Three Books (and one E-Book) on Starting A Home-Based Jewelry Making Business

When it comes to learning how to get started making money by making jewelry there are several different resources you can turn to, depending upon your background. If you know a lot of people who are already doing it, you can turn to them and learn from their advice and, in some cases, mistakes. You can read jewelry making blogs, attend business courses and solicit advice from any number of organizations and store owners who already work with jewelry or help people get started with their own businesses.

I personally like having resources I can go back to again and again, which is why I often turn to books when I want to learn something new. Books are an affordable way to get started in making and selling jewelry if you’re just looking to make a little extra money on the side or are just beginning the process of exploring what sort of home-based business you might want to run. I always consider business books to be little gems that almost always pay for themselves: it just takes one little trick or marketing idea to sell an extra couple of pieces of jewelry in a month and you’ve made enough profit to not only make more jewelry, but to also pay for the book! Here are some new and highly recommended books about starting your own home-based jewelry business:

How to Start a Home-Based Jewelry Making Business: *Turn your passion into profit *Develop a smart business plan *Set market-appropriate prices *Profit … on the Internet (Home-Based Business Series) – Yes, that’s really the title and yes, that very long name says it all! This new paperback book from Marie Loughran starts the very beginning by asking basic questions about what it means to be self-employed, what you’ll need to get started and even helps you examine some of the different approaches people take when making jewelry for others to buy. It’s a good book for the beginner jewelry maker who wants to set up her own business but doesn’t really know where to start.

Marie covers business plans, setting up payment options and bank accounts, pricing your jewelry, financial management marketing and all sorts of online sales considerations, tips and tricks. She covers selling at craft fairs, finding distributors and even touches upon how you might be able to get celebrities to promote your jewelry! It’s over 200 pages and it was just released in the last month or so. It’s currently the newest book about starting a jewelry making business available!

101 Ways to Market Your Online Jewelry Shop: Free and Cheap Ways to Market, Promote, Advertise, and Increase Traffic to Your Online or Etsy Jewelry Shop and Sell Your Jewelry Now – Here’s another new book from this year that has a really long title that encompasses a lot of different aspects of running a successful jewelry making business. It’s a short book with, as the title suggests, 101 single different ideas to market and sell more jewelry. Each idea takes up about one page, so this is really a book that gives you short burst of ideas or a kick in the creative pants when you need some new and inventive ways of marketing and selling your handmade jewelry.

A few of the suggestions are kind of obvious, but most are insightful and creative. Obviously it assumes you already have an online jewelry shop or storefront and doesn’t really explain how to go about setting one up on your own. The purpose of this book is to drive web traffic to your site after it’s built and ready to sell jewelry. The book doesn’t give you all the details of how to implement some of these plans, but it’s still a good creative start to marketing your jewelry online and in other venues. Really, most of these marketing ideas could be used with just about any art of craft item you make, so you’re not just limited to marketing jewelry with some of these methods.

Sell Your Jewelry: How to Start a Jewelry Business and Make Money Selling Jewelry at Boutiques, Fairs, Trunk Shows, and Etsy – Yes, yes another long titled book about how to sell the jewelry you make. If you want a little bit of both how to start your own jewelry business and little bit about how to market your jewelry online, then this book might be the one for you. This covers less about how to set up your business initially and more about how to sell, price, and market your handmade jewelry.

It covers different types of sales, how to set your pricing, tax implications, packaging and other aspects about making and selling custom jewelry that you may not have thought about. If you already have a jewelry business but are looking to expand, this book may be for you.

Many reviewers have said this book was the easiest to read and understand. It’s packed with useful information that is both practical and authoritative from both a business and jewelry making perspective.

Last but not least is a fairly new jewelry business E-Book (electronic book) that you can download and begin reading almost instantly if you just can’t wait. It’s called Bead Jewelry Profits – At Last and it’s written by Dionne Payn. Ebooks are incredibly earth-friendly (no paper!) and you can read them just about anywhere if you have a laptop or even a smartphone like an iPhone or Blackberry that can read .pdf files. Like most e-books, Bead Jewelry Profits – At Last comes with a bunch of extra resources that you won’t normally get out of a regular jewelry business book. Besides the instant e-book you also get:

• Two Months of Free E-Mail Coaching and Support from Dionne herself!
• The Bead Jewelry Profits Business Plan that will get you going in the right direction before you even begin!
• The Bead Jewelry Profits Pricing Calculator
• The Bead Jewelry Profits Audio Guide To Organizing Your Time And Getting More Out Of Life
• FREE Updates to the Bead Jewelry Profits e-book

That’s why e-books are becoming so popular! You aren’t just ordering a book when you get Bead Jewelry Profits – At Last, you’re getting a whole system of support and instruction!

Again, the best thing about buying and reading any of these jewelry making books is that just one or two ideas from a book can make you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in sales! And these books are all good reference material and contain a lot of information that you can go back to time and time again, so they’ll be useful for years to come. Happy reading!