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.

On location

The mitre square project that I mentioned a few blog posts back is pushing ahead! They’re through their first round of tech editing, and the patterns and tutorials are looking pretty polished.

We’re staying at a little AirBnB in the mountains of Liguria, visiting friends who’ve regularly modelled for us. They’ve recently moved to the area and weren’t able to come to us, so we’ve come to them.

Which means yes, it’s photoshoot time! I’m just about to steam block these Hats to remove all the creases from storage, and pick out all the cat hairs, then we’ll be heading over to our friends’ new house; they’re renovating and a partially derelict house could prove to be the perfect backdrop for these. If not, we’ll find somewhere in their little town and if that fails, we’ve always the mountains.

Summer is a tricky time to do a photoshoot in Italy - the scorching heat isn’t exactly ideal for wearing woolly Hats, and the harsh sunlight can wreak havoc on my lighting preferences. And folks are usually away, travelling for work or enjoying a holiday, or escaping the heat. As much as it was 5 hours on the road to get here and we’ve the extra expense of paying for somewhere to stay, I’m mighty relieved to be here and really looking forward to getting these photographed. As an added bonus, it’s much cooler up here in the mountains and it’s even cloudy this morning. Fingers crossed it stays like this for the rest of the day!

Not quite full circle, but...

Last summer I started a project that I hoped would give me the creative surge that was very much needed. But it didn’t work out as I envisaged; I think I was asking too much of the project and of myself, given the poor state of my mental health. I kept pushing and pushing, getting more and more frustrated, whilst at the same time knowing that there was a way to make it all work.

Thankfully I’ve been living with my ADHD and Autism diagnoses long enough to see what’s at play and why, and to be a bit kinder to myself. So I eventually realised there was no point in keeping butting heads with this project; I needed to park it and wait for my brain to switch into gear when it was ready to.

About 6 or 7 weeks ago I figured I’d pick this up again and see if I could form it into a publishable collection for this coming September. It was a tall ask; I’m still not coping well with deadlines and although my EMDR treatment has been effective and is still ongoing, it is still ongoing and progress takes time; some days, or even weeks, all I can do is hide in a corner raging at the world.

But I figured that I could try changing my approach.

Originally I’d been wanting to write this collection along the lines of Get Garter and Introspection - a guide to making a range of styles of Hats using this modular construction method. I was trying to make the mitre squares fit the Hats, and it wasn’t working. So what if I tried it the other way round? What if I pulled myself out of that rabbit-hole and let the squares lead the way?

Within a month I’d designed and knit 8 sparkly new Hats.

What’s really fun is that the squares decided they wanted to be a whole different set of Hats. They don’t fit what we might expect of Hats and certain Hat styles in lots of ways, and they’re proving hard to name. So rather than label them as a ‘beanie’ or ‘beret’ or similar, we’re going to run with a Minecraft-esque theme for the names because they really are built by adding more blocks and developing skills. They’re as cuboid and modular as they come.

The patterns are written and in the tech editing queue already! I’ve needed to write a whole bunch of new photographic tutorials and they’re mostly done and waiting for editing, I’ve a couple more short ones to finish today. Then all they need is a photoshoot and layout.

We’re on target to publish in September which makes me daftly happy as I haven’t published a proper creative collection like this in two years. I need this to feel like my brain is working again, and to be totally honest, the business needs it too - September sees the start of my busy season and if I don’t have something to launch and kick things off with, sales over the winter can struggle. It’s been a scary time for a lot of folks and we rely solely on this income to feed, house and clothe my little family, as you know. So I’ve very much felt a lift, even a hint of optimism, with these Hats.

Given their construction - only one small square to make at a time, with minimal thought to shaping needed, and their suitably for using up oddments and playing with colour - I think they’re the perfect thrifty projects for brains short on bandwidth or tight budgets. I had an awful lot of fun knitting and designing them and I’m pretty sure you will, too.

A little later into the summer we’ll be putting out a call for beta-knitters - the aim being for you to try the Hat construction method out and help generate interest on social media. You’ll get early access to one of the patterns and all the tutorials and in return for talking about the projects online and using the hashtags, you’ll get a free copy of the full and final eBook containing all 8 patterns! I did mention there were 8 designs, yes?

We’re not ready to start the call for beta-knitters yet but when we are, members of The Woolly Hat Society and Patreon supporters will be the first to hear about it. The last time I did something like this, for the Imperceptions collection, literally hundreds of people signed up and it was a huge success! But it does mean that we may need to limit places this time around as there’s an awful lot of admin for us to manage, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for newsletters over the next couple of months to make sure you can grab a place.

So, yeah. A whole new collection! 8 Hat designs written for 12 sizes across 8 gauges. The methods can be adapted for an even greater range and they’ll also work with other square types, too, including crochet. They’ll love your leftovers and oddments and they’re the perfect playground for trying out colour combos and seeing Hat construction from a whole new perspective. They’ll demand little of you in return for a stunning Hat.

Can you tell I’m excited about these? Can’t wait to get the photoshoots finished so we can start sharing the photos!