I've been thinking for four years now about selling merchandise, but the problem is, nobody has expressed any demand (here, or anywhere else) in buying merchandise. That is, I've designed merchandise: paper dolls, posters, bookmarks, but I conducted this question session:
Barely anybody commented, only one person commented and from that I concluded there wasn't much demand. The other thing is that I have yet to find a site I could rely on: I don't want to be taken advantage of, and I've heard several bad things about certain websites like Redbubble and so on, like the fact that they take a cut of your profits for themselves and so on. It's also difficult to find a proper online shop which can allow you to set your currency to British pounds, since all their prices are in American dollars, and while it is possible to convert dollars to pounds, I am too held back by the risks to want to try it out.
I was also able to get some figurines of my characters commissioned for my birthday and I've been thinking of crowdfunding some more so that I could sell them, but I'm too scared of the risks to be able to actually do anything... (sigh) just as I was too scared to accept ad revenue, or to open up the support channels to supply myself with ink, which, to be fair, was justified (I mean, how on EARTH does ink even relate to proper currency anyway? How does it compare to the British pound, or the Polish zloty, or even the old Roman denarius and sestertius? That's the bit I don't understand.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is, I can only produce merchandise if there's demand for it, and I can only make sure there's demand for it, based on how popular it is, which is why I've been too scared to monetise it until it had grown to a sufficient amount. To be able to successfully do so, I'd need at least 600 or 700 subscribers at most. I also don't have a PayPal account (yet).
