be as much merch around as I expected, given, if you look at indy bands, they always have merchandise, tons and tons of merchandise. Why do the authors not have as much of it around?
And so I wrote a book trying to showcase lots of ideas for it. So it was literally because I'd just come from developing products and was trying to put it into the writing world.
And I have to say, I think the whole hands-off thing is a really good way to start because print-on-demand technology, I am so grateful for it every day of my life. And it works for the books and therefore, if it works for the merchandise, why not? Because unless, as you say, if you've got a huge thing going on and you can afford to do the whole in-house production of it, and afford also your time, that's one thing. But if you are just starting out, it's really a good idea to start with something that kind of does it all for you and you just put the idea in, and then it goes off and offers all the production and the shipping and all of that done by someone else.
Consider Your Goals
This idea of hands-on / hands-off, I think is one distinction. I think another distinction is that if you're offering products, you're probably by definition doing it for income. If you're offering merch that's attached to your books, then it could be either an income or a marketing effort. Do you have any advice we should consider as we're going into this conversation about that distinction of goals?
[00:04:04] Melissa: I think if you can, and I'm not saying this is always possible, but if you can manage to think, what is linked to my book, because that's an obvious connection and an obvious reason why your readers would enjoy it but might also be enjoyed by someone who's never heard of your books and really doesn't care. That would be the gold standard to try and find those.
The merchandise that I play around with a little bit, because I have so little time I don't do as much of it as I should, but the merchandise that I play with is, I wrote a series of books in Morocco, in medieval Morocco, and they're very focused around the silver jewelry. It's Berber jewelry, it's beautiful tribal, silver jewelry, very intricate. And so I wrote a whole book that was very focused on it. I'd done a lot of research around it. And I thought, oh, this would be really nice as merchandise. It would be so pretty. There are ways you could do that. You could go and find a Berber jewelry shop and go, how about we do an affiliate situation where I just send people to you and I get a cut of anyone I send to you, because then they can buy the actual jewelry. That's one route, and I do suggest to people that they look at affiliate roots for things like that, because that could be quite interesting.
Reaching People Who Haven't Read Your Books
[00:05:16] Melissa: But the route I went down was, I went to Fiverr, and I took a number of photographs of real Berber jewelry, and I got someone to hand-illustrate them just in black and white, very simple pencil sketches, and they are beautiful. And then I used that as the merchandise, because I was like, to the readers, these are items from the book. To anyone else, they're just really beautiful pieces of tribal art. They're very geometric. I think they look really nice as wall things or on cushions. I put them on cushions in my house. But on walls, they look really beautiful, that kind of thing. So that's the kind of style I went for.
And in that case, you don't really need to know about my books. You could just go, oh, I really like that kind of look on my wall or on my cushions. That would work for me. And I had a bit of fun with, because it's jewelry putting it on t-shirts where it looks as if you are wearing the jewelry, because I've placed it there, that kind of thing. And I think that can be quite a good viewpoint to take. Is it going to be interesting to people who aren't just my readers? How are you reaching people who aren't familiar with your books with information about the jewelry?
With those ones, as I say, I've not done as much as I should have done, but what I've done with those is really just have them on those sites where they're available and all the rest of it. What would be nice, I think, and you were thinking about Shopify, and you were talking about things like Etsy, would be interesting to filter them through onto a site like that and see, how do you develop it on a site where people are looking for items like that, more than they might be on the production sites? People do go and browse there but they're often making something of their own bespoke rather than looking for other people's. But I think all of those sites are also beginning to be discoverability platforms and trying to showcase their products more. Those can be interesting things to do.
You were talking about how easy the interface is to use. And I was curious about that, because I've used Zazzle before, and I have to say, the interface for the creator is hard going. You make things and then it goes, oh yeah, I'll show them to you in about two days’ time. And you're like, okay, but I was sitting here, and I wanted to try and see how it all fits on the site. I wasn't terribly thrilled with that one. The weekend as a sort of a test run, I went to Redbubble, which I know you said from a user point of view, you were not entirely sure, but I spent two hours with the images ready, with my bio and the photo of me ready. And I created a whole shop from scratch in two hours with those images. And I thought, from the creator's point of view, it wasn't too bad, actually. I thought it was reasonably easy to use compared to Zazzle.
[00:07:55] Matty: Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to somebody like you, because I'm not proud, I'm going to use my own experience as an example. And currently, I have merch tied to my Ann Kinnear books and also to The Indy Author platform on Redbubble. As you said, the creator interface I think is quite easy. But the problem is that it's very hard to send people to Redbubble other than giving them a specific link to a product, even a link to a shop. If I'm looking at it from the point of view of a shopper, you go there and it's kind of hard to see what's available or if a product has different flavors, let's say. Yeah, I think those are two considerations, the user interface and the shopper interface.
Choosing a Platform
[00:08:36] Melissa: I know it's interesting how you would think that once one side was fixed, maybe the other side would be, but not necessarily. I've come across one, which I think might be a stronger candidate going forward, and that's Printful. So it's Print and then F U L, not a double L but all one word. And they're interesting because you were talking about, does it tie into other platforms? And this one ties into a shedload of other platforms. So I have a list because I can't even remember them all. So it definitely does Shopify, it does Etsy, it does WooCommerce, it does Wix, Squarespace. It does Amazon, does eBay. And the nice thing is it shows you for each one a sort of comparison chart, where it goes, this is how long it takes to set up. Does it do this? Does it do that? Does it cost anything?
So for example, Amazon, you think, oh, Amazon, that would be cool to have it on Amazon. But Amazon going to charge you I think it's like $40 a month to have that shop if you like, there. So you have to make sure that you're going to think you're going to make more than that on it, especially initially. Otherwise, you are fronting the cost of it for quite a while. So that's an interesting one, but they are definitely integrated with pretty much any other platform you can think of, which is an interesting thing for the future.
That is very interesting. And if I'm understanding the Printful model, it's separating out the creator interface from the shopper interface, in the same way that if you're an indy author, let's say, Draft2Digital is separating the experience of the indy author from the shopper experience, which I think is a good thing. Yep, however, having said that, I think there's a lot of talk around the creator economy developing and where people are wanting to buy directly from creators. And these are creators of all kinds, including authors. And I think as people get more comfortable shopping direct from an author or from a creator, that means that you might start pushing people more towards your own website than the big platform.
So at the moment, for example, I buy Facebook ads. I'm pushing you to Amazon, who's very kind of me on Amazon's behalf, because you might then just go and buy something else on Amazon. But what's to say I can't send you direct to my platform? You could come direct to my website if you are accustomed to buying direct from the creator.
And that then becomes interesting because then you can showcase all your merchandise right next to the book that it's linked to, and you've already got someone there that's showing an interest. It could become something where your merchandise showcases better on your website than it does at the moment.
Choosing the Merch
[00:11:17] Matty: Yeah, I love the idea of being able to combine the books and the merch. I have so many questions I'm trying to sort through what order. So getting back to Redbubble for a moment, which is basically the only merch platform that I have a ton of experience, and I experimented with a couple of others, but I'm most familiar with Redbubble. And one of the things that is both a blessing and a curse is, there’s a ton of products that you can put your design on. I experimented a little bit with selecting lots of them. They give you a preview to show you what the design is going to look like, and some of them, it just didn't look good, and I de-selected those.
But what I ended up doing is deciding I only wanted to select a very few products. So I ended up selecting spiral bound journals, blank journals, with the design on the cover, and a water bottle, and a tote bag.
[00:12:08] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:12:08] Matty: Because I thought those were the ones that made the design look nicest and were kind of tied to the audience I was trying to appeal to. And somehow, I just felt it looked more professional and desirable in some way, not to have a design on 75 different things. What are your thoughts about that?
[00:12:25] Melissa: So it is interesting. It's very tempting, when you first see it, you just go put it on everything. Woohoo. Who cares? So the first couple of ones that I tried, I was like, yeah, put it on everything. And then after a bit, you think, okay, but who is the target audience here? And the better you know your own readers, the easier this gets. My readers tend to be older women. And so I think they prefer things like beautiful journals, they like the water bottles, perhaps home decor, things that are beautiful, that sort of thing, as opposed to, I don't know, there were things that I just didn't feel had anything to do with the books.
[00:13:02] Matty: Shower curtains?
[00:13:04] Melissa: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'm very fond of things like duvet covers that have something unusual on. But this is the interesting thing is, if you are like your audience, it's easier to pick, because you go, what would I buy? That's a much easier route. But things like cat blankets and dog blankets and dog bandanas, I didn't know that was a thing, in the end, I unticked them and went now, I don't think that's actually quite right. But you think to yourself, if you were someone who wrote cozy mysteries where there's a spaniel in it and everybody who reads and really loves the dog element and that, that would be so cute.
So yes, I think probably when you first start, it's fun to just tick all the boxes and have a bit of fun with it, but actually, it's probably worth over time, whistling it down to what is a better, closer selection to the books and the audience.
The Jam Stall Experiment
[00:13:53] Melissa: There's also that concept of the jam stall. So they did this test with these two jam stalls, and they had one that only had two kinds, strawberry and raspberry or something, and then they had one that had six. And you think the one with six would make way more money than the one with two, but it didn't. The one with two, it made way more money than the one with six, because people get confused. So they stand in front of six and they go, oh, oh, um, yeah, well, I mean, I do like the raspberry but then again, the blackcurrant, and they do that. Whereas the other one, they go, blackcurrant or raspberry. I like raspberry. Okay. Then you buy it. Whereas when there's six, you start panicking. So when there's 75, you know? I think it's probably worth whittling it down.
[00:14:39] Matty: And logical or not, if I see a jam stall that's only selling two, I figured they must be the experts at selling those two jams. Whereas the more there are, the more I just, like the specialness kind of gets diluted somehow.
[00:14:52] Melissa: Yes. Yes, that's true.
[00:14:53] Matty: And the other thing that I think is a consideration, I said I had those three products. Actually, I think in reality on a lot of them, I only have the tote bag and the spiral journal. And another consideration is, I want to purchase a copy of anything that I'm selling. And if I tick 70 things, I'm not going to buy 70 things. So who knows what the quality is on the shower curtain? Whereas I can buy it if I'm only buying two versions of the thing. And the other thing that I've been thinking is, I've been doing some things like taking an image from the Redbubble site, removing the background using Canva, and then putting it on a background that's appropriate to the product.
So for example, one of the auto-generated Redbubble images is the woman with a canvas bag over her shoulder. And it actually has done it in a way so that it shows the design that I've put on it. And so I've taken that woman and I've put her in a bookstore background, which is more attractive than the plain one. But what would really be nice is a completely styled photo shoot of the bag, with maybe my books next to it, which is adding another level of complexity and expense, even if the rest of it is going to be hands off for you. Any thoughts about that?
I think using things like Book Brush and Canva can be quite useful because you can take those images that they've done of, here's the thing in 3D and put it onto, as you say something that's more suitable for it next to the book. So, when you have those nice shots where it's like, here's the book and a cup of tea and a suggestion that you and I have got a lovely leisurely afternoon, maybe there should be a cushion there as well, or there should be your bag back from the shopping or, those sorts of things.
Don't Get Over-excited
[00:16:34] Melissa: I think the initial impulse with these things is to get very excited, tick all the boxes, buy all the products. Too much. And the whole point of having to print-on-demand is to manage the costs and do a little research and see how it works. And I think probably what's best is to order like one product to see, is this shop in general putting out quality products? It's unlikely that they have an amazing quality t-shirt and then a terrible quality journal. You know, it's likely that they have a certain benchmark of quality. So if you can pick one thing, buy that, make sure that you are happy with the quality of it, and then over time, perhaps build up your own collection.
Although I was thinking, when I just bought a new phone and I bought the case for it, and then I went, ah, but I could have put my own merch on that. And then you would walk around with it and people would be like, and what is that? And you'd be like, ha ha, that is my merch.
I guess that's, yeah, that's a kind of third use of it that you can put this stuff up on a site, like Redbubble and just order one for yourself. I did that with an Indy Author t-shirt because I was doing a video event that everybody was clearly going to be branded. Like, I knew some of the people would be wearing branded t-shirts and I wanted a branded t-shirt that said, the Indy Author.
[00:17:50] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:17:50] Matty: So I just put it up and ordered one and it's still up there. Other people could probably order a t-shirt as well, but I didn't have that expectation, but it was an inexpensive way for me to get something just like you're saying, like the cell phone case.
It is a useful way of being able to do those things, which you can then use. If someone comes around your house and all the cushions on your sofa have got something on them that's unusual and different. They're likely to go, and where's that come from?
[00:18:15] Melissa: And this is the point about going back to that point about products that are going to appeal to more than just your readers. So it does not have to just be something that would only make sense to your readers, it can be something that would just appeal to lots of people, which is why you always have "Pride and Prejudice" and Shakespeare on literary merchandise. So if you want to make money that I think, if you are after just let's make load the literary merchandise and I don't care whose book it's pushing, probably you want to go with the two main leaders in that department, which is "Pride and Prejudice" and Shakespeare.
Copyright Considerations
[00:18:49] Melissa: And then I think we should just mention copyright here because I was the Writer in Residence at the British Library, and they have a business and IP center. So they're all about the IP, so the intellectual property, and I was doing a whole, like little popup exhibition for them about copyright and how to use out of copyright material in fun and unusual ways.
And so I went on to Etsy and I played around with the literary merchandise. And some of it was really cool and funny, and I liked it, whatever. But I cannot tell you the number of items I found that thought they were using out of copyright material, especially from "Pride and Prejudice," but are actually using something from an adaptation, and technically, are massively in breach of copyright, should someone wish to pick them up on it.
So they had like quotations that they thought were hilariously funny. It's a movie adaptation, it does not appear in the original book. There's something about Mr. Collins and how nice the potatoes are or something, and it's supposed to be really funny, but I was like, that is massively in breach of copyright, what you did there. You haven't taken it from the original book, which is free to use. You've got to be careful about this stuff. And again, people make, they'll have the Penguin book cover, and they'll turn it into a handbag.
[00:20:07] Melissa: And again, I'm like, it's adorable. It's copyright. That's copyrighted material. If Penguin feel like it, they can come get you for that. And it's really funny how people go, oh, well, that's out of copyright. You're like, the content is, but you are now using it from an adaptation where a script writer has been involved, or a publishing house, that's their version of it on the outside, at least, you know. You can forget these details and it's important.
[00:20:38] Matty: Yeah, your mention of Shakespeare makes me think that all my Ann Kinnear suspense novels, the titles are based on Shakespeare quotes, and I never thought of that before. If I make sure I'm taking it from the actual Shakespeare play, it would be fun to have something with The Sense of Death, the quote, The Sense of Reckoning. And I can imagine that would be, although some of them are morbid, like not ones that you would necessarily want to put on a pillow on your couch, but it might be fun. That's the kind of thing that would appeal to both fans of the books and just fans of Shakespeare.
[00:21:11] Melissa: Yeah. Yes, that's the point then you've broadened out the audience.
Matty's Book Plates
[00:21:15] Matty: And I think the question there would be, and I'll use this as a segue into another topic I wanted to ask you about. So there was the Redbubble hands off, completely hands off merch efforts that were tied to my books.
And then another, I guess this is a product opportunity that I saw was when COVID started and all the in-person events were being canceled, including book launches. I wanted to get book plates to put in my books so that a reader who bought the book elsewhere could send me a note, ask me for a bookplate, I would sign and inscribe it and mail it off to them.
And I looked everywhere for book plates that would accommodate that. And I couldn't find them. All of them said, and if anybody doesn't open a bookplate, it's the label that you can put in the front of a book. Most of them are to identify a book as belonging to a person. So they usually say Ex Libris, "from the library of," and then they have a space where you just write a name. But I wanted one that would not say, "from the library of," because I was going to write my name on it and would give enough room for an inscription. And so I looked and looked, didn't find it. And I thought, oh, an interesting product opportunity.
So I went to, I think it was Fiverr. I found a woman who does these beautiful pen and ink drawings, and I knew I wanted an animal theme, so I found some photographs that I liked, and I sent it to her, and I said, I want an owl that looks like this, but standing on a book. And she sent me back these gorgeous drawings.
And I went through the whole thing of, of course I did this on a small test scale, but I found the right size label, I got the labels, I got mailing envelopes that you could put the label in, so that if an author wanted to order the plates and the envelopes to mail out to their readers, they could do that. I found the bigger mailing envelopes that I would use to put that in. And I did a couple of test runs and it was so fussy and so time consuming that I just thought, this would've been fun, but this is where my question about the hands-off part came up. So I was never able to find a platform that would enable me to do a print-on-demand book plate. Any suggestions there for how I might pursue that?
Well, I was looking the other day at Redbubble. They have stickers, but I don't know how big the stickers are. I didn't spend time checking the size of the stickers, because for a book plate, you really want something that's almost the size of the page. It needs to fit within a standard novel, but you want something quite big, because that allows you to write a little message and that kind thing.
[00:23:38] Melissa: I think they're kind of missing a trick because that is a really nice thing for somebody to be able to have, and it's an easier way of signing a book than, I'll get a copy of the book, write the thing, send it to you, all of that. You can just have it sent to anyone and have it put on the thing. Yeah, I think they're missing a trick there.
My solution with that would be to go with someone like, Vistaprint or similar who can print stationery products and have a larger sticker made that can just stick into a book like that.
But yeah, should probably write to them and say, here's a new product idea, and I want a cut of the template, thank you very much.
[00:24:16] Matty: Yeah.
Because it's not a difficult template. Yeah, it's a big sticker, isn't it? Essentially.
[00:24:21] Matty: Yeah, it's a big sticker and you need to be able to have the design be a small part of it. Most of them default to, you want the design to take up most of the sticker, and you don't want that.
[00:24:30] Melissa: You just want a little bit, yeah.
But then I would still be taking on the distribution of it, the logistics. So yeah, I still feel like that should be an opportunity and I'm just not ...
Yeah, I have seen people who make bespoke book plates, and they could have done the thing, but the price was getting high and after bit you're like, is this really a fit? I mean, yeah, you know.
[00:24:55] Matty: Yeah, and it does introduce other things that you could do to make it special and appealing, but that would take even more time. I did see a lady the other day on TikTok, and she was like, when I send out a signed copy, I put this little bookmark in. And she'd come up with a pretty good solution, it was like a little bookmark, and then she added a little tassel, but I was like, it's nice, but it's still time out of your life. Which we're all a bit short on. And yeah, I was like, yeah, it's a nice thing to do for a more bespoke product and more premium product, perhaps, but not for your average ones.
That's a good entree to another topic I wanted to talk about, which is, when you're deciding what to sell and who to source it from, you could either go with the, I think Redbubble is probably fairly inexpensive for the kind of product it is. You know, you could do the $14 tote bag or whatever.
[00:25:47] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:25:48] Matty: Or you could get these super nice tote bag, the super nice leather tote bag. I don't know, the really high-end version with the same design, but just produced to a higher level of quality. When people are considering that, like favoring at cost or favoring quality, what would your advice be there?
Weighing Cost and Quality
[00:26:06] Melissa: I think when you're starting off, you really want to start quite low because otherwise your readers may not have necessarily built up to that level of wild enthusiasm necessarily. And also, that's where I would start veering off towards products that have a really wide audience. Those little handbags that are made out of a book, they’re the more premium end of things, and sure enough, they've picked them for the most popular books they can find. They're not picking them for individual authors. They're picking them for absolute classics that they know have a massive audience and that someone is even likely to buy as a gift because they just think, well, it's a classic anyway. Even if you particularly weren't that mad on it, it's still a classic book made into a handbag kind of thing. So I think I would always err towards the side of caution when you're starting out.
Having said that, I know that Octavia Randolph, who's a historical fiction author, has fans who are besotted with her. And she was going to look into doing really beautiful things where she was going to have them come to the country that her books are set in and take them on tours and all of that. And she was just planning that pre-COVID, and I think she's probably organizing it again now. And she said people were just totally signing up for that, like no problem.
So there is a market, and one of the things I talk about is moving away from the bookmarks and the mugs and the thing and whatever to try and think more creatively, what else would be interesting? If you have people who like reading crime novels, maybe you take them on a shooting clay pigeons, you know, something where it is more about the experience is getting you closer to something that's in that book. Food things, clothing things, actual experiences, can be very memorable for people and really link them better to the books.
Banking on Locations from Your Books
[00:28:06] Matty: Yeah, one thing that I think about periodically, and then I've never actually acted on, is that the Ann Kinnear books are largely set in two locations. One is around my home near Philadelphia, and the other one is on Mount Desert Island, Maine, which is where Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are. And in some cases, I'm referencing actual places using the actual name, but in a lot of cases, I'm referencing actual places, but changing the name. And I always thought it would be fun to have, and I think this would be more of like a giveaway for email subscribers, that it would be the map to the world of Ann Kinnear.
[00:28:36] Melissa: Oh, that would be cool.
[00:28:37] Matty: Yeah. You know, the restaurant where Ann and her brother have lunch, even though it's called this, is actually Sovana Bistro in Kennett Square. Hi, Sovana Bistro. So yeah, I guess that's yet another one that, that would be more on the creating the relationship with readers, not an income generation thing, to use those kinds of products.
[00:28:55] Melissa: Yeah, and I think people really love behind the scenes stuff. They just, they really like to know the research behind it, the inspiration behind it. I went to Bath recently, and the shop that's in Bridgeton as the seamstresses, the dressmaker’s thing, it's like a little deli cafe thing. I mean, there's just constantly people taking photos of it because it has a very distinctive frontage, and it's appeared twice in a massive series, but people were just obsessed with, "that's the original one," which was quite funny to, to stand there and watch it happening over and over again.
And certainly, that would then be an interesting thing to think about merchandise-wise that could bring in some income, is if some of those locations were up for having the books being sold there, like a museum or a bookshop or whatever, to also have with it a little map that would then, you must be in that area if you're buying it there to then think, oh, that would be fun, we can follow around the locations that belong there. That would be a fun thing to do.
[00:30:00] Matty: Yeah, it does seem like there are lots of opportunities for teaming up with various other entities, to benefit both you and that other entity.
[00:30:08] Melissa: Yeah, and I was actually just thinking authors as well, because if you had multiple authors who had stories based in one place, you could have something that allows you to look at multiple books and locations from all those different authors together.
[00:30:23] Matty: I wanted to loop back on what you had been saying earlier about integrations with other platforms. And there's a lot of buzz about Shopify in the indy author community now I think, because Joanna Penn has been talking a lot about her move to a Shopify platform. And I thought about it briefly. I'm on PayHip, and I decided to stay at least for the time being on PayHip because I just wasn't ready to take on the work that would be needed to set up an effective Shopify store.
How to Gain Visibility for Your Products
[00:30:45] Matty: If someone is using a platform like PayHip, which doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Shopify does, do you have any tips, any insights as to how to optimize merch or products on those platforms?
[00:30:57] Melissa: I think one of the ways you can do that is to have products, so you have the main product on a discoverability platform like Amazon, so it's very obvious and very easy to buy. But the product that's linked to it, for example, a journal, a workbook that goes with a non-fiction book, you could have something there that goes, when you've bought this on Amazon, you can get the workbook only on my website. And that's a very simple thing to be sold on a website because it can just be a downloadable PDF. You can have a simple print run done of it through someone like Lulu or whatever. But that then means that you are getting them back onto your website to buy a product that goes with the main product that's got higher visibility in the world.
Probably for fiction, that doesn't work as strongly, unless what you are doing, which I think is what Joanna's looking towards in the future, Joanna's always ahead of all of us, so I don't feel too bad for not being right on it when she is. When she's on it, I'm like, I'll be there in five years’ time, Joanna, don't you worry. You lead the way. She's great. I learned everything from Joanna. When I first switched and became an indy author, I just literally sat and read her website for six months. That's all I did. I just read it and went, all right, okay, I didn't know any of this stuff.
I think the way she visualizes it is that in the future, you would have some products on places like Amazon, because that's the discoverability platform. And then you'd be like, okay, now that three of the books are up there and you've got really into the series, all the other ones are on my website, so come back here. So that, in other words, you sort of have that high visibility, but then you are bringing people back to you. And I think that's how she's visualizing it for the future, that's what it looks like to me, which I understand because it's very hard to get that level of visibility straight out of the box as an individual author.
[00:32:52] Matty: Yeah, I can imagine, even with the basic functionality that PayHip offers, you can do things like, if a person puts one product in their cart, then it recommends another product or it offers a discount on another product. And it would be fun if there's a way to say, oh, you just bought book two of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, The Sense of Reckoning. Did you know that the title, The Sense of Reckoning, comes from a Shakespeare quote? Do you want a t-shirt with a Shakespeare quote? Click here and go to wherever to take a look at that.
Customer Data Trumps Sales
[00:33:17] Melissa: I think there's some scope for it now, but I think that will build a lot in the future. I think that's what the front runners are getting very excited about, is that they want the customer data. It's not even the sales, the customer data will be so interesting to see because at the moment, you hand over the customer to the retail platform, and they hold it. They have the data and they're not giving it to you, even though you brought them there and they're your customers and all the rest of it. You don't see what's going on and what else they've bought and that kind of thing, other than what they're prepared to show you.
And so to be able to have the customers there and to be able to do, have you seen this, here comes book three, have you looked at the merch? All of that, that's going to be the fun thing to be able to play with. This whole thing of you must have a mailing list, that won't even be a thing in the future because of course you'll have a mailing list. It'll be your customer data.
[00:34:10] Matty: Oh that's a really interesting way of thinking about it.
[00:34:12] Melissa: You won't be building one from scratch. It'll just come in from the sales as it does for every other retailer. That will be very interesting, I think.
[00:34:21] Matty: And I think that there are two things that are happening among the potential buying base that are helpful. One is that people like Joanna are paving away for people becoming comfortable with the idea of buying direct. And then I think there's just more interest, I think the popularity of a platform like Etsy illustrates that there's an interest that people have in supporting individual creators, not supporting a corporate entity.
[00:34:46] Melissa: Yes, very much.
[00:34:47] Matty: And so they can tap into those.
The Allure of Bespoke Products
[00:34:49] Melissa: (This is a continuation of the "Customer Data Trumps Sales" clip) Yeah, I love Etsy and I look at Etsy and I think, so I can spend 500 pounds and I can have a designer handbag, which frankly, is available for everybody else, and I'm not really sure is worth the value of that. Because at what point did you pay for all the materials in the craftsmanship, which doesn't even seem to be that high, or I can go onto Etsy and I can pay a hundred pounds and someone will make me a bespoke handmade bag, which nobody else has in the world. You know, the value there becomes very obvious. And I think that's probably what people like, that they like that instant, the bespokeness, they like being able to go directly to someone.
Wonderbly Books
Have you seen the Wonderbly books? So they've taken print-on-demand to whole other level. They're mostly books for children, but they have expanded so much recently. So they'll have a book, and it will go, The Little Girl Who Lost her Name, that was where they started. And you would send in the name. So you go, okay, Jessica and they go, okay, and as you turn the pages, this little girl who is unnamed goes on this whole experience and she finds the letter J and she finds the letter E and she finds two SS and all the way through. And then at the end, Jessica, and all they're doing there is they have an alphabet, and they're pulling down the letters you said, and it's going in and being print-on-demand. And all of a sudden, you have a book that is totally bespoke. Also, you get to choose the hair, the hair color, the skin color, the eye color for the child, whether it's a boy or girl, all of this. You there have a very bespoke product. I mean, they've really worked out what print-on-demand is capable of.
[00:36:23] Melissa: And I know there's a thing now, and I can't remember who's doing it, but I know that somebody at the moment allows you to put in a different one extra page in the book that can be bespoke. So that page could be what we were talking about where you would, a signed thing. You could have it typed. You could have a whole thing from you that goes, "to very dearest reader, whatever, Mark, thank you so much for reading the books, best wishes," blah, voila! You can actually have that printed for them, which is an interesting concept in the future.
[00:36:57] Matty: Yeah, that is nice. I totally agree with the idea of, the bespoke product is another trend I think, that people are really appreciating.
[00:37:06] Melissa: It sort of elevates a product that is, it's okay, it's a nice product. And then you put someone's actual name in it and they're like, Ooh, it's an amazing product. And it really changes that for them. Yeah.
Tools for Product and Merch Creation: Canva and Unsplash
[00:37:20] Melissa: I was quickly going to say something about tools for this sort of thing.
Yep. And the copyright issue again, and then just drawing attention to two things. One is Canva who, if you have their pro license is quite a good route because they allow you the commercial use of a design that you've created. What they don't allow is you can't take a photo of theirs and just sell it on to someone else to use as that photo. But you can take any of their elements, make them into something that's yours, and then you have commercial rights to that, and you can go and sell them. So that's nice. Although it's a third-party thing, so you can't then get mad with them if they sell the same image of a flower that you used to someone else, because that's obviously going to happen. But the fact that you are putting it together in a different way, makes it bespoke to you.
So that's one really good tool. And the other one for photographs is Unsplash and they again have the commercial thing. So you can use that again. So put together a few tools at the beginning that you can play with a little bit.
I saw a very simple tote bag the other day, which just said "Talk Darcy to me," which I thought was quite funny. And I was like, well, you're making your intentions clear. So that's, you know, you're putting where the standard is. It was quite funny. That was literally, that's all someone's done, is a piece of typeface. And I think that can be a nice thing to play with from books as well, is the quotes. And of course, you have a good start there because you've got Shakespeare helping you out as well. So you can have your quotes and Shakespeare's things together.
[00:38:43] Matty: Well, that's great to know about Unsplash because I use Unsplash all the time. I think that every social media post I have is illustrated with an Unsplash photograph. And one of the things I really like about it is that it's super easy to find things. The image quality is very high. And I also have Deposit Photo and I really struggle with Deposit Photo because it has so many levers you can pull. I'm sure that if you're an experienced content manager, it's great, but I don't even understand some of the filters that they, it would enable me to find stuff on Deposit Photos, so.
[00:39:18] Melissa: It's tricky.
[00:39:19] Matty: Unsplash is really good that way. It seemed clear to me that using it to illustrate a social media post was fine, but I was never clear if the photos that were on there could be used in the way you're describing. So that's great to hear.
[00:39:30] Melissa: Yeah, I went and checked, so yeah, it's fine for commercial use. Again, it has the same thing. You cannot sell it on as a photo. You sell it on as something you've done with it and put it onto a product or something. That's what you're selling on. You can't set yourself up as another Unsplash and sell on the photos, is basically what they're protecting against. But otherwise, yes, commercial use.
[00:39:50] Matty: I could imagine, if I'm understanding correctly, that you could find a picture of a flower. Use Canva to remove the background, put the flower on a tote bag with a quote, and that would be permissible.
[00:40:01] Melissa: Absolutely, yeah. A hundred percent.
[00:40:03] Matty: Is everybody else going to be spending the entire afternoon interested today making products on Canva?
[00:40:08] Melissa: I know. The first time I found Canva, when it was new, I didn't do anything for a week. I spent a week just going, oh, look at this. I can make a template. And I made templates for everything you think of, even thinks I had zero interest in. I was just like, this is such fun!
[00:40:26] Matty: It is a very, very helpful tool. And also offers a lot of stock photos, as I think you mentioned.
[00:40:32] Melissa: Yes, and certain categories really struggle. Historical fiction, you go and find medieval Moroccan pictures. It's like hard, it's hard work. And to be able to find stuff that can work for you and put it into book trailers and stuff like that, it's really fun. I'm having so many ideas now. Book trailers is something I adore. I couldn't make Facebook ads work until I got the hang of trailers, and then suddenly, they worked. It was really weird. So I credit those with my adverts working, yeah.
[00:41:03] Matty: And what tools do you use for the trailers?
[00:41:06] Melissa: I use Animoto, which is stunningly easy to use. And they have recently put back in a tool that I was begging them for, which is a voiceover. So it allows you, not so much for my book trailers, but I do like little research trip videos to show readers where I went and what I did and stuff, and to be able to speak over the images that you're showing them is a really nice thing to be able to do.
Do you have any upcoming merchandising ideas for your own that we haven't had a chance to mention yet?
[00:41:38] Melissa: So at the moment, I'm just thinking about, because I started playing with it again, thanks to you, I then been thought, what else do I have? And I thought, I have really beautiful images of the Colosseum the way it used to be before it was broken. There isn't a lot of images of it out there like that, and it's really beautiful. I had it hand drawn again by an architect on Fiverr. He was so funny, he drew it all and then he was like, wow, I'm in awe of what they did with the tools they had at the time. You know, as an architect, he could understand that this was just an amazing building.
So yeah, I have these beautiful drawings and I think they might look really nice if you can think up nice gladiatorial things to put underneath, which I think might be fun. Because I have a series which is basically the backstage team of the Colosseum. So it's following their lives and I'm thinking it would be quite fun to have the Colosseum on a t-shirt and then something underneath, trying to think what would appeal to more to men, and probably, and gladiatorial stuff. I have to think about that.
It's a good opportunity to play. It's always nice. I think sometimes just being able to play with something else, which may or may not come off commercially, it still fills up the creative well. It still does something useful for the writing.
[00:42:52] Matty: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. It's a nice mental break. It's interval training or whatever exercise which something a little bit different.
[00:42:59] Melissa: Exactly.
[00:43:00] Matty: You get a little burst of creative energy.
[00:43:01] Melissa: And you might come up with the next big hit.
[00:43:03] Matty: Yeah, so fun. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for talking us through this.
[00:43:07] Melissa: Thank you for having me.
[00:43:09] Matty: Oh, it has been my pleasure. Please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:43:15] Melissa: Okay. So probably my website is best. So it's MelissaAddey.com/books. And you can just scroll down, you'll see all the books there.
[00:43:24] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:43:25] Melissa: Alright, thank you.
[00:00:05] Melissa: Hi, I'm good. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Melissa Addey writes historical fiction, has independently published 15 books and runs workshops on writing and independent publishing. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, won the 2019 Novel London award and her books have been selected for Editor's Choice by the Historical Novel Society, as well as featured by BBC Radio and the Evening Standard. She was the 2016 Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now on monthly workshops there. Before she became an author, she spent 15 years in business, developing new products and packaging for major supermarket and then mentoring over 500 entrepreneurs for a government innovation program.
And so I think we're going to be tapping in a lot to that last part of your bio, because I invited Melissa on to talk about "Hands-off" merchandising for authors.
And I think this is going to be a really nice companion piece to a conversation I had with Amy A.L. Jackson, back in episode 99, called "Connecting with Fans through Merchandising." And Amy had a ton of great information about how you can build relationships with your readers and followers through merchandising.
But Amy has a whole production and distribution operation going, which I think is maybe beyond at least what authors want to start out with when they're first considering merch. So I had specifically asked Melissa on to talk about when I'm calling "hands-off" merchandising.
The Difference between Merchandise and Products
[00:01:28] Matty: And I had met her by listening to an interview with Joanna Penn on The Creative Penn Podcast way back in 2016 on Merchandising for Authors. We're going to be talking about that. And one of the things, Melissa, that I wanted to start out with is that you have an interesting distinction between merchandise and products. Do you want to talk a little bit about that to start us out?
[00:01:48] Melissa: Yeah, the merchandise would be something that is directly linked to your books as opposed to products, which could be anything. So you could develop literary merchandise that isn't actually linked to your books. You could be developing it around Shakespeare or "Pride and Prejudice" or whatever. I mentioned those two because they come up all the time with literary merchandise.
So those two are just worth a distinction when you are thinking about what kind of products do I develop. If you are developing from your own books, then they need to be linked strongly to those books so that they are in a way, being recognized by the readers, who presumably have come to love your characters and the themes and all of those sorts of things.
[00:02:29] Melissa: And I originally wrote the book because I had come, as you say, from a background in business where I was developing new products all the time. And then I came to being an author and I thought, oh, there doesn't seem to be as much merch around as I expected, given, if you look at indy bands, they always have merchandise, tons and tons of merchandise. Why do the authors not have as much of it around?
And so I wrote a book trying to showcase lots of ideas for it. So it was literally because I'd just come from developing products and was trying to put it into the writing world.
And I have to say, I think the whole hands-off thing is a really good way to start because print-on-demand technology, I am so grateful for it every day of my life. And it works for the books and therefore, if it works for the merchandise, why not? Because unless, as you say, if you've got a huge thing going on and you can afford to do the whole in-house production of it, and afford also your time, that's one thing. But if you are just starting out, it's really a good idea to start with something that kind of does it all for you and you just put the idea in, and then it goes off and offers all the production and the shipping and all of that done by someone else.
Consider Your Goals
This idea of hands-on / hands-off, I think is one distinction. I think another distinction is that if you're offering products, you're probably by definition doing it for income. If you're offering merch that's attached to your books, then it could be either an income or a marketing effort. Do you have any advice we should consider as we're going into this conversation about that distinction of goals?
[00:04:04] Melissa: I think if you can, and I'm not saying this is always possible, but if you can manage to think, what is linked to my book, because that's an obvious connection and an obvious reason why your readers would enjoy it but might also be enjoyed by someone who's never heard of your books and really doesn't care. That would be the gold standard to try and find those.
The merchandise that I play around with a little bit, because I have so little time I don't do as much of it as I should, but the merchandise that I play with is, I wrote a series of books in Morocco, in medieval Morocco, and they're very focused around the silver jewelry. It's Berber jewelry, it's beautiful tribal, silver jewelry, very intricate. And so I wrote a whole book that was very focused on it. I'd done a lot of research around it. And I thought, oh, this would be really nice as merchandise. It would be so pretty. There are ways you could do that. You could go and find a Berber jewelry shop and go, how about we do an affiliate situation where I just send people to you and I get a cut of anyone I send to you, because then they can buy the actual jewelry. That's one route, and I do suggest to people that they look at affiliate roots for things like that, because that could be quite interesting.
Reaching People Who Haven't Read Your Books
[00:05:16] Melissa: But the route I went down was, I went to Fiverr, and I took a number of photographs of real Berber jewelry, and I got someone to hand-illustrate them just in black and white, very simple pencil sketches, and they are beautiful. And then I used that as the merchandise, because I was like, to the readers, these are items from the book. To anyone else, they're just really beautiful pieces of tribal art. They're very geometric. I think they look really nice as wall things or on cushions. I put them on cushions in my house. But on walls, they look really beautiful, that kind of thing. So that's the kind of style I went for.
And in that case, you don't really need to know about my books. You could just go, oh, I really like that kind of look on my wall or on my cushions. That would work for me. And I had a bit of fun with, because it's jewelry putting it on t-shirts where it looks as if you are wearing the jewelry, because I've placed it there, that kind of thing. And I think that can be quite a good viewpoint to take. Is it going to be interesting to people who aren't just my readers? How are you reaching people who aren't familiar with your books with information about the jewelry?
With those ones, as I say, I've not done as much as I should have done, but what I've done with those is really just have them on those sites where they're available and all the rest of it. What would be nice, I think, and you were thinking about Shopify, and you were talking about things like Etsy, would be interesting to filter them through onto a site like that and see, how do you develop it on a site where people are looking for items like that, more than they might be on the production sites? People do go and browse there but they're often making something of their own bespoke rather than looking for other people's. But I think all of those sites are also beginning to be discoverability platforms and trying to showcase their products more. Those can be interesting things to do.
You were talking about how easy the interface is to use. And I was curious about that, because I've used Zazzle before, and I have to say, the interface for the creator is hard going. You make things and then it goes, oh yeah, I'll show them to you in about two days’ time. And you're like, okay, but I was sitting here, and I wanted to try and see how it all fits on the site. I wasn't terribly thrilled with that one. The weekend as a sort of a test run, I went to Redbubble, which I know you said from a user point of view, you were not entirely sure, but I spent two hours with the images ready, with my bio and the photo of me ready. And I created a whole shop from scratch in two hours with those images. And I thought, from the creator's point of view, it wasn't too bad, actually. I thought it was reasonably easy to use compared to Zazzle.
[00:07:55] Matty: Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to somebody like you, because I'm not proud, I'm going to use my own experience as an example. And currently, I have merch tied to my Ann Kinnear books and also to The Indy Author platform on Redbubble. As you said, the creator interface I think is quite easy. But the problem is that it's very hard to send people to Redbubble other than giving them a specific link to a product, even a link to a shop. If I'm looking at it from the point of view of a shopper, you go there and it's kind of hard to see what's available or if a product has different flavors, let's say. Yeah, I think those are two considerations, the user interface and the shopper interface.
Choosing a Platform
[00:08:36] Melissa: I know it's interesting how you would think that once one side was fixed, maybe the other side would be, but not necessarily. I've come across one, which I think might be a stronger candidate going forward, and that's Printful. So it's Print and then F U L, not a double L but all one word. And they're interesting because you were talking about, does it tie into other platforms? And this one ties into a shedload of other platforms. So I have a list because I can't even remember them all. So it definitely does Shopify, it does Etsy, it does WooCommerce, it does Wix, Squarespace. It does Amazon, does eBay. And the nice thing is it shows you for each one a sort of comparison chart, where it goes, this is how long it takes to set up. Does it do this? Does it do that? Does it cost anything?
So for example, Amazon, you think, oh, Amazon, that would be cool to have it on Amazon. But Amazon going to charge you I think it's like $40 a month to have that shop if you like, there. So you have to make sure that you're going to think you're going to make more than that on it, especially initially. Otherwise, you are fronting the cost of it for quite a while. So that's an interesting one, but they are definitely integrated with pretty much any other platform you can think of, which is an interesting thing for the future.
That is very interesting. And if I'm understanding the Printful model, it's separating out the creator interface from the shopper interface, in the same way that if you're an indy author, let's say, Draft2Digital is separating the experience of the indy author from the shopper experience, which I think is a good thing. Yep, however, having said that, I think there's a lot of talk around the creator economy developing and where people are wanting to buy directly from creators. And these are creators of all kinds, including authors. And I think as people get more comfortable shopping direct from an author or from a creator, that means that you might start pushing people more towards your own website than the big platform.
So at the moment, for example, I buy Facebook ads. I'm pushing you to Amazon, who's very kind of me on Amazon's behalf, because you might then just go and buy something else on Amazon. But what's to say I can't send you direct to my platform? You could come direct to my website if you are accustomed to buying direct from the creator.
And that then becomes interesting because then you can showcase all your merchandise right next to the book that it's linked to, and you've already got someone there that's showing an interest. It could become something where your merchandise showcases better on your website than it does at the moment.
Choosing the Merch
[00:11:17] Matty: Yeah, I love the idea of being able to combine the books and the merch. I have so many questions I'm trying to sort through what order. So getting back to Redbubble for a moment, which is basically the only merch platform that I have a ton of experience, and I experimented with a couple of others, but I'm most familiar with Redbubble. And one of the things that is both a blessing and a curse is, there’s a ton of products that you can put your design on. I experimented a little bit with selecting lots of them. They give you a preview to show you what the design is going to look like, and some of them, it just didn't look good, and I de-selected those.
But what I ended up doing is deciding I only wanted to select a very few products. So I ended up selecting spiral bound journals, blank journals, with the design on the cover, and a water bottle, and a tote bag.
[00:12:08] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:12:08] Matty: Because I thought those were the ones that made the design look nicest and were kind of tied to the audience I was trying to appeal to. And somehow, I just felt it looked more professional and desirable in some way, not to have a design on 75 different things. What are your thoughts about that?
[00:12:25] Melissa: So it is interesting. It's very tempting, when you first see it, you just go put it on everything. Woohoo. Who cares? So the first couple of ones that I tried, I was like, yeah, put it on everything. And then after a bit, you think, okay, but who is the target audience here? And the better you know your own readers, the easier this gets. My readers tend to be older women. And so I think they prefer things like beautiful journals, they like the water bottles, perhaps home decor, things that are beautiful, that sort of thing, as opposed to, I don't know, there were things that I just didn't feel had anything to do with the books.
[00:13:02] Matty: Shower curtains?
[00:13:04] Melissa: Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'm very fond of things like duvet covers that have something unusual on. But this is the interesting thing is, if you are like your audience, it's easier to pick, because you go, what would I buy? That's a much easier route. But things like cat blankets and dog blankets and dog bandanas, I didn't know that was a thing, in the end, I unticked them and went now, I don't think that's actually quite right. But you think to yourself, if you were someone who wrote cozy mysteries where there's a spaniel in it and everybody who reads and really loves the dog element and that, that would be so cute.
So yes, I think probably when you first start, it's fun to just tick all the boxes and have a bit of fun with it, but actually, it's probably worth over time, whistling it down to what is a better, closer selection to the books and the audience.
The Jam Stall Experiment
[00:13:53] Melissa: There's also that concept of the jam stall. So they did this test with these two jam stalls, and they had one that only had two kinds, strawberry and raspberry or something, and then they had one that had six. And you think the one with six would make way more money than the one with two, but it didn't. The one with two, it made way more money than the one with six, because people get confused. So they stand in front of six and they go, oh, oh, um, yeah, well, I mean, I do like the raspberry but then again, the blackcurrant, and they do that. Whereas the other one, they go, blackcurrant or raspberry. I like raspberry. Okay. Then you buy it. Whereas when there's six, you start panicking. So when there's 75, you know? I think it's probably worth whittling it down.
[00:14:39] Matty: And logical or not, if I see a jam stall that's only selling two, I figured they must be the experts at selling those two jams. Whereas the more there are, the more I just, like the specialness kind of gets diluted somehow.
[00:14:52] Melissa: Yes. Yes, that's true.
[00:14:53] Matty: And the other thing that I think is a consideration, I said I had those three products. Actually, I think in reality on a lot of them, I only have the tote bag and the spiral journal. And another consideration is, I want to purchase a copy of anything that I'm selling. And if I tick 70 things, I'm not going to buy 70 things. So who knows what the quality is on the shower curtain? Whereas I can buy it if I'm only buying two versions of the thing. And the other thing that I've been thinking is, I've been doing some things like taking an image from the Redbubble site, removing the background using Canva, and then putting it on a background that's appropriate to the product.
So for example, one of the auto-generated Redbubble images is the woman with a canvas bag over her shoulder. And it actually has done it in a way so that it shows the design that I've put on it. And so I've taken that woman and I've put her in a bookstore background, which is more attractive than the plain one. But what would really be nice is a completely styled photo shoot of the bag, with maybe my books next to it, which is adding another level of complexity and expense, even if the rest of it is going to be hands off for you. Any thoughts about that?
I think using things like Book Brush and Canva can be quite useful because you can take those images that they've done of, here's the thing in 3D and put it onto, as you say something that's more suitable for it next to the book. So, when you have those nice shots where it's like, here's the book and a cup of tea and a suggestion that you and I have got a lovely leisurely afternoon, maybe there should be a cushion there as well, or there should be your bag back from the shopping or, those sorts of things.
Don't Get Over-excited
[00:16:34] Melissa: I think the initial impulse with these things is to get very excited, tick all the boxes, buy all the products. Too much. And the whole point of having to print-on-demand is to manage the costs and do a little research and see how it works. And I think probably what's best is to order like one product to see, is this shop in general putting out quality products? It's unlikely that they have an amazing quality t-shirt and then a terrible quality journal. You know, it's likely that they have a certain benchmark of quality. So if you can pick one thing, buy that, make sure that you are happy with the quality of it, and then over time, perhaps build up your own collection.
Although I was thinking, when I just bought a new phone and I bought the case for it, and then I went, ah, but I could have put my own merch on that. And then you would walk around with it and people would be like, and what is that? And you'd be like, ha ha, that is my merch.
I guess that's, yeah, that's a kind of third use of it that you can put this stuff up on a site, like Redbubble and just order one for yourself. I did that with an Indy Author t-shirt because I was doing a video event that everybody was clearly going to be branded. Like, I knew some of the people would be wearing branded t-shirts and I wanted a branded t-shirt that said, the Indy Author.
[00:17:50] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:17:50] Matty: So I just put it up and ordered one and it's still up there. Other people could probably order a t-shirt as well, but I didn't have that expectation, but it was an inexpensive way for me to get something just like you're saying, like the cell phone case.
It is a useful way of being able to do those things, which you can then use. If someone comes around your house and all the cushions on your sofa have got something on them that's unusual and different. They're likely to go, and where's that come from?
[00:18:15] Melissa: And this is the point about going back to that point about products that are going to appeal to more than just your readers. So it does not have to just be something that would only make sense to your readers, it can be something that would just appeal to lots of people, which is why you always have "Pride and Prejudice" and Shakespeare on literary merchandise. So if you want to make money that I think, if you are after just let's make load the literary merchandise and I don't care whose book it's pushing, probably you want to go with the two main leaders in that department, which is "Pride and Prejudice" and Shakespeare.
Copyright Considerations
[00:18:49] Melissa: And then I think we should just mention copyright here because I was the Writer in Residence at the British Library, and they have a business and IP center. So they're all about the IP, so the intellectual property, and I was doing a whole, like little popup exhibition for them about copyright and how to use out of copyright material in fun and unusual ways.
And so I went on to Etsy and I played around with the literary merchandise. And some of it was really cool and funny, and I liked it, whatever. But I cannot tell you the number of items I found that thought they were using out of copyright material, especially from "Pride and Prejudice," but are actually using something from an adaptation, and technically, are massively in breach of copyright, should someone wish to pick them up on it.
So they had like quotations that they thought were hilariously funny. It's a movie adaptation, it does not appear in the original book. There's something about Mr. Collins and how nice the potatoes are or something, and it's supposed to be really funny, but I was like, that is massively in breach of copyright, what you did there. You haven't taken it from the original book, which is free to use. You've got to be careful about this stuff. And again, people make, they'll have the Penguin book cover, and they'll turn it into a handbag.
[00:20:07] Melissa: And again, I'm like, it's adorable. It's copyright. That's copyrighted material. If Penguin feel like it, they can come get you for that. And it's really funny how people go, oh, well, that's out of copyright. You're like, the content is, but you are now using it from an adaptation where a script writer has been involved, or a publishing house, that's their version of it on the outside, at least, you know. You can forget these details and it's important.
[00:20:38] Matty: Yeah, your mention of Shakespeare makes me think that all my Ann Kinnear suspense novels, the titles are based on Shakespeare quotes, and I never thought of that before. If I make sure I'm taking it from the actual Shakespeare play, it would be fun to have something with The Sense of Death, the quote, The Sense of Reckoning. And I can imagine that would be, although some of them are morbid, like not ones that you would necessarily want to put on a pillow on your couch, but it might be fun. That's the kind of thing that would appeal to both fans of the books and just fans of Shakespeare.
[00:21:11] Melissa: Yeah. Yes, that's the point then you've broadened out the audience.
Matty's Book Plates
[00:21:15] Matty: And I think the question there would be, and I'll use this as a segue into another topic I wanted to ask you about. So there was the Redbubble hands off, completely hands off merch efforts that were tied to my books.
And then another, I guess this is a product opportunity that I saw was when COVID started and all the in-person events were being canceled, including book launches. I wanted to get book plates to put in my books so that a reader who bought the book elsewhere could send me a note, ask me for a bookplate, I would sign and inscribe it and mail it off to them.
And I looked everywhere for book plates that would accommodate that. And I couldn't find them. All of them said, and if anybody doesn't open a bookplate, it's the label that you can put in the front of a book. Most of them are to identify a book as belonging to a person. So they usually say Ex Libris, "from the library of," and then they have a space where you just write a name. But I wanted one that would not say, "from the library of," because I was going to write my name on it and would give enough room for an inscription. And so I looked and looked, didn't find it. And I thought, oh, an interesting product opportunity.
So I went to, I think it was Fiverr. I found a woman who does these beautiful pen and ink drawings, and I knew I wanted an animal theme, so I found some photographs that I liked, and I sent it to her, and I said, I want an owl that looks like this, but standing on a book. And she sent me back these gorgeous drawings.
And I went through the whole thing of, of course I did this on a small test scale, but I found the right size label, I got the labels, I got mailing envelopes that you could put the label in, so that if an author wanted to order the plates and the envelopes to mail out to their readers, they could do that. I found the bigger mailing envelopes that I would use to put that in. And I did a couple of test runs and it was so fussy and so time consuming that I just thought, this would've been fun, but this is where my question about the hands-off part came up. So I was never able to find a platform that would enable me to do a print-on-demand book plate. Any suggestions there for how I might pursue that?
Well, I was looking the other day at Redbubble. They have stickers, but I don't know how big the stickers are. I didn't spend time checking the size of the stickers, because for a book plate, you really want something that's almost the size of the page. It needs to fit within a standard novel, but you want something quite big, because that allows you to write a little message and that kind thing.
[00:23:38] Melissa: I think they're kind of missing a trick because that is a really nice thing for somebody to be able to have, and it's an easier way of signing a book than, I'll get a copy of the book, write the thing, send it to you, all of that. You can just have it sent to anyone and have it put on the thing. Yeah, I think they're missing a trick there.
My solution with that would be to go with someone like, Vistaprint or similar who can print stationery products and have a larger sticker made that can just stick into a book like that.
But yeah, should probably write to them and say, here's a new product idea, and I want a cut of the template, thank you very much.
[00:24:16] Matty: Yeah.
Because it's not a difficult template. Yeah, it's a big sticker, isn't it? Essentially.
[00:24:21] Matty: Yeah, it's a big sticker and you need to be able to have the design be a small part of it. Most of them default to, you want the design to take up most of the sticker, and you don't want that.
[00:24:30] Melissa: You just want a little bit, yeah.
But then I would still be taking on the distribution of it, the logistics. So yeah, I still feel like that should be an opportunity and I'm just not ...
Yeah, I have seen people who make bespoke book plates, and they could have done the thing, but the price was getting high and after bit you're like, is this really a fit? I mean, yeah, you know.
[00:24:55] Matty: Yeah, and it does introduce other things that you could do to make it special and appealing, but that would take even more time. I did see a lady the other day on TikTok, and she was like, when I send out a signed copy, I put this little bookmark in. And she'd come up with a pretty good solution, it was like a little bookmark, and then she added a little tassel, but I was like, it's nice, but it's still time out of your life. Which we're all a bit short on. And yeah, I was like, yeah, it's a nice thing to do for a more bespoke product and more premium product, perhaps, but not for your average ones.
That's a good entree to another topic I wanted to talk about, which is, when you're deciding what to sell and who to source it from, you could either go with the, I think Redbubble is probably fairly inexpensive for the kind of product it is. You know, you could do the $14 tote bag or whatever.
[00:25:47] Melissa: Yeah.
[00:25:48] Matty: Or you could get these super nice tote bag, the super nice leather tote bag. I don't know, the really high-end version with the same design, but just produced to a higher level of quality. When people are considering that, like favoring at cost or favoring quality, what would your advice be there?
Weighing Cost and Quality
[00:26:06] Melissa: I think when you're starting off, you really want to start quite low because otherwise your readers may not have necessarily built up to that level of wild enthusiasm necessarily. And also, that's where I would start veering off towards products that have a really wide audience. Those little handbags that are made out of a book, they’re the more premium end of things, and sure enough, they've picked them for the most popular books they can find. They're not picking them for individual authors. They're picking them for absolute classics that they know have a massive audience and that someone is even likely to buy as a gift because they just think, well, it's a classic anyway. Even if you particularly weren't that mad on it, it's still a classic book made into a handbag kind of thing. So I think I would always err towards the side of caution when you're starting out.
Having said that, I know that Octavia Randolph, who's a historical fiction author, has fans who are besotted with her. And she was going to look into doing really beautiful things where she was going to have them come to the country that her books are set in and take them on tours and all of that. And she was just planning that pre-COVID, and I think she's probably organizing it again now. And she said people were just totally signing up for that, like no problem.
So there is a market, and one of the things I talk about is moving away from the bookmarks and the mugs and the thing and whatever to try and think more creatively, what else would be interesting? If you have people who like reading crime novels, maybe you take them on a shooting clay pigeons, you know, something where it is more about the experience is getting you closer to something that's in that book. Food things, clothing things, actual experiences, can be very memorable for people and really link them better to the books.
Banking on Locations from Your Books
[00:28:06] Matty: Yeah, one thing that I think about periodically, and then I've never actually acted on, is that the Ann Kinnear books are largely set in two locations. One is around my home near Philadelphia, and the other one is on Mount Desert Island, Maine, which is where Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are. And in some cases, I'm referencing actual places using the actual name, but in a lot of cases, I'm referencing actual places, but changing the name. And I always thought it would be fun to have, and I think this would be more of like a giveaway for email subscribers, that it would be the map to the world of Ann Kinnear.
[00:28:36] Melissa: Oh, that would be cool.
[00:28:37] Matty: Yeah. You know, the restaurant where Ann and her brother have lunch, even though it's called this, is actually Sovana Bistro in Kennett Square. Hi, Sovana Bistro. So yeah, I guess that's yet another one that, that would be more on the creating the relationship with readers, not an income generation thing, to use those kinds of products.
[00:28:55] Melissa: Yeah, and I think people really love behind the scenes stuff. They just, they really like to know the research behind it, the inspiration behind it. I went to Bath recently, and the shop that's in Bridgeton as the seamstresses, the dressmaker’s thing, it's like a little deli cafe thing. I mean, there's just constantly people taking photos of it because it has a very distinctive frontage, and it's appeared twice in a massive series, but people were just obsessed with, "that's the original one," which was quite funny to, to stand there and watch it happening over and over again.
And certainly, that would then be an interesting thing to think about merchandise-wise that could bring in some income, is if some of those locations were up for having the books being sold there, like a museum or a bookshop or whatever, to also have with it a little map that would then, you must be in that area if you're buying it there to then think, oh, that would be fun, we can follow around the locations that belong there. That would be a fun thing to do.
[00:30:00] Matty: Yeah, it does seem like there are lots of opportunities for teaming up with various other entities, to benefit both you and that other entity.
[00:30:08] Melissa: Yeah, and I was actually just thinking authors as well, because if you had multiple authors who had stories based in one place, you could have something that allows you to look at multiple books and locations from all those different authors together.
[00:30:23] Matty: I wanted to loop back on what you had been saying earlier about integrations with other platforms. And there's a lot of buzz about Shopify in the indy author community now I think, because Joanna Penn has been talking a lot about her move to a Shopify platform. And I thought about it briefly. I'm on PayHip, and I decided to stay at least for the time being on PayHip because I just wasn't ready to take on the work that would be needed to set up an effective Shopify store.
How to Gain Visibility for Your Products
[00:30:45] Matty: If someone is using a platform like PayHip, which doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Shopify does, do you have any tips, any insights as to how to optimize merch or products on those platforms?
[00:30:57] Melissa: I think one of the ways you can do that is to have products, so you have the main product on a discoverability platform like Amazon, so it's very obvious and very easy to buy. But the product that's linked to it, for example, a journal, a workbook that goes with a non-fiction book, you could have something there that goes, when you've bought this on Amazon, you can get the workbook only on my website. And that's a very simple thing to be sold on a website because it can just be a downloadable PDF. You can have a simple print run done of it through someone like Lulu or whatever. But that then means that you are getting them back onto your website to buy a product that goes with the main product that's got higher visibility in the world.
Probably for fiction, that doesn't work as strongly, unless what you are doing, which I think is what Joanna's looking towards in the future, Joanna's always ahead of all of us, so I don't feel too bad for not being right on it when she is. When she's on it, I'm like, I'll be there in five years’ time, Joanna, don't you worry. You lead the way. She's great. I learned everything from Joanna. When I first switched and became an indy author, I just literally sat and read her website for six months. That's all I did. I just read it and went, all right, okay, I didn't know any of this stuff.
I think the way she visualizes it is that in the future, you would have some products on places like Amazon, because that's the discoverability platform. And then you'd be like, okay, now that three of the books are up there and you've got really into the series, all the other ones are on my website, so come back here. So that, in other words, you sort of have that high visibility, but then you are bringing people back to you. And I think that's how she's visualizing it for the future, that's what it looks like to me, which I understand because it's very hard to get that level of visibility straight out of the box as an individual author.
[00:32:52] Matty: Yeah, I can imagine, even with the basic functionality that PayHip offers, you can do things like, if a person puts one product in their cart, then it recommends another product or it offers a discount on another product. And it would be fun if there's a way to say, oh, you just bought book two of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, The Sense of Reckoning. Did you know that the title, The Sense of Reckoning, comes from a Shakespeare quote? Do you want a t-shirt with a Shakespeare quote? Click here and go to wherever to take a look at that.
Customer Data Trumps Sales
[00:33:17] Melissa: I think there's some scope for it now, but I think that will build a lot in the future. I think that's what the front runners are getting very excited about, is that they want the customer data. It's not even the sales, the customer data will be so interesting to see because at the moment, you hand over the customer to the retail platform, and they hold it. They have the data and they're not giving it to you, even though you brought them there and they're your customers and all the rest of it. You don't see what's going on and what else they've bought and that kind of thing, other than what they're prepared to show you.
And so to be able to have the customers there and to be able to do, have you seen this, here comes book three, have you looked at the merch? All of that, that's going to be the fun thing to be able to play with. This whole thing of you must have a mailing list, that won't even be a thing in the future because of course you'll have a mailing list. It'll be your customer data.
[00:34:10] Matty: Oh that's a really interesting way of thinking about it.
[00:34:12] Melissa: You won't be building one from scratch. It'll just come in from the sales as it does for every other retailer. That will be very interesting, I think.
[00:34:21] Matty: And I think that there are two things that are happening among the potential buying base that are helpful. One is that people like Joanna are paving away for people becoming comfortable with the idea of buying direct. And then I think there's just more interest, I think the popularity of a platform like Etsy illustrates that there's an interest that people have in supporting individual creators, not supporting a corporate entity.
[00:34:46] Melissa: Yes, very much.
[00:34:47] Matty: And so they can tap into those.
The Allure of Bespoke Products
[00:34:49] Melissa: (This is a continuation of the "Customer Data Trumps Sales" clip) Yeah, I love Etsy and I look at Etsy and I think, so I can spend 500 pounds and I can have a designer handbag, which frankly, is available for everybody else, and I'm not really sure is worth the value of that. Because at what point did you pay for all the materials in the craftsmanship, which doesn't even seem to be that high, or I can go onto Etsy and I can pay a hundred pounds and someone will make me a bespoke handmade bag, which nobody else has in the world. You know, the value there becomes very obvious. And I think that's probably what people like, that they like that instant, the bespokeness, they like being able to go directly to someone.
Wonderbly Books
Have you seen the Wonderbly books? So they've taken print-on-demand to whole other level. They're mostly books for children, but they have expanded so much recently. So they'll have a book, and it will go, The Little Girl Who Lost her Name, that was where they started. And you would send in the name. So you go, okay, Jessica and they go, okay, and as you turn the pages, this little girl who is unnamed goes on this whole experience and she finds the letter J and she finds the letter E and she finds two SS and all the way through. And then at the end, Jessica, and all they're doing there is they have an alphabet, and they're pulling down the letters you said, and it's going in and being print-on-demand. And all of a sudden, you have a book that is totally bespoke. Also, you get to choose the hair, the hair color, the skin color, the eye color for the child, whether it's a boy or girl, all of this. You there have a very bespoke product. I mean, they've really worked out what print-on-demand is capable of.
[00:36:23] Melissa: And I know there's a thing now, and I can't remember who's doing it, but I know that somebody at the moment allows you to put in a different one extra page in the book that can be bespoke. So that page could be what we were talking about where you would, a signed thing. You could have it typed. You could have a whole thing from you that goes, "to very dearest reader, whatever, Mark, thank you so much for reading the books, best wishes," blah, voila! You can actually have that printed for them, which is an interesting concept in the future.
[00:36:57] Matty: Yeah, that is nice. I totally agree with the idea of, the bespoke product is another trend I think, that people are really appreciating.
[00:37:06] Melissa: It sort of elevates a product that is, it's okay, it's a nice product. And then you put someone's actual name in it and they're like, Ooh, it's an amazing product. And it really changes that for them. Yeah.
Tools for Product and Merch Creation: Canva and Unsplash
[00:37:20] Melissa: I was quickly going to say something about tools for this sort of thing.
Yep. And the copyright issue again, and then just drawing attention to two things. One is Canva who, if you have their pro license is quite a good route because they allow you the commercial use of a design that you've created. What they don't allow is you can't take a photo of theirs and just sell it on to someone else to use as that photo. But you can take any of their elements, make them into something that's yours, and then you have commercial rights to that, and you can go and sell them. So that's nice. Although it's a third-party thing, so you can't then get mad with them if they sell the same image of a flower that you used to someone else, because that's obviously going to happen. But the fact that you are putting it together in a different way, makes it bespoke to you.
So that's one really good tool. And the other one for photographs is Unsplash and they again have the commercial thing. So you can use that again. So put together a few tools at the beginning that you can play with a little bit.
I saw a very simple tote bag the other day, which just said "Talk Darcy to me," which I thought was quite funny. And I was like, well, you're making your intentions clear. So that's, you know, you're putting where the standard is. It was quite funny. That was literally, that's all someone's done, is a piece of typeface. And I think that can be a nice thing to play with from books as well, is the quotes. And of course, you have a good start there because you've got Shakespeare helping you out as well. So you can have your quotes and Shakespeare's things together.
[00:38:43] Matty: Well, that's great to know about Unsplash because I use Unsplash all the time. I think that every social media post I have is illustrated with an Unsplash photograph. And one of the things I really like about it is that it's super easy to find things. The image quality is very high. And I also have Deposit Photo and I really struggle with Deposit Photo because it has so many levers you can pull. I'm sure that if you're an experienced content manager, it's great, but I don't even understand some of the filters that they, it would enable me to find stuff on Deposit Photos, so.
[00:39:18] Melissa: It's tricky.
[00:39:19] Matty: Unsplash is really good that way. It seemed clear to me that using it to illustrate a social media post was fine, but I was never clear if the photos that were on there could be used in the way you're describing. So that's great to hear.
[00:39:30] Melissa: Yeah, I went and checked, so yeah, it's fine for commercial use. Again, it has the same thing. You cannot sell it on as a photo. You sell it on as something you've done with it and put it onto a product or something. That's what you're selling on. You can't set yourself up as another Unsplash and sell on the photos, is basically what they're protecting against. But otherwise, yes, commercial use.
[00:39:50] Matty: I could imagine, if I'm understanding correctly, that you could find a picture of a flower. Use Canva to remove the background, put the flower on a tote bag with a quote, and that would be permissible.
[00:40:01] Melissa: Absolutely, yeah. A hundred percent.
[00:40:03] Matty: Is everybody else going to be spending the entire afternoon interested today making products on Canva?
[00:40:08] Melissa: I know. The first time I found Canva, when it was new, I didn't do anything for a week. I spent a week just going, oh, look at this. I can make a template. And I made templates for everything you think of, even thinks I had zero interest in. I was just like, this is such fun!
[00:40:26] Matty: It is a very, very helpful tool. And also offers a lot of stock photos, as I think you mentioned.
[00:40:32] Melissa: Yes, and certain categories really struggle. Historical fiction, you go and find medieval Moroccan pictures. It's like hard, it's hard work. And to be able to find stuff that can work for you and put it into book trailers and stuff like that, it's really fun. I'm having so many ideas now. Book trailers is something I adore. I couldn't make Facebook ads work until I got the hang of trailers, and then suddenly, they worked. It was really weird. So I credit those with my adverts working, yeah.
[00:41:03] Matty: And what tools do you use for the trailers?
[00:41:06] Melissa: I use Animoto, which is stunningly easy to use. And they have recently put back in a tool that I was begging them for, which is a voiceover. So it allows you, not so much for my book trailers, but I do like little research trip videos to show readers where I went and what I did and stuff, and to be able to speak over the images that you're showing them is a really nice thing to be able to do.
Do you have any upcoming merchandising ideas for your own that we haven't had a chance to mention yet?
[00:41:38] Melissa: So at the moment, I'm just thinking about, because I started playing with it again, thanks to you, I then been thought, what else do I have? And I thought, I have really beautiful images of the Colosseum the way it used to be before it was broken. There isn't a lot of images of it out there like that, and it's really beautiful. I had it hand drawn again by an architect on Fiverr. He was so funny, he drew it all and then he was like, wow, I'm in awe of what they did with the tools they had at the time. You know, as an architect, he could understand that this was just an amazing building.
So yeah, I have these beautiful drawings and I think they might look really nice if you can think up nice gladiatorial things to put underneath, which I think might be fun. Because I have a series which is basically the backstage team of the Colosseum. So it's following their lives and I'm thinking it would be quite fun to have the Colosseum on a t-shirt and then something underneath, trying to think what would appeal to more to men, and probably, and gladiatorial stuff. I have to think about that.
It's a good opportunity to play. It's always nice. I think sometimes just being able to play with something else, which may or may not come off commercially, it still fills up the creative well. It still does something useful for the writing.
[00:42:52] Matty: Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. It's a nice mental break. It's interval training or whatever exercise which something a little bit different.
[00:42:59] Melissa: Exactly.
[00:43:00] Matty: You get a little burst of creative energy.
[00:43:01] Melissa: And you might come up with the next big hit.
[00:43:03] Matty: Yeah, so fun. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for talking us through this.
[00:43:07] Melissa: Thank you for having me.
[00:43:09] Matty: Oh, it has been my pleasure. Please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:43:15] Melissa: Okay. So probably my website is best. So it's MelissaAddey.com/books. And you can just scroll down, you'll see all the books there.
[00:43:24] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:43:25] Melissa: Alright, thank you.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Do you already offer merch or products as another stream of income in your author business? If yes, I’d love to hear what platform you’re using, and how you like it. If you haven’t yet ventured into merch or products, did Melissa convince you to consider it? What’s the first type of merch or product you’d pursue?
Please post your comments on YouTube!
