I am working on a very special project for engaged military couples. I am seeking partners, sponsors, and business participants in all areas of the wedding industry. Sorry to be so cryptic but I want to keep the big surprise for the couples. If you’d like to learn more, please pop me an email at info {at} diybride [dot] com or use le contact form.

Some of the cool stuff: There’s been a major shift in the budget demographics with strong upticks in the percentages of both micro budget and luxe budget readers. (Hello, recession!) It’s a fascinating shift. The average visitor is much craftier than the one I saw just 3 years ago. The interests of my readers is also shifting to different kinds of projects, which I love.

From the emails and interaction I have with my DIYers I had a sense of some of the changes I’ve seen in the survey but there was no way to quantify it all. The survey has been an easy and handy way to pointing me in the right direction for this year.

If you have not yet conducted a survey of your viewers this year, I highly recommend it. Making assumptions about the needs of your readers or basing your decisions on outdated demographics can be a detrimental to your business. How will you know if you’re meeting the needs of your audience/client-base?

Here’s my tip o’ the day for greater success: Get direct feedback from those you’re reaching, listen carefully to what their needs are and incorporate those that fit your business’ mission into your strategy for the coming year.

Question: How do you feel about DIY taking away business from wedding pro’s?

My Answer: Saying that DIY is “taking away” something implies ownership. No vendor/service provider owns a place in any wedding until a couple deems it so. Even then it’s a by-invitation position, one of privelege, and not an entitlement.

In fact the only “required” vendor for a wedding to legally take place is an officiant. Everything else is purely optional.

I, and the DIY movement, can’t take away anything that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The question caught me a bit off guard.  At a time when every web site, community, and blog is scrambling to offer more DIY content to their audience it’s hard for me to imagine that most vendors aren’t fully on board and trying to accommodate do-it-yourselfers.

In The Knot’s most recent user survey, 55% of their respondents said they were going to DIY some aspect of their wedding. DIY is, in fact, everywhere and it has gone beyond the “budget” bride.

DIY is no longer just a lower-end budget option. It is not at all uncommon for couples with $50,000, $60,000, $75,000+ budgets to incorporate DIY into their weddings now. For some it’s a status symbol, a way to show off their creativity. For others it’s a deeply personal way for couples to become active participants in the execution of their wedding. For many DIY is a way to save money so they can upgrade other parts of their budgeted items and, for others, it’s the only way they can afford to have the wedding they want – and deserve.

The DIY movement is a great democratizer in our industry. It empowers couples, creatively and financially, so don’t expect them to relinquish that kind of control anytime soon.

This isn’t the death knell of the wedding industry; it’s a shift.  Nothing’s being “taken away” from the industry. There’s still demand for stationers, cake designers, jewelers, photographers, caterers, musicians, etc. But now there’s a lot of new opportunity in the industry because of DIY. How each business adapts to the shift and looks for innovative ways to serve the new DIY mindset will decide their fate.

Aliventures’ post on Why Your Creativity Matters. My favorite quotes from the article:

To create means producing something which didn’t exist before and which wouldn’t have existed without you. A painting, a blog post, a novel, a piece of jewellery – whatever it is, it’s yours.

To create is to dream, to imagine, to take a part of yourself and to place it in the world.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED presentation on nurturing creativity. I particularly love how she addresses the myth of the suffering artist.

• The team at Envelopments, who happen to be some of the nicest people on the planet, launched their own blog.
• My friends Saundra Hadley and Jennifer Jasiczek have teamed up to bring Saun’s {Get Real} Sales Training Workshop to the fine citizens of Texas.
• Eventology, The Science of Running a Successful Wedding Business,  has a few open slots remaining for this year’s event. Register now!
• Preston Bailey and Marcy Blum, undoubtedly the best-known and most-respected talents in the industry, are opening their doors for a mentoring weekend next month.
• The Wedding Report, an industry statistics and market research center, reports the average cost of a wedding decreased last year to $19,581 from $21,814 in 2008.

I’m embarking on a tour of the U.S. this year and am reaching out for some assistance.

My Immediate Need: I’m looking for some venue ideas and locations for  wedding craft workshops. If you know of fun, funky, affordable venues in your area that can accommodate at 20 – 25 people, please send them my way.

About The Tour: I’ll be teaching day-long wedding craft workshops around the US in support of my latest book, The Crafty Countdown. The price point per person is around $75 to keep it within the reach of most DIY couples. There will be hands-on projects along with straight demos of do-it-yourself crafts. Attendees will get a swag bag with instruction sheets, sample product, and other goodies.

Sponsorship opportunities are available for swag bag inclusion, program mentions, and even project demos. Please contact me for details at khris -{at}- diybride -{dot}- com or via the contact form.

Last weekend I participated in a holiday boutique at the art studio where I teach. Originally I had planned to sell a series of kick-ass prints but the ink hadn’t dried in time. (Note: last minute print runs will always bite you on the arse. Plan ahead. Waaaaay ahead.) The night before the boutique I scrambled to put things together to have something to sell.

As I displayed my small collection of bits ‘n bobs, I was struck at how unlike me these things were – especially when I looked around at the other awesome artisans’ works. Their stuff was rocking my little crafty world. Their creations were more my style than most of my own work. How could this be?

It has been a conscious effort to create projects for DIY Bride (the site and books) that appeal to a broad range of tastes and styles, to create things that can be adaptable to a multitude of styles.  Which is fine. I like that challenge. But somewhere along the line I’ve lost my own creative voice and have become a generic version of my crafty self. This, dudes and dudettes, totally bums me out.

Going back to last weekend, there was one project of mine that got a lot of attention from customers and artists alike. The project was one I adored, a last-minute spark of an idea, that was fun and playful – totally something that reflected my true creative self. It sold really fast and it was my only sale that day.

Why the heck am I telling you this? There’s a lesson here that I want to share as you’re crafting your wedding day.

Create things that make you happy. Don’t try to fit into a mold that’s been set by your family, wedding blogs, wedding magazines, vendors, your friends, or anyone else. Your wedding is a deeply personal and important day. Make it as authentically YOU as you possibly can. Break rules! Mix ‘n’ match styles! Be daring and bold or as subtle as you want to be. The only expectations you need to meet are your own.  This is the path to true happiness in and beyond crafting. {ed: This applies to your business as well.}

In spirit of authenticity you’ll be seeing more projects here that reflect who I am because I’d like to share that side of me with you. ‘Cos we’re friends and I like you. Maybe we’ll connect on those projects, maybe not. Whatever. It’s all cool. (Don’t worry – I’ll still be doing the adaptable stuff because I know lots of you  need little sparks to get you started.) You’re always welcome to send me your creations, too. I love seeing the uber-cool stuff that you guys are doing and the Disciples of DIY Bride really love seeing “real world” projects from their peers (that’s you).

Thanks for sharing this moment with me. Now, let’s get crafting!

Keeping the site running is truly the toughest part of my job and something that I can’t readily afford to outsource. I depend a great deal on free (or nearly free) solutions and that means a lot of researching, learning, tweaking, and hoping I don’t mess up anything too much. ‘Tis the nature of being DIYer, right? Don’t get me wrong – I do kind of dig getting my inner nerd on but it’s only by necessity that I even bother to get this in depth with the stuff that I do.

2009 brought tremendous growth and, with that, came tech challenges I wasn’t really prepared to handle. Massively important lessons about manageable growth, outsourcing and patience came my way. I have big HUGE plans for DIY Bride but I’m on a more realistic schedule for getting to there. Finding the balance of what my community members want/need and what I can do on my own is the hard part of the equation.

Some of you have asked me about the tech behind DIY Bride. Here’s what I’ve got goin’ on:

• DIY Bride blog runs on self-hosted Wordpress platform. I adore WP! I’ve been using it since 2005/2006. I use free and paid off-the-shelf plugins, available to the general WP population.
• I host at Hostgator. I’ve bounced around to other hosting companies but keep coming back to HG. It’s been the most reliable, affordable, and easy-to-deal-with host I’ve encountered.
• I was using Joomla to handle the social network/community. I love the idea of Joomla (started using it when it was just a beta of Mambo years and years ago – pardon my geeky nostalgia here but it was the first big tech thing I ever got into) but really hate it in “real world” usage. There’s promise there but it’s too far outside of my skill level, patience, and needs to make it a practical solution for DIY Bride right now.
• Before Joomla I had toyed with Wordpress Mu but it wasn’t really suitable for what I was looking for at that time. Since I abandoned Mu over a year ago, BuddyPress was launched and looks like the contender for the great community features I have in store for the site. I’ve checked out Dolphin and Elgg and some hosted solutions but none really appeal as much as BP.
• The forums are now integrated with the main site (but not yet available for member usage). I’ve used phpBB, vBulletin, and Kunena in the past;  Simple:Press is the newest forum package.
• It’s no secret that I’ve been developing an ecommerce wing of DIY Bride. I’ve been playing around with a ton of different shop solutions (from free to $300) with various degrees of satisfaction. Haven’t found that perfect fit yet  and I’m mourning that 300 bucks right now.
• I develop my site offline on my own localhost server before it goes live. On my Mac I use MAMP to set up my dev area.

As new or would-be authors (or those who write book reviews or ask for freebies) there are some things you need to know about the author-side of the publishing industry.

1. Authors generally have very little (if any) input about the design and layout of their books. It is the publishing house who will decide how the book looks and they have the final say on all aspects of design, content and layout.

2. Authors receive a limited number of copies, anywhere from 1 – 30 is typical,  of our book for free as part of our contract. Any beyond that we have to purchase ourselves. Most publishing houses will offer us a discount but we still gotta pay up for our books.

3. The publishing process is a long one. It takes about a full year after the completed manuscript has been submitted for a book to hit the shelves.

4. Book tours are pretty rare these days. Publishers have stopped paying for them except in very rare cases. If you see an author signing at your local book seller or specialty retailer it’s likely that she set it up herself (unless she’s already a household name like JK Rowling, Giada De Laurentis, Stephenie Meyer…). For most authors/publishers a book tour is not a good way to spend those precious marketing dollars.

5. Authors are now largely responsible for marketing their books in partnership with their publishers. Every author has to submit a marketing plan as part of her book proposal. This takes an inordinate amount of time, effort, and funding – just as much as marketing and sales for any other kind of business. Budget your time and funds accordingly.

6. The “advance”, a sum of money an author receives before the book is published that’s based on the projected sales of the book, is  paid in 3 installments: upon the signing of the contract, when the completed manuscript is accepted by the editor, and when the book is released. Some publishers pay faster than others. There can be long stretches of time with no income.

7. There’s not a lot of money in publishing for the average writer. The amount of the advance varies greatly from publisher to publisher, genre to genre, and writer to writer. Let’s just say that the vast majority of writers can’t quit their day jobs and live off the advance for a year. In the craft book world I’ve heard the typical advances range $5,000 – $25,000. Most books – in all genres – never make back their advance which means the authors will never see any money beyond the amount of the advance.

8. Oprah isn’t calling. When news of my first book deal broke to my inner circle, well-meaning friends and family started asking in earnest when I’d be on Oprah. (Because, hey, isn’t that where all authors just go to to pimp their books?) You just can’t get on TV shows or appear in magazines because you’ve written a book. If you’re lucky your PR and marketing work done before the book is released will get you there but those are opportunities are few and must be worked & prepared for.

9. Weird people start coming out of the woodwork when they learn you’ve written a book. Luckily most are well-meaning and want to be helpful and supportive. There are others who are toxic. You’ve been warned.

10. Writing a book is hard work that takes skill, discipline, and planning.  It is, in and of itself, a business endeavor with strict deadlines and tight profit margins. Expect it to be a full-time job while you’re writing and again when you’re promoting it upon its release.