Thank you, everyone, for joining me on this little blogging adventure. I appreciate the comments and the emails tremendously! You’ve been quick to respond, engage. Love it!

There have been some really good questions and comments rolling in from you guys. I thought it’d be fun to publicly address a few each week.

Jennifer P, in response to my ‘What Is It That You Do‘ post asked why the DIY Bride blog wasn’t profitable if I got a book deal from it.

The book and the blog are 2 separate parts of my business. While they overlap in terms of audience and promotion, the revenue streams are entirely different from one another. My publishers don’t pay me to operate my blog. My blog advertisers don’t pay me to write books.  The time, materials, labor are different for each which makes the profit/loss margin different for each. Make sense?

Alianna wants to know why DIY needs to be legitimized to the wedding industry. (Mentioned in the competition post.)

The do-it-yourself crowd has a bad rep in the wed industry. Some see DIY as a threat to their income. Some are convinced that DIY is nothing but low class, shabby (not in a chic way) projects. Some have had bad experiences with DIY gone wrong. Some are just plain ignorant to how great DIY can be.

There’s also an undercurrent of entitlement in the wedding professional ranks. There are a good many vendors who think that the only real way to have a wedding is to hire professionals to do everything. DIY automatically equals disaster, because, well, you’re too stupid to know what your own wedding should be like. A more common belief is that the vendors are always more creative and talented than you are so not hiring them will turn your wedding into “an arts and crafts” project.

Not all vendors hold these beliefs, of course, but a great many still do. I became involved in the professional side of the industry with the intent of changing hearts and minds. It’s been a long, hard road but it’s getting easier. More and more vendors are welcoming DIYers with open arms. I even consult with a number of wedding planners on how to bring DIY projects to their clients. It’s really fun to see the changing attitudes.

This underlines why it’s so important that there is competition in the DIY blogosphere. The more people that showcase kick-ass projects and talk about the process, the more awareness it brings to the industry about what DIYers can bring to the table and how great we can coexist in the same industry, let alone the same wedding.