Summit of Awesome Day One: Part Two, Crafty Boogaloo
This post was guest written by Christiane Knight of Three Ravens and The World of Xiane.
Because an hour of Debbie Stoller and Laurie Henzel wasn’t enough, I just had to join their early afternoon workshop on the topic of Shameless Self Promotion. Just up my alley!
The gist of this workshop was something that every good business owner should know: how to craft a pitch to a magazine, local TV, or other media to get them interested in what you do. The goal was to give an intriguing story about an angle of your business that the media can easily spin into a compelling piece that features you and your work.
This was challenging, but fun! We were given homework to craft our own statements about our biz, and to think of three different media titles we could send our pitch to - my examples being a knitting magazine, a weekly blog that covers the arts scene in Baltimore, and a local TV station’s morning show. Coming up with these ideas was really thinking outside the box for me, as I’d never thought much about pitching locally! I’d go as far as to say that this workshop was a crucial step in the growth of my business, because of the ideas it generated for me.
Also, Debbie and Laurie? Totally funny. It was a fantastic learning experience, and I’d highly recommend seeing them speak if you have the chance.
Another breakthrough session coming up! How To Use Light In Your Product Shots was presented by Miranda Lievers, a photographer with Blue Olive Photography from Vancouver, BC.
Now, there’s a ton of info online about improving your product shots, and some of it is contradictory. A lot of it recommends using a lightbox to create the right lighting situation. I have to admit that for myself, the lightbox idea has not worked so well. I prefer natural light and a non-white background for my shots - not that there’s anything wrong with the lightbox look, I just find that I don’t get the feel that I’m looking for using that technique.
Miranda, on the other hand, advocates using what she calls “window light” - that is, natural light streaming in through a single source of a window. And the best part of what she showed us? It used low tech supplies to help us control the light, and was super easy to understand! She demonstrated how to control the natural light source via simple reflective items like aluminum foil and posterboard, and gave us an extensive tour of example shots from actual product listings. This was a really beneficial lesson!
My last session of this action-packed day was Blogs, Books, and Magazines, Oh My! This was a talk about pitching one’s book or article idea, approached from different aspects of publishing. From the Literary Agent’s point of view, we had Kate McKean of the Howard Morhain Literary Agency - she explained what a literary agent can do for you, including negotiation with publishers, explaining legal details, and making sure you get paid. [always nice!]
Kari Chapin [The Handmade Marketplace] was our published writer’s point of view. She had some great insight to offer about what writing a book is really like, including the pressure that happens when you receive an advance for your book... then have to come up with the content. She also explained some of the realities of how royalties work, and some of the things that, as a writer, you don’t get to choose. One of the things that she talked about that I never realized: once you’ve written a book, you never really stop promoting it. It’s important to keep interest up if you’d like to get royalties on your work rolling in!
The blogging world was represented by Lish Dorset from Craftzine [and also Handmade Detroit and My Vintage Kitschen] - she encouraged us to write articles and submit ideas to Craft and other crafty blogs, as there is always the need for content, especially for blogs that post daily. She recommended talking about subjects that you are very excited about, because that enthusiasm translates well, and submitting great photos if you have them. She got me fired up about writing even more blog posts about the crafty world and getting them published!
As the day drew to a close, we were all reluctant to leave. The Summit of Awesome is such an all-encompassing day of info and camaraderie, I didn’t even realize it was the end of the day! I’m excited to dive into the awesomeness tomorrow - and I’ll be sharing Day 2 with you as soon as I’m back!