Become an Author

Hi everyone,

Crazypatterns is one of my favorite platforms for patterns. I also have lots of ideas and am diligently documenting my creations. So far, though, it’s just been a hobby. Now here’s my question… I’m still caring for my severely disabled daughter and currently have a part-time job that I do from home. Are there any authors here who manage to juggle this as a side business alongside a job and children? I realize that you’d have to register it as a small business, deal with the tax office, keep books, and so on… Thanks for your answers! 

Hi Nancy,

I’m also a mother of four and run my sewing pattern design and blog business as a small business.

I don’t have another job.

First of all: I love what I do and never want to do anything else! In terms of the work itself, I couldn’t be happier :).

But let’s get down to business: Your question is really about the effort involved, and I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to that.

Especially in the beginning (the first two years!), you put in an endless amount of time without really seeing much money come back. At least, that’s been my experience.

Success only really takes off once you’ve built up a small product range and gained some recognition. You also learn a lot, become more professional, and simply get better at many things.

To illustrate what I mean:

My “foundation” is my own blog with a shop. My core business is e-books with sewing patterns.

The blog drives a huge amount of traffic thanks to high-quality content. Behind this content are SEO texts, good photos, strong reach on Pinterest, social media presences on Facebook and Instagram, AND a newsletter that I send to my subscribers twice a week.

All of this has grown since 2016. I’ve built it all up step by step.

My shop here on Crazypatterns has been part of it from the very beginning and forms one part of the whole, just like other shops on other online marketplaces.

Here’s what I do every week:
- Sewing (in the evenings, when the kids are asleep) and taking photos for patterns (camera! good lamp!)
- Editing photos (for patterns, social media, lookbooks, blog, newsletter...)
- Writing texts (social media, teasers, product descriptions, newsletter, blog posts...)
- Keeping technical and legal matters up to date
- Bookkeeping (1–2 mornings every 4 weeks, 2 hours each)
- Developing ideas for social media
- Organizing test sewing
- Planning and implementing editorial content for blog / e-books / social media / newsletter -> images, texts!
- Photo shoots for design images
- Creating lookbooks from the test sewing projects
- Planning and carrying out marketing campaigns with collaboration partners
- Answering customer and reader questions
- Recently: shooting videos
- Developing concepts / optimizing the website
- SEO training
- Keyword research

These are the typical tasks my workdays revolve around. I work four mornings, roughly from 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., and then often from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. In the evenings, I do some sewing, usually from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. On Fridays I go to yoga, and the weekend is the weekend.

If you’re just starting out, you won’t need a lot of this yet. And maybe you only want to run a small shop here on Crazypatterns. In that case, a lot of what I do with my blog won’t apply to you.

But I definitely recommend that you at least create and maintain an Instagram profile so you can link to your shop here from there.

I hope I was able to give you some answers :). The amount of effort is basically in your own hands: it’s best to plan different stages, like a staircase. For a newsletter, you first have to build up subscribers anyway, so you won’t be writing anything for that at the beginning.

Best regards,
Sonja

Hello nancy-schmidt,
it’s great to have you here as an author.
If you have any questions, you can reach out to the authors here in the forum or contact support.
https://www.crazypatterns.net/de/contacts/support
As soon as you’ve uploaded your first pattern, the authors’ forum will be unlocked for you. There you’ll find detailed information on all aspects of being an author.
I wish you every success.

@Sonja,
you’re really hardworking. :-)

Haha, thanks @Josefa :D