Amazingly after being sick for a week I had one day of action and  then went down with a cold !  It could be because my recently returned traveller son has been ill upstairs for the last few days and guess who has been waiting on him? Hmmmm!

Anyway I haven’t been able to do any creating or making for days now but have used the time ill to read  a couple of marketing books.  First I read Commercial Creatives by Mike Carthew and  Anna Ward which I bought for my Kindle after reading about it in Wendy’s Handmade Harbour giveaway.  I enjoyed the book and it has quite a lot of good advice, some of which a lot of us already know, but it sometimes takes reading it in print to bring the points home! This book is good if you want to grow your business to be more than just a hobby and, I felt, was more targeted at people who were already having a degree of success.

I have already put into place some of the advice from the book in regards to marketing and next I will be redesigning my online shops to make things more streamlined and improving my product pictures!

Another book I would recommend if you have an Etsy shop is “How to create an income from home with a successful and profitable etsy shop’, by Rebecca Garlardo.  This is very good for new, and experienced Etsy sellers who aren’t getting enough sales. It has some valuable advice about not accepting sales commissions without doing all the maths first to see if it is a) possible in the time given, and b) profitable.

Both these books are fairly cheap on a Kindle which is a bonus but you may find that some of the text in tables, or links is very faint. I think these must be coloured text and my Kindle is only black and white.

So that was my creative week! What’s been going on everywhere else I wonder? Time to pop over to Handmade Monday and see what all the other crafty folk have been up to!