Isla Saona is a perfect example of a paradisic Caribbean island. Part of the Dominican Republic, it features a white sandy beach and blue waters from the Caribbean Sea. It is a breathtaking getaway and popular for day trips while on a Caribbean Cruise. Its palm trees touch the clouds and your heart.
We have been there ourselves and indulged in this tropical paradise. I have used a lot of awesome photos for creating travel souvenirs on print on demand websites and the latest addition are Isla Saona T-Shirts on Amazon.com:
Isla Saona T-Shirts on Amazon.com by Christine aka stine1
eBook: How to easily Report Your Stolen Zazzle Designs to Amazon.com by Christine aka stine1
Are you a designer on Zazzle, Society6, Cafepress, Design by Humans or any other print on demand shops and a victim of blatant (often Chinese) copycats who sell cheap items with your original designs on Amazon.com? Many of us are affected – if not most! It happens with our most popular designs and our least popular designs alike. Anyone can be their victim and Amazon does little to help us.
Society6 and Cafepress do nothing to help us either. As far as I know, Zazzle is the only print-on-demand website that really cares and tries to help their designers with more than useless watermarks. They have understood that these cheap (and I mean CHEAP in both quality and price) copies also hurt Zazzle’s reputation and earnings. We are not alone in this battle! Zazzle has even managed to make the process of reporting copied designs a bit easier for us, there is no need to repeatedly fill out Amazon.com’s online form over and over again.
I am writing this manual on how to find unwanted copies, how to easily report those copies and what else there is to do so that you can fight back. Be warned, it will be tedious and annoying – even with an easy process like this. You might even cry because it seems to be impossible to solve this but do remember: The worst is to not even try it!
Buy it on Smashwords in all kinds of formats (even PDF!) or directly on Amazon.com.
A few years ago – I can’t even remember when – I requested an invitation for Amazon Merch. Back then, it was every POD designer’s dream to directly upload designs to Amazon and sell t-shirts through the vast Amazon Marketplace. It was way before copycats nagged us with constantly ripping off our work.
Anyway, I had requested an invitation which never got granted. So a few weeks ago I stumbled across it once more and signed up. A few days later they welcomed me and asked me about my tax information. Lucky me had requested an ITIN years ago to avoid tax reduction on Smashwords and therefore, my w8ben forms are very easy to fill out.
When I logged in I was eager to upload all my work but… arrgh, they only accept PNG format with dimensions of EXACTLY 4500 x 5400 pixels *sigh* That means I have to cut my digital art, hope it still looks good and convert it to PNG format. Not a thing to do in 2 minutes. But I accepted the challenge and do have the first uploads running for review 🙂
I’d really apprechiate you checking out my “brand” Christine aka stine1 on Amazon.com and leave a comment or two. Or maybe you like it enough to even share? Who knows, please let me know and I will repay the favor *thumbs up*
In the future, you can expect some tips and tricks regarding Amazon Merch and the Marketplace, not only about copyright infringements and how to fight them. So stay tuned!
So I have joined EyeEm one year ago, in order to start a new adventure in trying to sell stock photos. With gazillions of vacation photos on our own media server at home (99% shot by my husband) and very limited time on my hands for adding new designs to my various print-on-demand shops, this had seemed like an easy endeavour.
stine1online stock photography on EyeEm
And yes, it was. EyeEm makes it super easy to upload and tag your photos since they do recognize what’s the topic of your photo and suggest suitable tags. It’s a recent feature for the app version, I am using the computer version most of the time – because that’s where I have easier access to our photos.
Almost all of my uploads also add their geo tags which is important for potential customers. Also, of over 3,000 uploaded photos, more than 2,000 have been accepted into the EyeEm Marketplace. Of these, almost 500 were accepted for premium and almost 250 are actually already live on Getty Images. Other photographers do have a better ratio but I am happy about it since I usually upload almost all photos from a topic. I only weed out the ones that were a mistake, e.g. when feet or other things were cut of. Hubby tends to do that, you might say he has a thing for cutting off feet 😉
What I also like about EyeEm is the fact that you can upload photos without the intention of adding them to the market. I did this with my digital altered photos of the Santa Monica Pier. Why? Because I do have all EyeEm uploads imported into Copytrack in order to find illegal copies of my works. That way, I do get an overview of what copycats do with my work.
And my sales? I had 3 sales within my first year. Not too bad for the first year, especially since adding photos to Getty seems to take ages. All three sales had been through the Premium Collection on Getty Images and earned me a total of $15.00:
Zizzling Zazzle - Christine aka stine1 blogging 