How My Drawing Became A Maze

my kafka novel of trying to be a capitalist

Photo by SEO Galaxy on Unsplash

This is a story about our tech dystopia.

I’d like to pay off my student loans a bit faster. Nothing grand — just chip away at the iceberg. I had the idea of selling prints of my drawings, starting with one I finished last night:

It seemed good enough to offer, especially with the Fourth of July coming up. I have a decent number of Substack subscribers. If even a modest percentage of you ordered a print, it could actually amount to something.

So I started investigating how to make that possible.

Etsy was the obvious choice. But Etsy holds all seller funds for 90 days. That means you must front the production costs yourself — for three months — while Etsy holds your money like a bank that forgot it’s not one. I’m not under any illusions of Etsy stardom, but if a noticeable percentage of you bought prints at once, those would be 90 very expensive days for me. And I have significant expenses coming up in that window: a probable move, and a trip I’ve already committed to.

So I looked into Fine Art America. Within minutes, I was in full-blown tech purgatory. Their system recognizes that my email address is tied to an existing account — but when I try the “forgot password” option, they tell me no such account exists. If I try to make a new account, I’m blocked because my phone number is tied to the ghost-email account that both exists and doesn’t. Schrödinger’s login.

Next up: Printify. It sounds promising until you realize that Printify doesn’t actually print anything. It’s a connector. You upload your art to Printify, then find a third-party printer to plug into it, then connect all of that to a separate storefront. And of course, if anything goes wrong — and something will — you get the joy of figuring out whether the problem is with Printify, the printer, or the storefront. Hope you like filing tickets and decoding vague error messages.

I began to wonder: is there a low-hassle solution?

Enter INPRNT and Society6, both supposedly “easy.” INPRNT requires you to apply — not with a portfolio, but to be voted on by “the community.” Who that is, how they vote, why they vote — a black box. I have no idea if I’m eligible, or even real, by their standards.

Then I tried Society6 — only to find that they’ve shut down new artist registrations while they overhaul their platform. They’re moving toward a “curated” model, which seems to be code for “more hoops, less money.” So that’s out too.

So now I’m stuck.

I have other patriotic drawings in progress: military-themed, a teddy bear with an Uncle Sam hat, a bald eagle profile. I’d like to offer them as prints.

But it appears there is no way — not a single way — for a person in 2025 America to offer a piece of art for sale online without needing to:

• manage multiple third-party integrations,

• commit to being tech support for three companies at once,

• or risk financial loss while someone else holds the cash.

What I want sounds absurdly simple: I want to post a link in a Substack. If you like the drawing, you click the link, choose a print size, ideally an option to get a framed version, and it gets sent to you. I get a cut. You get the art. Everyone’s happy.

Instead, I’ve spent hours registering for platforms I didn’t know existed, and discovering that all of them fail in exactly the same way: they assume the artist has infinite time, money, and patience. I have none of those. I have a day job.

So, yes. I’m stuck.

Comments are open for everyone. If you know of a solution — a real, functioning one that won’t require me to re-architect a retail ecosystem from scratch — I’m all ears.

Right now, simply wanting to sell a print in America feels like begging for scraps at the table of tech giants.

And the literally-making-me-cry-at-5am-thing is, I’ve always believed in markets. I’ve always thought that if you made something people wanted, there would be a way to sell it. In the United States of America.

But this? This is terrifying.

I’ve literally helped someone disappear before — legally, for good reasons — and that was less complicated than trying to sell a drawing online.

Does anyone have a solution?

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