Gather Here is the best.

Seriously. If you’re in the Boston area, you do not want to miss this yarn + fabric shop. Friendly, well-stocked and filled with a wonderfully sweet community.

I was totally thrilled to make it home to the Launch Party.

(And they had signs all over! Even in the window! Nothing will make a girl feel fancier than a window sign!)

Reviews + Giveaways

Not sure if the book is right for you? Check out these reviews:

“Let me just tell you – this book is HEAVY. It’s full of advice, full of theories and ways to practice them. Full of material to follow – from friendly to professional, from personal to business. This book doesn’t have tons of drawings, tons of diagrams or lots of colours. It’s straight to the point.”

Read the whole thing at Rock + Purl + enter win a copy

“Market Yourself by Tara Swiger does not disappoint. Tara Swiger knows marketing and after you read this book (heck, after reading the first chapter!) you will believe that Tara Swiger knows you.”

Read the whole thing at Handmade Success + enter to win a copy

“Market Yourself is oriented toward people who make and sell handmade objects (including, ahem, knitting patterns) but could be just as easily applied to boutique service companies or pro-bloggers looking for the right audience; pretty much any business with a small-to-non-existant marketing budget will find invaluable tips here.”

Read the whole thing at Ropeknits

“What you need to do is straightforward (know who your “Right People” are, for example), but it can feel overwhelming. That’s where this book went from being interesting to being gripping for me: Tara breaks all this down in a friendly, conversational way and provides worksheets and helpful tips (like “16 Questions To Help You Write A Douche-Free Bio” by Kelly Parkinson). “

Read the whole thing at MK Carroll

Vianza’s just straight up giving away a copy (enter by tonight!)

And I think that’s everything?

If you’ve reviewed the book (or you’d like to!) leave me a comment with a link! And if you’ve bought or won the book, leave a comment and let me know what you think, mkay?
Thank you for making this week utterly magical.

Related posts:

1. Find your FAB: features, advantages and benefits
2. Linchpin in a Business of One
3. You’re invited to brunch

In Boston? Join me!

Tonight I’ll be teaching a workshop on Right People. It’s totally free, and it’s at the fabulous Gather Here. Get the details here.

Not in Boston? Tweet + win $50!

Need some ideas? How about: 

Here’s what others have been saying:

I’ve been reading Tara Swiger’s #marketyourself preorder pdf since yesterday and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. taraswiger.com/market-yoursel…

— Jennette Cross (@doviejay) May 3, 2012

in my hot little hands (or rather, on my iPad screen) is @TaraSwiger ‘s book! you need one too: bit.ly/IJHEYq #marketyourself

— Kristine Beeson (@kdlb) May 2, 2012

The difference between the different versions.

Why do I want a PDF?

Do you have any questions?

Related posts:

1. 7 ways to be part of the brunch
2. Shannon is crafting a (publishing) business
3. Summer Manifesto – Glad to Be Home Edition

A few of you wanted to know how you could do even more to help, so I put together a quick guide on how you can spread the book-love to those who need it!

1. Tweet it! Facebook it!

Here are some ideas:

I just bought @TaraSwiger’s Market Yourself! Get yours here: http://bit.ly/IbR5oM  #marketyourself

Click to tweet

A simple system for sharing my handmade awesomeness? Exactly what I need! http://bit.ly/IbR5oM  #marketyourself

Click to tweet

 #marketyourself: It’s about Right People, Delight, and  Getting Out the Door. Yes, please! http://bit.ly/IbR5oM

Click to tweet

2. Pin it!

Did you know I embroidered the book cover? I did, because I’m that in love with it:

Or you can pin the actual book cover:

3. Email your friends, family and strangers (but don’t be a spammer, yo!)

If you’re a maker-seller then I bet you know a bunch more just like you, who would love the book. When you think of someone, send a quick “Thought you’d like this! ” note. They’ll love you for it.

4. Let’s brunch together at your place.

No, not your kitchen nook (although I never turn down a brunch) – your online home. You can ask me questions or just give me a topic to write about (like making dreams coming true, or simple marketing advice).

Before you do this – think about your people: what do they like to read about? What would help them most?
Some ideas:

• If you sell patterns or yarn, I can answer questions/write about my own journey as a knitter/spinner/dyer.
• If you sell art, I can talk about the power of buying art to express ourselves (I go on about this in the book!)
• And of course, if you provide services or education to any kind of business, I can write about marketing, people-finding, and map-making.

5. Bring the party to Amazon

6. Get the book in book stores.

Got a favorite local bookstore? Call ‘em up! Ask them if they plan to stock Market Yourself. If they respond with “huh?”, send ‘em here + here.
(My favorite bookstore is Malaprops. If you’re ever in Asheville, don’t miss it! If you live in Asheville, give ‘em a call for me, eh?)

7. Let’s get together. Live. In person. No joke.

I’m taking this baby on the road!
May 10th: Gather Here in Cambridge, MA
May 12th: Wishstudio in Newburyport, MA

And then?
San Diego, Cleveland, and Chicago in June; Portland and Seattle in August and…anywhere else you’ll have me!

If you’ve got a great local bookstore, yarn shop, or a friend with a big living room, ask them to host a workshop. We can talk Right People and Marketing your Creative Biz, or we can talk Map-Making.
To get this started, send a note to the place and copy me on it (taraATtaraswiger.com).

(If you hook me up with a place, I really will take you out to a real, live brunch)

Thank you!

Thank you so much for all of your encouragement, tweets, and sweet emails.
Stay tuned for even more brunch wonderfulness on May 10th!

I almost forgot to tell you! The Starship is now open. Join us here, until Friday.

Related posts:

1. You’re invited to brunch
2. Brunch? Don’t you mean Launch?
3. Good Shtuff – Extraordinary Hibernation Edition

If I could, I’d take you out to Plant, order up my favorite pancakes and chat with you about your life, your business and your marketing. We’d sip soy lattes and giggle over the huge cinnamon rolls.
But we deserve it! Because sharing your thing, putting it out into the world, is hard.

Since you can’t come over for brunch**, we’ll have to settle for this – an online celebration of both my book and your business.

Because I was thinking of you as I wrote this book. I thought about the process you go through as you learn to think about your product, and as you learn to think like your people. I arranged and rearranged the book to make it a system that will walk you through every aspect of getting comfortable with your marketing, and growing into bigger and bigger things.

For example, I know it can be tricky to get that craft show patter just right (I’ve been in a LOT of awkward craft show booths!), so the Offline Marketing chapter starts with just chatting with your friends about your project. Then you branch out into your community. Finally, you’re talking to total strangers about it – but instead of being scary, it’s easy because you already know what to say, how to say it, and what the soon-to-be-fans might ask.

If you’ve got a creative business, go here to grab the book while it’s still in pre-orders and you’ll get a plate of Pre-order Specialness:

1. Everyone who buys the book before May 9th will get an invitation to a live, on-the-phone Q+A session with the me!
   You’ll have a chance to send in your questions before the call, listen in as I answer your questions, AND receive a recording (mp3) after the call. Invitations will be sent out the week of May 14th.
2. 1/2 off a Right Person Exploration. Your discount will be sent the week of May 14th.
3. You’ll be entered to win a FREE, 30 minute, one-on-one session with me. On May 10th, we’ll choose 2 winners. Each winner will get an email with a probing questionnaire (so I know all about you before the session), and when you return it, you’ll schedule a time that works for you. The session will be held over a text chat and you’ll get a transcript when it’s all over.

This brunch is for everyone!

• Mindy let me share my tips for staying inspired during a big project (like the book!)
• I’m brunching with Jamie, and chatting about how dreams really DO come true right here.
• During brunch with Jessika, I’m sharing the super-simple marketing equation.
• And tomorrow, we’re chatting live, during the #omhg twitter chat, at 1pm EST.

For more brunching goodness, sign up here to find out where I’ll be having real, in-person brunches, workshops and conversations around the country!

Thanks for joining me for this brunch!

*Why Brunch? Read this story of brunching vs. launching

**If you are close by, let me know and I really will take you out to brunch!

Related posts:

1. Brunch? Don’t you mean Launch?
2. 7 ways to be part of the brunch
3. Good Shtuff – Extraordinary Hibernation Edition

In 2 months, she was leaving and I became manager.
It was that simple.

The owner owned several locations, but lived hours away, so I not only managed it on a day-to-day business, but I was also faced with making the big decisions (I talked to the owner only once every few months). It taught me so much of what I know about owning a business, but it happened with no training and no safety net.

A super-recent grad with a BA in French…and I was running a profitable retail + experience business with 12 employees, open 7 days a week, 10 hours a day.

At the Kiln Time, I made my first profit and loss statement (hint: it’s a list of income vs expenses and will tell you a LOT about the health of your business).
I hired my first person.
I fired my first person (and several more after that).
I made the schedule for my 12 employees.
But more than all that, I had my first taste of marketing.
I had to get people into the store, with no website (it was perennially “under construction”, and this was 2004), no advertising budget, but one great big window and a location next to a popular breakfast place (which would have been great, if our Ideal Customer was couples in their 70s…sadly, it wasn’t).

I had to learn that our best marketing, our long-term strategy was word of mouth and repeat customers (we had one of those buy 9 get one free punch cards). So instead of focusing on bringing more people in, I turned my attention to what made our current customers happy.

I tested and tweaked and tested again, the entire spiel. When a customer comes in, we tell them what the place is (lots of people just wandered by and wandered in), but most people are there with a purpose, they know they want to paint. So the pressure wasn’t to convert, it was to delight.

I soon recognized that the thing that least delighted the customer was when their expectations didn’t match up with their experience.

Usually, this meant that the item they painted did not turn out how they imagined. My staff wanted to chalk this up to the lack of decent painting skills, but I felt we could do more to help. We could explain best painting practices (for example, one coat of a color will look streaky once fired, you need three even coats to get a solid color; or, paint your light areas first and then your dark areas) and that would bring the customer closer to the desired results. We could explain (and show!) the process of how we glazed the pottery and then loaded the kiln, so they understood the risk of drips of glaze or a piece breaking in the kiln. When we discovered what kind of pieces were likely to break, we could warn customers (the warning never deterred anyone, because we also promised to let them repaint anything that broke).

We had to learn to talk to the customer about the experience of painting pottery. We made it clear that what you paid for was the in-studio experience, the joy of painting, the fun of being with your friends (or all alone). The piece you get is secondary, you’ve already received the main benefit we offered - the act of being creative.

And that, that’s the spark of everything I do today – I help creative businesses talk to their people about what the people care about. I teach businesses small and large to connect with their community on the topics that matter to them.

What I learned at the Kil’n Time is true for every business: it is your reponsibility to delight the customer.

You set clear expectations.
You delight them by meeting those expectations.
You explain it so they can understand: the benefits, the process, the entire experience.

If you’ve had a bout of unhappy (or confused, or disgruntled) customers – can you see where it went wrong? Could you make things easier or clearer for future customers?

What have you learned about delighting your customers?

Learn to systematically delight your people in my new book. Grab it here before May 10th and get pre-order specialness!

Related posts:

1. Insanely specific marketing advice
2. The making of an entrepreneur – studying French
3. It costs how much?! aka, Marketing with Price

my college campus

As I mentioned back in my first series about quitting my job (written nearly 3 years ago!), it goes back even further – I was a crafty kid, with an eye of doing something with those crafts. I sold friendship bracelets at church camp (and got caught, and got in trouble).

Nearly everyone I knew worked for themselves. My grandpa had a roofing business and my grams was the company accountant. My dad worked for himself as a contractor. My step-grandma built and ran a successful property management firm in southern California.

When I quizzed them (and anyone else who did something without a boss), everyone claimed that it was simple. You just start. And don’t stop.  They learned a skill, and then instead of trying to find a boss to pay them to do it, they found clients + customers.

But I grew up smart and college-focused. I never considered learning a “trade” and starting my own business. I loved reading. I loved college. I wanted to hang out on campus with a big library and other smart people for the rest of my life. So, I know! I’ll be a professor.

And I loved French. I loved the complex system of a language. I loved that it had a kind of logic, while being beautiful. I loved that there was a right and wrong way. Even better, my college’s French program was heavily literature-focused. We read a French novel a week, I wrote 20 page research papers about the French Impressionist movement reflected in poetry and music.  It was Tara-heaven.

Those four years devoted to studying what I loved taught me I could devote myself to what I loved.

It’s easy to say “Do what you love!” and “Follow your bliss!”
But it’s another thing entirely to actually do it. For most people, it’s completely out of their range of experiences. If you’ve spent the first half of your life doing what you’re supposed to do, it’s not easy to just snap out of it, it’s not easy to try something crazy.

After studying French and surviving four years of everyone asking, “But what are you going to do with a French degree?” I was prepared. I was already weird.
I had already done my own thing. Although I didn’t really think about when I was starting my business or quitting my job, that French degree had made me comfortable with risk, with being bold about the things I love.

And that’s all it takes, one small bold step, one tiny proof that you can do it, that you can bring at least a little of what you love into your everyday…

and you start building your business, you begin to trust yourself and your passions.

What experience (no matter how tiny) prepared you to do more of what you love? What choice did you make that gave you the confidence to start your business?

PS. Why didn’t I go on with my goal to be a French professor, go to grad school, etc? I student-taught one French class my senior year…and puked every day before the class. My nerves just couldn’t take standing in front of a classroom of people.  I decided to take a year off…and in that year I found my first business-runnin’ job – more on that in the next post.

Related posts:

1. The making of an entrepreneur
2. The making of an entrepreneur – pottery + marketing
3. Path to Yarn – Learning to Knit

Even though I hear this all the time from my college friends (How did a French major end up writing a book about marketing a craft business?), for some reason Kyeli’s question really grabbed me.

How did I end up here?

Since I first realized I was going to eventually grow up and move out (at about age 15), I’ve been unflinchingly focused on the near future. What do I want next year to be like? What can I do now to be ready for that? What classes can I take in high school to prepare me for college (heck, I started attending the community college while still in high school)? Where’s this job going to lead? What’s next?

With all this focus on the future, I don’t spend much time thinking about the past. I’m not into nostalgia. I’d rather feel hope for the future, than nostalgia for the past.  I’d rather you tell me what you’re going to do than what you have done.

But sometimes that means that I jump into the next thing, without explaining (or even thinking about) what led here. I focus on what I’m doing now, not all the stuff in my past that qualifies me to do what I do (I’m not a fan of qualifications – can you do it? Do it!).

But there are so many lessons I learned in my past jobs and experiences – lessons that I bring to the Starship + Explorations - that I don’t want to forget.

My about page gives the short version of this path to full-time business-runnin + lovin, but the full story has many more twists in turn.

There’s my first job, in my extended family’s business (I stuffed envelopes from age 12, and made a $12/hour.)

Then the college job at the scrapbook store, where I grilled the owner for details on how she started her business.

My first post-college job, at a paint-your-own-pottery studio, where I became the manager in 3 months and ran the whole operation for more than 2 years.

Then the yarn store I first sold my yarn to (and began to help manage).

And finally, the total shock of moving away from both of those management jobs, to a small town in East Tennessee where I realized NO ONE would hire a French major with two years of small business managing to do anything interesting. I temped all around the local college campus: in a basement Accounts Payable office, a fancy (and so so strict) fundraising office, and finally landed as a Executive Aide, responsible for maintaining a department website and recording, editing, and introducing podcasts to the local medical education community.

All the while, of course, I was slaving away nights and weekends on my escape plan.

There were moments of deep depression, of unbelieving frustration (I graduated with honors! I paid for my entire education with scholarships! I hired and fired people!… And now I’m maintaining your CALENDAR?!) and the kind of I must work for myself resolve that comes from  realizing that relying on someone else for a paycheck will always, always leave you underpaid and underappreciated.

And of course, after working for myself, and answering other people’s small biz questions, I gathered even more experiences, stories and lessons. As a First Officer, I’ve worked in creative businesses both large and small, as a community manager, a copywriter, an Idea Partner, a teacher, a mentor. I’ve crafted plans that have worked, and those that have sputtered. I’ve marketed products that have sold out in a day, and those that never hit it big.

It was all these experiences, these bosses, and this on-the-job learning that got me here. To the place where I’m about to publish my first book. To the moment that I’m about to turn 30 and am realizing I really love what I do.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to take a break from my future-staring and share what I learned from each of those jobs, the lessons I learned about running a small business, becoming clear about what you offer, and eventually marketing your work. I’ll also be asking questions of you – what did you learn in past jobs?

How can you take your experience in an unrelated field and apply it to what you’re doing today?

Related posts:

1. The making of an entrepreneur – studying French
2. The making of an entrepreneur – pottery + marketing
3. Path to Yarn – Learning to Knit

The answer is: it depends.

Here’s who the Starship has been most beneficial for (from what they tell me about their business):

• Creatives – you might sell your art, your craft, your words or your creative services (we’ve got an editor and a humorist in the Starship) – but no matter what, you think of your business as being based on you, your tastes and your creativity)
• Established businesses – you might have opened your first Etsy shop last week or built your first website 5 years ago, but you’re in business. You’re not still wondering, “Should I start a business? What would I sell?”
• You’re looking for community. Whether you like to gather all the research before you make a decision (the Starship Communication Station is a great place to gather opinions) or you just like to connect with people who get your struggle, the Starship’s greatest benefit (according to the cadets) is the way it provides them with a community that keeps them accountable to their own dreams.

Who hasn’t found the Starship useful:

• Those who are looking for definitive answers (like, “Yes, you must do X.” Or “No, never do Y”). The Starship asks questions of you. You can ask the group for their opinions, or you can ask me for my feedback, but at the end of the day you are the one to gather all that up and then you make the decision.
• Those who don’t get online at least once a week. Although you are welcome to download all the classses at once and never visit the forums (really! You have permission! No one will hassle you!), the fact is the businesses who have seen the most growth are those that participate in some way (the chats, the forums, the live classes) at least once a month. If you don’t get online that often, or aren’t interested in making like-minded creative businesspeople, the Starship won’t change much in your business.
• Those that hate metaphors. The Starship is a metaphor and we talk a lot in metaphors. If that makes you crazy, you might not want to beam aboard.

If you think the Starship might be for you, check it out here. But don’t dally, because there’s only a few spots left and registration ends tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. A launch promise and a Starship
2. Welcome to Your World
3. I fell overboard..

“The act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer – before we can even know the question – we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.”*

Whoa.
This means, that if you’re feeling stuck, right this minute, if you’re feeling like you can’t find the solution…that’s a great place to be. Your epiphany, your creative idea is just around the bend.

When I look back at my own business, I know this to be true. 
I created the Starship in a moment of stuck-ness. I had a handful of students that took classes from me monthly, but they wanted to get to know each other. And so many of them (all of them!) were creating these great ideas for their own businesses, I wanted a way to share it with the other students.
And the students were frustrated that they would take the classes…but not put it into practice. We’d just move on to the next class and they’d think, “Oh, I’ll come back to this.”

I wanted the information, the worksheets, the whole experience to be useful. And fun.

I thought about all these frustrations and got a little cranky over it. I even considered stopping teaching, because what’s the point if it’s not effective? 

And then, as I was writing about how I might quit, I got the idea for the Starship.

• A place where my brilliant students, captains in your own businesses, could come together and learn from each other.
• A community where the weekly chats and check-ins kept your head in the game, kept you thinking about what you wanted to do, to implement, to create.
• A Library full of all my classes, so that you could take the class Rock the Show, right before your first craft show.

It’s been one year since I opened up the Starship privately to the very first students (I didn’t open it to the public until that June), and in the last year I’ve seen other smarties come up to that point of frustration and then, *pop*, they crack through it to the solution.

Have you worked through frustration to pop onto an epiphany?

PS. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that registration for the Starship is open again. This month there are only 10 8 spots and registration closes to new Cadets this Friday. If you want a friendly reminder, you can sign up for reminders here.
If you want to beam aboard in April (and join us as for the Business Systems class next week), come aboard.

*Edited, as I found an actual quote, thanks to BrainPickings.

Related posts:

1. Experimentations in Obsession
2. Finding our place in this space
3. A launch promise and a Starship

My book is a system for talking about your thing from two angles: what makes you and your thing unique, and what your people (the buyers) want from your thing.
Write to Sell starts right off with your customers and figuring out what they want. In fact, the first chapter starts like this:

If you’ve ever written anything for your business (a product description, an about page, an email) then you’re familliar with the struggle to put what you know and think about your item out of your mind and focus on what your customers care and think about what you sell.

And as Write to Sell points out, your buyers are only thinking ONE thing about your product: What’s In It For Me?

This is where makers get mixed up. They think that buyers are thinking “Oh, this is handmade! I love handmade! I want to buy it!“, so they write about how handmade it is, what they used, what their process is like.

In reality, buyers are thinking “Oh, this is handmade and buying handmade is better because….(it reinforces my self-image as someone who doesn’t buy mass-made stuff, it’s sustainably-made, it makes me feel like I’m supporting an artist, it’s longer-lasting, etc).”

Your job is to fill in that blank for the buyer, to explain why buying this handmade thing is, in fact, better.

The author shares a helpful equation for filling in the blank.

Features ->Advantages -> Benefits

For example:
Feature: my Monthly Yarn Mail is spun-just-for-you and sent automatically, once-a-month
Advantage: You get the colors you want, delivered right to your door
Benefit: You don’t have to “hunt” for the perfect yarn, it comes right to you.

Let’s do another example, this time with something technical:
Feature: This bag is double stitched
Advantage: It’s very strong
Benefit: You never have to worry about it busting, even if you have it stuffed full of your kids toys and food and books.

Walking through this equation in your product description or sales page makes it obvious to the buyer why they care and it how it benefits them.

What’s the FAB of your product?

Related posts:

1. Do you want fries with that?
2. Your Questions, Answered: It’s all about the benefits Edition
3. It costs how much?! aka, Marketing with Price