Beading Instructions

Sandy Paluzzi
The Bead Peddler

Yet another way to make money off your jewelry designs is to sell instructions for making the piece.  Instructions can be printed in black and white, but they must be thorough and easy to understand.  Illustrations are essential.    If you are unable to write and illustrate your instructions, you can hire a graphic artist.  I am  going to break company policy here and specifically recommend Dwyn Tomlinson who has written many free jewelry projects for this magazine.  Dwyn can be reached at dwyn@beadfx.com .  After you receive your instructions, give them to a friend or family member to make sure they can recreate the piece.

Once you get your instructions ready for sale, you have several open marketing venues.  Etsy and artfire are the obvious online choices.  There are also websites such as jewelrylessons.com that exist solely to market beading tips, tutorials and patterns.   Search on beading patterns and peruse the various sites that sell or display projects.

Beading magazines are always open to great instructions.  Most magazine have clearly written submission instructions available to authors.

Finally, the brick and mortar world offers a plentitude of opportunities.  Your local bead store may be interested in displaying instructions for projects that use their beads.  Instructions also sell well at trade or craft shows. 

The biggest money maker of all may be to hold a beading circle where you oversee others making the project.  You can charge one price which includes the price of your time, the instructions and materials.  If nothing else, a beading circle is a good way to test market your instructions.  You will quickly discover if the directions need to be tweaked before the tutorials go solo.  Beading circles can be held anywhere including  a beading store or someone's home.  A fun idea is to team up with a local, reasonably priced restaurant to make the evening a dinner/craft hour.  Several restaurants have small private rooms which would be perfect for your use.

Instructions are a good way to increase the return on your design time.  In the jewelry world, as in all markets, there is more than one way to make money off a good idea.  While you may reject several open venues, it never hurts to consider all avenues for increasing sales.  This is especially true in today's economic environment

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