Create Your Own Amazon Merch

In case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, Amazon is really pushing this right now. The “upload your design for custom merch for yourself or for general sale” thing has been there for over a decade, but they recently added in a vibe-design feature. You can describe it to the Amazon AI and iterate the result, then approve it.

It’s not a huge thing, but it might make some things easier for author merch. Or even if you just want an easier time getting a custom mug to drink from while on a panel (not that I’ve already been toying with the idea or anything thanks to Author Update, no, not hardly).

If you’re thinking of an author storefront, it might make it easier to describe something from your book. Once approved, you can have up to ten designs “live” for purchase (one design can be on multiple different items), and Amazon takes care of all the sales side; you get a small royalty on each sale. They also explicitly allow (which means they expect) you to use an Amazon Associates link to each product, so that royalty won’t be the only part of the sale you get, technically.

The main benefit to all of this is the convenience and low ceiling. You can experiment with author merch without having to pay a higher up-front design cost, and that will let you know if there’s enough demand to justify having a human professional design something better.

I haven’t experimented with it myself, though as I said I was already toying with getting a shirt and/or mug with my Novel Ninja logo on it (my profile picture) that I made with my absolutely awesome MS Paint skills thirteen years ago. My wife is interested in getting FBI-style polos that have the logo of the Interplanetary Police Forces from her series.

But we already have those logos, and I haven’t tested Amazon’s system to see how good it is. Even if it’s bad, though, you can already do the same thing with Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc., and get one to edit an image from another if you need to. So it’s not exactly groundbreaking, just potentially convenient, and possibly something people here didn’t know they could do anyway.