Producing and printing your own 2007 photo calendar

We continue our 2007 photo calendar project by creating the actual calendar. As you'll recall, in "Creating your own 2007 photo calendar, step-by-step", we selected 13 images to be used for each month, plus a cover. Next, in "Images and a cover for your own 2007 photo calendar", we learned about proper image formatting and created the cover image. In this final installment, we'll upload the images to CafePress and show you how the whole calendar came together.

Understanding CafePress

Let's start by talking a little about CafePress. CafePress is a service firm that does one-off production of a wide variety of items, from T-shirts to mousepads to calendars. They provide three key functions:

• First, they do the actual manufacturing and production of your product.
• Second, they provide you with Web pages from which customers can order your product.
• Third, they provide the handling and shipping of those orders.

The thing about CafePress is that they're very much a vanity press. For example, the production cost to ZATZ for the calendar we're showcasing is $14.99. There are no real volume discounts. By contrast, had I printed, say, 1,000 copies of the calendar using a traditional printing company, the calendar would have likely cost about $3 each.

Of course, I'd have had to invest close to $3,000 up front to get the price-per-unit so low. With CafePress, there's no initial volume production investment at all. Obviously, the difference in volume between producing single items and a thousand unit press run changes the economics.

Once you define your CafePress-produced product, you markup the amount. So, for example, I decided I wanted $7 profit for each calendar, which made the purchase price a whopping $21.99. I could have sold it for as little as $14.99, but then there'd be no profit at all. If there is a profit, every so often CafePress will send you a check for that amount.

If you just want to have a few fun items to sell, and maybe make a few bucks, then use CafePress. If you want to make real money, do it the real way, using real money.

Obviously, nearly every photo service provider makes some sort of calendar service available. Kodak Gallery and Shutterfly, for example, each charge $19.99 for a custom calendar.

Creating your store and uploading your image

Like most of these services, you need to create an account on CafePress, which creates a "store" on their Web site. Once you've got a store created, you'll need to log in and navigate to your Media Basket, which is where you upload your images.

We had a ton of problems with this, as you can see in Figure A.

According to CafePress, they were experiencing problems with their servers while we were working on this project. They claim to have fixed the problems and all the images will show up just fine. This problem was annoying, but heck, I'm certainly not going to talk about having everything on a Web site working. We're always trying to fix something on our sites here at ZATZ as well.

Creating your product

Once you've created your store and uploaded all thirteen images, you'll need to start creating your calendar using the Product Designer. Although tedious, this part was fun because it's where the calendar really starts to come together.

First, as shown in Figure B, I selected the cover image from the images I'd previously uploaded and placed in my Media Basket.

Once this is selected, click next. I then selected the photos for each of the months, as shown in Figure C.

Once all the pictures are uploaded, you select a price, initialize your store, and you're ready to sell (or buy) your calendar, as shown in Figure D.

Quality of results

Although we had some problems using the Web site, we finally finished the calendar's setup and placed an order.

And, although it took about two weeks to arrive, we were very impressed. The quality of the printed calendar was excellent. Other than a tiny logo on the back of the calendar, there was no way to tell this hadn't been produced as part of a production print run. The paper stock was solid and the finish was clean.

We give CafePress' calendar production service a 4 out of 5. It'd have gotten a 5 out of 5 if the Web site wasn't so troublesome initially.

Oh, and here's a shameless, little plug. If you want to get my calendar, you can order it here.