Should I sell digital products as a maker?

Probably yes, and the probably matters, because the reason most makers are told to sell digital products is the wrong one. Nobody starts down this road dreaming about PDFs. You start the day you feel the ceiling: every single thing you sell has to be made by your own hands, one at a time, and there are only so many hours in your week, so your income has a hard maximum built into it that working harder cannot move.

I felt that ceiling hardest in my quilt years. However well a launch went, the next quilt still took the same hours as the last one, and somewhere in every Christmas rush I would realise that the only way to earn more that month was to sleep less. A digital product was the first thing I ever sold that cost me nothing per sale, and that is the honest reason to consider one, rather than the passive income promise, which is mostly not true and worth dealing with straight away.

Are digital products really passive income?

No, and I want that said plainly before you spend a month making one. A good pattern or tutorial takes real work up front: writing it, testing it, photographing the steps, fixing the instruction that makes perfect sense to you and to nobody else. And then it needs selling, the same as everything else you make, because "make it once, sell it forever" quietly skips over the part where anybody finds out it exists.

The market is crowded too. Digital files are easy to list, so everybody lists them, and the price pressure down there is brutal. Competing on price is just as much of a losing game with a download as it is with handmade, possibly more so, because a stranger comparing 2 files she cannot touch has even less to go on than a stranger comparing 2 quilts.

You will still answer customer questions as well, because somebody will always open the file on her phone and message you when page 3 won't load, which is fine, that's simply what having customers is.

But the advantages are real, and they deserve saying just as plainly. No materials, no postage, no dispatch time, no stock in the spare room, and no order keeping you up past midnight because the fair is on Saturday. When 30 people buy in the same weekend, your week looks exactly the same as when 3 people do.

And one advantage gets missed almost completely, and it's the one I care about most: a digital product can be sold to somebody who loves your work but cannot stretch to the £60 quilt. Hold onto her, because she's the whole point of this.

What digital products can a maker actually sell?

This is the bit that stalls it, because "digital product" sounds like something a tech person builds, when really it comes out of the expertise already sitting in your hands. You have spent years getting good at something. The product is a way of handing a piece of that over.

It might be the pattern for the thing you make. It might be a tutorial for the technique people always comment on, the one with "how do you get it so neat" sitting under every photo. Or the printable version of something you currently sell physically, or the spreadsheet or template you built for yourself years ago because nothing out there did the job properly.

The honest test is the simplest one: have people already asked you for it? If the same question keeps turning up in your messages and comments, your audience has already told you what to make, and demand you have actually heard beats any amount of guessing at what might sell.

If nobody has asked you for anything yet, that's a different problem, and it's worth solving before you build the product rather than after.

Is it worth doing when it only sells for a few pounds?

The first digital thing I ever sold was priced at £2.50, and it went on to sell 157 times. That comes to £392.50 all in, and you will not see £392.50 on anybody's billboard.

But I did the other sum too. 157 sales of anything handmade would have been weeks of cutting and sewing and queueing in the post office, and 157 sales of that file were the same amount of work for me as 1 sale of it. That is what breaking the link between your hours and your income actually looks like at the small end, a bit unglamorous and completely real.

Price it properly though, because cheap never means careless. The sums matter at £2.50 exactly like they matter at £60, and the backwards way I price handmade products applies to a file just as well as it does to a quilt.

And now the woman who couldn't stretch to the £60 quilt comes back in. A low priced digital product is very often somebody's first ever purchase from you, and the first purchase is the hardest one you will ever get. Once she has paid you £2.50 and had a lovely experience, she is a customer, with your name in her inbox and a reason to trust the next thing you make, where a follower who only ever loved your photos has never crossed that line.

£2.50 gets her across it

How do I actually sell a digital product?

This is the part the passive income crowd goes very quiet on.

The obvious move is to upload the file to a marketplace and let the search box do the work. But have you considered what actually happens to a digital product uploaded somewhere nobody knows who you are? It lands next to thousands of nearly identical files, the only thing a stranger can compare is the price, and the race to the bottom on digital marketplaces makes handmade undercutting look gentle.

Mine never won a search result in its life. All 157 of those sales traced back to emails sent to people who already knew me, people who had bought the physical things or watched them being made, and when I told them the file existed, some of them wanted it. Not one sale arrived from a stranger typing something into a search box.

Which is the realisation that should change how you build the thing: the file was the quick part, and the list it sold to had taken me years. So yes, probably, make the digital product, and go in knowing it will only ever sell as well as you can reach people who already care about your work.

How you warm up the interest before anything goes on sale, and how the digital version sits alongside the physical collection so the same launch earns twice, is more than one post can carry. That's the whole of the Handmade Launch System, and the £2.50 mistake is in there too, because I'd rather you didn't repeat it.

Every one of those 157 sales started life in an inbox. Worth thinking about whose inbox yours would start in