I have a fairly short post for you today.
With pen show season well and truly underway, I’ve seen a plethora of posts and videos about pen show hauls — I’ve shared my own, too. And it’s great.
It makes me happy to see people keeping the pen world afloat. Even better when posts/hauls feature indie-made pens. The world is tough right now, and every pen purchased helps keep an indie maker afloat. And that leads to my — currently — unanswerable question.
I love supporting indie makers and small businesses. Unfortunately, pens are consumable goods, and I already have too many. Yes, I said the forbidden sentence. I have too many pens. It’s why I adopted my “no pretty ink sticks” rule. But, that eliminates many indie-made pens.
So, I do my best to tell people about indie makers in conversations, through my blog, and on my Instagram. But it’s not as good as the monetary support of purchases — especially since my audience is still fairly small.
Which leaves me with the question: how do I support indie pen makers when I’m trying to buy less pens, specifically few to none of the kinds of pens they make?
