Google Blogoscoped

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Make Your Own Shirts, Books, and Mugs

CafePress.com (now in its sixth year) is an easy-to-use, completely configurable store where you can create & sell your own hooded sweatshirts, mugs, buttons, bags, caps, CDs, or books. Of course you can also buy your own products. With some clicks I just made a Google Blogoscoped pullover hood.

Note images need to be around over 1000 pixels wide to be used on clothes. Images are uploaded and used separately, so you can create a repository and attach the same image to a variety of different products. Your shop URL will look like “www.cafepress.com/yourtitle” and really works within seconds. To determine your profits you can add your own commission right onto the base price. The basic math, of course, is the higher the commission the less likely people buy your product... unless the brand is right. (Note that images may be checked for copyright/ trademark infringement.)

I found the site via a suggestion in researching BlogBinders.com (much more on that site once I hold the Google Blogoscoped book I created in my hands), but CafePress does not seem to be suited well for creating your own book unless you know how to prepare a finished PDF to upload. (In BlogBinders, you can upload XML, which works quite smoothly.)

Another site for creating your own book which I came along was Lulu.com. The only downside here was that it didn’t seem to support “private” offerings in the sense that you may not want to let Lulu sell your book in their public store.

Update: Several people, including the Lulu.com support, noted that indeed you can set up “private” publishing.

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