I mentioned Craft Seller magazine in a recent post and I realised thought I meant to write about this a while ago, I never got round to it. I became aware of it through a friend, Katy, who had mentioned it on her blog. Go on and give that post a read, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s in the magazine.
As I said in my comment on Katy’s post, the idea of this magazine horrifies me. Having a magazine give you patterns of stuff to make to sell, tell you how and where to sell it makes me sad for the people who have genuine talent and ideas and work so hard to get their work out there. I’m all for people to be encouraged to be creative, don’t get me wrong, but I believe that encouraging people to make a quick buck in this way is fundamentally wrong.
This hasn’t taken up too much of my brain cells of late (I’ve had other things to think about) but when I started to think about it again, I did some research and found I am not alone in this standpoint. And even more worryingly, it seems that the fears Katy touched on around copyright are being borne out. The first thing I saw when I started researching it was this post by a well-known name, Cupcakes For Clara.
And then I found this post where people have already voiced the same concerns as me. And then this one. And this one from someone who’d read it and was really annoyed about the content, too. I could go on but I’m sure you can use Google for yourself.
If you need a magazine to tell you what to make, how to make it and then how to sell it, you are doing it wrong. What I love about the indie craft community is seeing someone take their idea and put it into practice and making a unique piece of work. This magazine goes COMPLETELY against that and only serves to fuel the overcrowding of the marketplace by essentially creating a production line in living rooms across Britain knocking out identical products (of dubious copyright status) being sold for rock-bottom prices and undercutting the pros.
Have you read it? Have I got this all wrong? I’d love to be wrong about this.
Anti Bullshit League 