There are fourteen sets of handmade resin dice on a shelf in my friend Marisol’s apartment. Sharp edges, real inclusions, one d20 with tiny dried flowers suspended inside it. She poured them over two weekends back in February and photographed every single set that same week. Six are actually listed on Etsy.
The other eight are not listed because pouring dice is fun and filling in a listing form is not.
I have watched some version of this at three conventions now. The table is incredible. The person behind it has been painting or sculpting or soldering since they were fifteen. Then you ask where you can find them online and they wince, and hand you an Etsy shop with four items in it, two of which sold out in 2024 and were never relisted. The making has never been the bottleneck in fandom commerce. The paperwork is.
Which is a problem, because the table only exists for a weekend. Artist alley pays for the badge, the hotel, maybe the flight if the weekend goes well. The shop is the thing that’s supposed to cover the other fifty weeks, and for most of the people I’ve talked to it doesn’t, not because their work isn’t good enough but because it’s barely in there.
Nobody searches the way you talk
Here’s the thing about people who make stuff for other nerds: they name things the way their group chat would.
A shop I like has a listing called “Wizard Boi (Forest Variant).” It’s a lovely little resin figure, maybe four inches, mossy base, tiny lantern. I only found it because someone dropped the link in a Discord server. Nobody types “wizard boi” into Etsy. They type “small fantasy wizard figurine,” or “resin desk decor for D&D,” or “dungeon master gift.” Search has nothing to work with except the words the seller supplied, and the words the seller supplied were an inside joke.
This happens constantly with fan-adjacent work. Perler sprites get listed as “sprite art,” which could mean anything. Custom painted minis get listed under the character’s name and nothing else, which is fine if the buyer already knows the character and useless if they’re shopping for “hand painted tabletop miniature commission.” A cosplay maker sells armor patterns under a title that quietly assumes you already follow her on Instagram.
The title is the worst place to make this mistake, because the front of it does the most work. Whatever sits in the first handful of words is what a search has the strongest reason to match, and it’s also what a buyer skimming a grid of thumbnails reads before deciding whether to stop. “Wizard Boi (Forest Variant)” burns that space on a joke two hundred people understand. “Resin wizard figurine with lantern, forest variant, D&D desk decor” is uglier and I like it less, honestly. It also gets found.
Most Etsy advice aimed at makers is about photography. But photography is usually the part makers are already fine at. They have decent light because they need decent light to work. What they skip is everything typed underneath the photo.
The thirteen boxes
Etsy gives you thirteen tag slots per listing. Most small fandom shops I’ve poked around in use four or five, and two of those are usually the same word in singular and plural.
Then there are the attribute fields, which shift depending on which category you picked, and which are genuinely tedious. Primary colour. Material. Occasion. Who it’s for. They feel like bureaucracy invented to punish you for finishing something. They’re also a chunk of how a listing ends up in the filtered results a buyer actually clicks, once that buyer has narrowed things down to “under $50” and “made to order.”
None of it is craft. Which is exactly why it doesn’t get done. You finish a piece at eleven at night, you’re proud of it, and the last thing you want is twenty minutes of dropdown menus. So you write a title, dump in three tags, hit publish, and the piece drops into a hole.
Sunday nights are the worst version of this. Forty things photographed, four listed.
And then the batch sits there long enough that relisting feels like admitting something, so it doesn’t get done either.
The part that got easier, and the part that didn’t
Something did change in the last couple of years, and it changed in a direction that’s less irritating than most AI news aimed at artists.
Etsy Listing AI tools read a few photos of a single item and write the form underneath it. Title, description, category, the tag slots, the attribute boxes, a starting price range. Roughly a minute per item, and every field is editable before anything goes live. Tools like this can also tidy the photo, cutting the kitchen table out of the background so the piece sits on plain white instead of on a placemat.
That distinction is worth spelling out for this audience specifically. The background is cut away, not repainted. Nothing is generating an image of your work and nothing is inventing your work. The clerical half gets handled, which is the half you resented anyway.
What it doesn’t do is decide what you’re selling. It reads what it can see. If your figure is an original character with no name, you’ll get a description of a small resin fantasy figure holding a lantern, and the part where you tell buyers this is Beetle, the disaster wizard from your webcomic, is still yours to write. That’s also the part that sells to fans, so you probably shouldn’t outsource it even if you could.
It also won’t catch the things only you know. Two pours from the same mould are not identical, and if the buyer is getting one of a batch rather than the exact piece in the photo, that has to be said somewhere near the top or you’re going to spend a Sunday answering messages about it. Same with anything hand painted. Same with a piece that has a bubble in it you decided to keep. A tool reading photos will describe what’s in the frame; the honest caveats around it are still a human job, and skipping them costs more in returns and cranky reviews than the twenty minutes ever did.
It won’t price your work either, not in any way you should trust. A suggested range is a starting point, not a valuation, and handmade fandom goods get priced on reputation and scarcity in ways nothing reading a photo can see. Plenty of makers underprice themselves by half. No software is going to talk them out of it.
Fewer holes
The realistic version of this isn’t “AI runs my shop.” It’s that the eight dice sets on the shelf go up on a Tuesday instead of never.
Small creative shops die of friction, not of indifference. Somebody is searching right now for exactly the thing sitting unphotographed in your spare room, and they won’t find it, because finding it depended on you typing thirteen boring words at eleven at night four months ago.
Marisol listed five more sets last month. Three are still on the shelf, and one of those she’s keeping.
