Avoid shipping logistics
I resonate with the vision of Metalabel—artists collaborating and splitting royalties—but after finishing a project with it (The Best Internet Essays 2025), I’m not sure if I’d use it again for a self-published print book. I imagine this works so much better with a digital product, but for a physical deliverable, I found the convenience of automating the royalty split to not be worth the friction of handling shipping. (I’ll describe my process, and if I did something wrong, please correct me.)
All purchases happen through the Metalabel storefront, and from there you can export a CSV that you can bulk upload into a tool like Lulu (an online printer). I decided to offer the anthology (The Best Internet Essays 2025) for a limited window, otherwise I’d have to handle shipping logistics at a daily/weekly level. But even with a single shipment, I ran into trouble. The first issue is that a lot of countries require a phone number for shipping. Metalabel didn’t collect that, so I had to put 1-111-111-1111, which got flagged for some countries, requiring me to use my personal cell phone. Other countries required a tax ID, and I’m still waiting to hear back from the buyers so I can ship them their copy. Another thing I didn’t think through is the return addresses. I assumed that the printer would provide their own address, but instead they used the name/address from my credit card, which I did not intend to share! I’ve been writing under a pseudonym, and this doxxed my last name to anyone who purchased.
The other problem was that so many people—in real life and online—were confused why the sale had an end date. Books don't typically have deadlines. Even those who knew the deadline procrastinated, and were bummed when they remembered they forgot. Again, my decision, specifically because I do not want to be regularly porting over CSVs and manually handling the edge cases that are inevitable.
In the future, I’ll likely set up a storefront where a reader can purchase it themselves, input their address and any required information for their country, and then get their own unique tracking ID. And, considering so much effort goes into making a book, I wouldn't want to limit it to a one-month window; I'd want it open forever, or for years, at least. If I do a royalty split again, I can set some interval, maybe once per quarter or year, and then ask the contributors to invoice me. None of my friction above was specific to Metalabel functionality (the whole platform as it is was very pleasant to use, and it's Lulu that I'm frustrated with), but because they aren't integrated with a shipping platform, it requires logistics that are annoying and avoidable.