Considering publishing options

I’m still undecisive about the name for this new collection that I’ve been working on. I really ought to make up my mind because coming here and mentioning it’s working title, ‘mitre magic’ feels a bit odd!

‘Cuboidal’ is one of the names on the shortlist, as is ‘Polygonise’. It’s all about the squares and geometry and being rather 3-dimensional. I mean, my designs usually are about the geometry and being rather 3-dimensional; it’s the fact that it’s squares, not circles, that are behind this collection that makes it different.

But I digress, I’m sure I’ll make up my mind about the name soon.

Not long after I published Going Straight, when Ravelry was in it’s infancy, I posed the idea on the designers forum about releasing patterns from a book individually. The idea received lots of positive comments, it wasn’t something that was done in publishing after all, and it provided an option for folks who couldn’t afford the whole book or who might only want one pattern.

This was 2008 sometime and whilst I couldn’t say I was the first indie designer to offer single patterns from an eBook, it was a really new idea. It’s now pretty commonplace to do it, and it’s almost expected of designers.

With the exception of a few, I’ve continued to make patterns from my collections available as singles. However recently, as I went through the great reformatting, I withdrew a whole load of single patterns that are in eBooks but don’t sell enough to justify carrying them forward.

Reformatting, translation and any editing that occurs during these processes comes with a cost. Then listing on multiple platforms, and not just the fees but the time in doing so or paying someone to do it for me, also gets costly. So it makes sense to trim my back catalogue from time to time. I want to keep as many options open as possible, but I’ve also got to keep things balanced and manageable. Not to mention avoid overwhelming everyone with All The Hat choices!

Going forward, the ones that will likely always remain as single patterns are those in my recent collections, from Circled onwards. They’re generally my best sellers anyways and the collections, and designs, that I’m proudest of. Yet looking at the sales figures for those patterns, with the collections having anywhere between 4 and 7 designs in them, only 2 from each sell really well. Most of them sell well enough, but there’s a few - Get Garter and Introspection - that really don’t sell as singles at all.

I think this is because of the nature of these collections - the eBook is way more than the sum of it’s parts. There’s so much extra design, sizing and construction info in the eBooks, not to mention all the details about calculating yardage and more, that it makes sense to buy the eBook and not just a pattern.

This new collection relies heavily on the tutorials in a way previous collections haven’t; if you’re familiar with mitre squares you might not need the tutorials so much, yet there’s a lot of new twists on familiar techniques that are essential to the construction and success of the Hats, and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss that.

And if I release these patterns as singles patterns, they’d each need an extra 20+ pages of supporting material. Which is serious chunk of the eBook. And I can’t justify doing this. It’s a LOT of material to maintain, correct and support in the single patterns, and the $9 price tag won’t cover it.

And so I’ve come to the decision to not publish this collection as individual patterns. It’s an 8 pattern collection with an incredibly in-depth guide to not only the mitre squares but also the construction for each Hat. There’ll be a section on making the Hats from other types of squares, including crochet, as well as details about yardage and other related techniques. It’ll cost $23 for all of that which I think is really good value.

It’s weird, breaking this tradition of mine of nearly 15 years, and it’s not been an easy one to make - the want to make sure that everyone has the choice to buy just one pattern is strong. But I have to be kinder to myself and more practical with my business thinking if I’m to get out of this burnout and keep us afloat.