How to Price Crafts Book Review

We were asked to review James Dillehay’s latest book on marketing your craft called “How to Price Crafts & Things You Make To Sell”.   We’ve already implemented a few of the many practical tips he gives to improve and increase your sales.

Are you selling your arts and crafts for the maximum price?  How do you determine what that price should be?  Jim shows step by step how to identify your production costs (material costs, labor, overhead, and unit costs) and then decide at what profit margin you can price them at.

Some of the tips we found immediately useful were helping to create a better artist’s statement and how to word a more descriptive wording to our online listings.  We use a slide presentation to explain our process of making our polymer clay art pieces at our shows but after reading the book we are now going to focus our slide show on our finished products that will aid in selling more product.

Once you start to make a little money, Jim details the bookkeeping skills you will need especially aimed at artists and crafters – everything from preparing profit/loss statements for a back loan to tax advantages at year end.

Other tips include: organizing your time and workplace, how to emphasize your greener side, and determining and maximizing your profit margin.

Even if your craft business is running smoothly and getting bigger year by year, we think everyone can benefit from Jim’s new book because we all need a “tune-up” now and then.