Some of you may have been cosplaying for a while now and are wondering what next steps there are. If you want to stay more hobbyist that’s perfectly fine. For those looking to go the more professional cosplayer route, you’re probably wondering how to generate revenue from your craft. The key to making money is having a product to sell to the masses. Which raises the question, what can cosplayers sell to make money? I’m here to cover a list of products cosplayers commonly sell and generate good revenue streams.
What Can Cosplayers Sell?
- Prints: These can be done as digital files or physical photos that are often signed. People will sell photos of themselves modeling their cosplays for fans to purchase. These require doing photoshoots to have pictures for prints and then can be sold on platforms like Ko-fi, Gumroad, etc.
- Patterns: If you make some of your own cosplay patterns or do draping, you can then save that hard work. Take that pattern whether it’s for sewing or foam and scan it to your computer. You can then list and sell it as is or I like to upload them into photoshop and use the magnetic lasso tool to clean up the lines of it all. After that you can sell it on Ko-fi, your own website or any other site that lets you sell digital goods. The best part about these is once you upload them to your store you don’t have to do anything for fulfillment. The site should give them the file to download after the purchase is complete. This makes it a great passive income source.
- Merchandise: This can include calendars, pins, stickers or even t shirts with your own designs or more of your cosplay pictures. There’s tons of websites to fulfill merchandise like Redbubble, Design by Humans and even Amazon.
- Cosplays and commissions: This one gives you the option of premaking cosplay stuff to sell like wigs, props or armor, or you can take custom requests to make on demand. This takes a lot more work than the above options since you have to create the product and handle shipping.
- Books and planners: Veteran cosplayers write books or put together planners and work books to help organize and teach other cosplayers the craft. Self publishing is often the way to go with this and is incredibly easy, especially for ebooks. Amazon is a very viable options for this and will handle fulfillment if you offer paperbacks. If you feel particularly knowledgeable on a certain aspect of cosplay you can consider writing a book.
- Custom designs: Some cosplayers do commissions, others will create completely custom designs for you. Whether you don’t have the creative itch to convert a character from one gender to the other, or need a seasonal reskin for a character, finding someone who can draw the design will come in handy and is a great thing to sell if you often get that creative bug.
- Supplies and kits: Some cosplayers sell specific supplies for making cosplays like their own lines of foam or they make beginner kits for foam crafting or sewing to offer up. If you want to help cosplayers get started you can also put kits together with everything a new crafter needs.
- Courses: An alternative to book is courses. Courses are incredibly popular with people desiring to learn more outside the classroom. If you do have a lot of knowledge on cosplaying, try offering online courses you can sell.
The above options are not your only choices. If you have a unique idea, explore it. Or if you see something someone else is doing and want to try your own unique version of it, give it a shot. The world is truly your oyster with creativity and cosplay.
AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: there may be a few links in this post that are affiliate links. Clicking these links or making purchases through these links can help support myself and this blog.