Early this morning, I headed over to Society6, as I often do, to check whether I’d sold anything and to see if they’d released any details about the new subscription plan that they said was coming. The answer to the first question was no, no new sales. And the second? They had, and you can read all about it for yourself on their blog post Introducing Artist Plans. Or just read my summary below.
There are three levels. Free is free, fittingly; Basic is $4.99/month; and Pro is $12.99/month. New accounts have to choose a tier at sign-up; existing accounts have until November 29 to make their selection. Anyone who doesn’t manually choose a tier will be assigned to the Free plan.
There are, of course, some differences between the plans. Free allows you to have up to 10 designs and automatically assigns a royalty of 10%. Basic allows up to 100 designs; Pro up to 10,000. Both of the paid plans allow you to set your own royalty, add you to an email list for quarterly trend reports, and enroll you into webinars. Pro members also get access to a sales analytics dashboard and can order their own products for 20% below the base price – Basic and Free members pay the base price for their own products.
I’m sure others will offer much more commentary than I feel inclined to give at this moment. What I will say is that I am glad to see that there is, in fact, a free option (I had been worried that there wouldn’t be) and that at first impression, I find this system better than Redbubble’s.
At this point in time, it does not make financial sense for me to enroll in a paid plan. Which means that at some point before the end of November, I am going to need to choose which 10 designs to keep. That’s going to be tough.