Managing Demand

For those of you who sell your dulcimers as a business... Maybe you can provide some advice.

My preference has been to have a short queue and be able to offer delivery in a 2-3 weeks. The original plan was to build one customer instrument per week, working on only one at a time.

The rate orders are coming in seems to be increasing and my queue is now 8 instruments and seems to be growing fairly quickly. I started out selling for very reasonable prices, perhaps too reasonable, and have increased prices several times in the last few months. I still think my prices are very reasonable, and wonder if I need to keep raising them. I don't want to raise them too high and stop orders all together, but I don't see me keeping up with demand unless this is just a temporary surge in business.

I have not found that modest price increases seem to affect the rate orders are coming in. How have you balanced price vs rate of orders?

Am I kidding myself to think I can fine tune demand by tweaking prices? Have I just been charging little enough that the increases don't have much effect?

I am retired and really do not want this to become a full time job. I guess I could just stop taking orders altogether and sell whatever I feel like building, but I think folks really like having an instrument built just for them and I enjoy providing that.