Thursday, February 21, 2013

Day 91: Killing Your Darlings

In literary editing there's a phrase to "kill your darlings," meaning to cut any superfluous writing that only exists because you love how it's written, not because it actually needs to be there to advance plot or character development.

Today I killed some darlings. In looking at past collage sheet orders, I noticed that my half-page sheets (4.25x9.75 inches) sell about ten times better than the tiny little quarter sheets (4.25x5.5 inches). Whether this is because the larger sheets sell better in comparison to the smaller, or that stores with larger volume happen to purchase the larger sheets more often and thus increase the total sold that way, I'm not sure. But in either case, it was time to make the hard decision to essentially reduce my collage sheet offerings by half in order to help my brick & mortar stores do better. There's probably a couple of designs I could retire as well (like the kitty cats), but give me a moment to recuperate from killing off the little sheets first.

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