A completely deadline-free holiday break

Being able to take a completely completely deadline-free holiday break is starting to look possible. I only need to finalise artwork briefs for Book 6 and send to publisher ( hopefully tomorrow morning?), proof some client documents and send them through to them. Then I'm free to go celebrate Christmas with my family and then go on a short holiday. Yay!

Wishing you a fun, relaxing week in the run-up to Christmas

It was a lovely long weekend. I slept longer hours at night and napped quite a bit during the day. I spent some time with friends. Went shopping for Christmas presents. Thank God my side of Johannesburg slowly becomes a ghost town after the 15th December, when peoplego away for holidays outside the city.

It does feel creepy when I go for my regular walk and I can go around 10 minutes without a car/bus/taxi driving past. But it also makes Christmas shopping a leisure activity. No queues. No irritable people wanting you out of the way. You can have a seat at restaurants without having to wait and have a leisurely meal without feeling like you're taking up a seat that could be used by another paying customer.

I still have work to finish before I can close up business for Christmas/New Year holidays, but it's a manageable work load.

What does your week in the run up to Christmas look like?

A portrait, two books and seed of an idea

It was raining and after an afternoon of tea and cookies, my neighbour Elaine Laverick Thorne took a photo of me laughing and she used it to do this painting. Now it hangs in my office. Nice, painting, yes? Thank you Elaine.

Here are the writing life highlights for the past two days:

1. The ebook, How to get quoted in the media, brought me a retainer client. We had lunch and he's hiring my company to implement what we talk about in the book. For now, all I can say is, the client is a very nice guest estate in the Northern suburbs of Joburg, Christelle and I toured the facility yesterday and I liked it very much. It's the kind of place I'd want to stay if I was in a foreign city (luxurious but comfortable; a home away from home but much nicer than my own house:-). They have very exciting plans for 2012 that involve kids, and as you might know, kids are a very strong interest for me. So the assignment promises to be fun.

I'm also thinking the place could be a wonderful location for a monthly Children's Book Morning, where various children's authors/publishers can launch their books in a kid-friendly environment, or read their current books for children etc. But the Children's Book Morning is still a lone thought rattling around in my head: it still needs to be fleshed out and a proper plan laid out  and implemented by the right people ( not me. I don't have the capacity). We'll see.

2. Book 6 manuscript came in and I pushed to finish the first leg of my work on it ASAP so it can go into editorial before Christmas.  This puts me a little below the mid-way point through the client publishing project, with 6 more books to go next year. All I can say is, sleeping is starting to sound like a beautiful fantasy.

It's the last working day before the long weekend, and for many South Africans, the last work day until 2012. So enjoy the long weekend and to those who'll mostly be offline for the rest of the year, Happy Holidays!  

What message are you unwittingly communicating to your clients/readers?

For the past couple of days, I've been thinking about the information that we unwittingly communicate to our clients and readers. As an individual, friend, sister, writer, publisher, blogger, there are things that I communicate/have communicated directly.

For example, most people who are in my life for any length of time know I don't like the phone and if you are a friend/family member calling me during the day and I'm writing/editing, there's every chance that I won't pick up. It startles me, disturbs my train of thought. Yeah, I know I should be smart enough to entertain two distinct thoughts at the same time, but it doesn't happen. So I live with it. But I digress: this not information that you learn because I didn't call or didn't pick up the phone when you called during working hours (though sometimes that happens quite a bit, especially for persistent friends/family members who believe they should be the exception. For the record, the only exception is my mother). It's something that I TELL people directly.

Getting Work Done During The Festive Season Even When You Want To Screech " I Don't Wanna!!!"

My morning email to an online business forum group I belong to was titled "I don't wanna!" And honestly, I didn't want to work at all. My body feels heavy/tired, the sun was bright and shining and all I wanted to do was hang out at my local Fournos Bakery with friends, drink unending cups of tea and watch people spend money they don't have on Christmas purchases they don't need. But I had to stay chained to my computer and get some work done.

The good news is that I was very productive - managed to do final polishing of plans/sequences for 2 non-fiction books, which I then emailed to the publisher. Client will be happy and I'm definitely chuffed to have completed this task this year.

So how did I managed to keep the old-friend brain switched on long enough to get the work done?

1. Lots of sleep - Last week my brain was mostly useless due to pain, drugs pain meds and just feeling out of sorts. So I decided to get as much rest as possible over the weekend so that even if intellectually I had no interest in working, there were no physical limitations.

2. Starting small - I know productivity experts encourage us to start with the difficult tasks first, but if I had to do that, there was no way I was every going to get started. So I had to start with things I could do (blogging, writing a game review for a client) and built from there.

3. The platform to whine endlessly about not wanting to work  Support from friends and colleagues -Yup, it was nice being able to share my misery and learning I was not the only one who didn't wanna. There were people I wanted to strangle though. My friend Lynn was high up on that list. Her crime? She was home, cabbaging, with no plans to do anything for the day beyond watching TV and puttering around her home and garden.

4. Butt glue - To get anything done, I did have to stay glued to my chair, even though I wanted to leave my office and go elsewhere ( destination didn't matter). And while there are a lot of things I can do while sitting in front of my computer in my office, once all the programmes are shut down and I can only allow myself to use Word and Adobe PDF, options become very limited ( aka, no Facebook, surfing on the net, twitter, Linked and all that happy social media stuff). So then, I could either review the sequences for the books I'm doing next year for the client while double-checking with my research documents. It seems to have worked:-)

I'm sure you all have strategies you use to push yourself to work when you're demotivated, so please share?

On Damaria Senne Media milestones and digital publishing in South Africa

Rebecca has posted a review of How to get quoted in the media over at Living the life of writing. Rebecca's review is especially aimed at book authors. Check it out.

On Saturday Damaria Senne Media reached a big milestone: the sales of How to get quoted in the media actually reached a stage where I could pay out royalties to my co-author. No, it was not a boatload of cash, but it was definitely a nice addition just before Christmas. This is huge for me, because it means that self-publishing (some of my works and other people's) could be a nice income stream for me.

I know that there are people who are making it big out there through self-publishing (read the story of Amanda Hocking on Friday. I'd heard about the self-publishing sensation but hadn't made the time to read the story until now, and I was not only inspired, but she also very realistic). But half my reservations have always been that Africa still has electricity and connectivity problems ( among other things), so was it realistic to expect that the market would be ready enough for digital publishing?

As Pam said during our recent email discussion: "As cheap as you can sell an e-book it would help increase access to books so much for so many people. Also a pity someone doesn't invent a solar powered Kindle like a solar powered calculator. And then get government or the Bill Gates or Mark Shuttlesworth Foundations to donate them to schools and Thusong Centres so more people, even the very poor, had access. It would be a win-win situation for authors and ordinary people!"

Problem is, I don't want to wait for that kind of intervention. I don't want to enter the market when other publishers have taken over a big share of the market. And I have things to say now, material to publish now and I'm sure there are other South African writers  who do too. I also believe that that the South African digital market has some possibilities: you just need to publish material that people need, aimed at the target audience that already has Internet access and are open to either owning a Kindle device or installing Kindle on their computers. And then, there's always the PDF option, which people are very comfortable with.

So while I know that I'm no big competition for publishing houses right now ( I need them to be my clients at this stage, or to contract me to buy my new books and publish them:-), it was heartening to realise through the sales from this ebook that there is a viable starting point for a small digital publisher in South Africa right now and I could grow.

Anyhoo, Christelle is also happy. Upon receipt of her first royalty payment, she reminded me that I asked for a sequel. We know more or less what it's going to be about (in line with helping small business and NGOs do their marketing and communication better), but I don't want to narrow it down now until the ebook is at least drafted.

Pam and I are also talking about publishing a collection of her romantic short stories on Amazon. They're written, edited and once we're back from holidays, we'll start talking about launch dates.

So, I haven't done a review of 2011 yet, but judging by this alone ( launch of Damaria Senne Media and the publication of its inaugral title), 2011 has been fairly good to me.

The value of media coverage for your small business

In our book, How to get quoted in the media, my co-author Christelle Du Toit and I talk about the value of media coverage for your small business. There are many benefits - raising your company's profile, making people aware of a product etc- but the one we like best is that it can make you money.

In view of that strong assertation, I thought it would be fair to do a post-moterm of yesterday's interview on 5fm's Mind your business.  Are we all talk or do we live the talk? Keep in mind that this media appearance was little more than a ONE MINUTE pitch on a segment of a very popular radio programme, no more.

1. Time and resources to land the interview - We initially contacted the station asking for an interview when we launched the book some months back. So while we did invest effort then, this interview was the realisation of our investment long after we'd thought they'd rejected us.
Lesson: Just because the media says "no" now doesn't mean they mean "no forever." So don't give up and always be prepared to respond to unexpected queries.

2. Preparation - Christelle spent time preparing for the interview. She also ran her pitch by me, and we timed it to make sure that she said all we needed to say in that one minute. I didn't realise a minute could be so short!
Lesson: Even if you do know your company and product, prepare again. Make sure that you have enough information to fit the time allocated. Do a dry run with a colleague or friend if you have to.

3. The interview - It went well, thank you Christelle. This is one of the things I love about having a collaborator: having someone skilled who can represent me or my product without stress.

4. The return on investment - So what did we get out of the interview?
a. A chance to tell small business owners who listen to Mind your business about our book. As previously stated, the ebook is aimed at non-profit organisations and small business owners, so the target market was spot on. As to what that awareness will mean in the long run, time will tell.
b. Sales enquiries - we had a couple. Christelle fielded calls and I sent emails to people she spoke to. We were not inundated though - we wish!
c. Actual sales - yes, we sold a couple of books online. Not bestseller sales, but come on, this is a new title by unknown authors, published by a new digital publisher! I always feel it's a miracle people are willing to part with their money to read what I have to say:-)
d. Business enquiries - We have a meeting set up with one potential client who wants to talk to us about media relations for his chain of guest houses. The meeting could lead to a solid business deal, or not, depending on whether he sees value in what we offer. But that meeting is more than we had before Christelle did the one minute interview. And it's a qualified lead; someone who identified a need, not someone who's still unsure about whether media coverage can help his business or not.
e. Material for our social media activities- It's a gift that keeps on giving, isn't? Because however the interview went, we can use it as a case study to promote the book and for others to learn from our experiences.

In conclusion, not all your media interactions will come out as well as this one has: it can go badly if the journalist doesn't like your company/product/you/has a negative story about your company/industry. It could be a neutral story that doesn't resonate with people, with the result that no one response and you have no tangible result to show for your time and investment. BUT, if you choose your media carefully, make sure you speak to your target market and prepare thoroughly, your interview could score you a decent audience response, maybe even a few sales.

On 5fm this afternoon

Christelle Du Toit, my co-author on How to get quoted in the media is going to be interviewed on 5fm's Mind your business this afternoon. The show is a segment of DJ Fresh's Afternoon Drive. The interview is at 16h55 and 5fm's frequency is 98FM. Check it out if you have the chance.

And if you're visiting this site as a result of the interview, please say hi in the comments section. And don't forget to treat yourself to our ebook (available on the right hand panel of this blog.)

Staying booked through the December/January period

Everywhere I look, people are talking about Christmas, the holiday season and wrapping up their work. I have to admit a part of me is envious because I'm nowhere near wrapping up. My schedule is still full and I'm still chasing deadlines. I'm probably going to work until the last week of Christmas, when most companies in South Africa will be shutting down for the festive season, unless they are retail, hospitality or have a damn good reason to be open.

Not that I'm complaining. A lot of freelancers talk about December/January as slow months and that never fails to scare me because that's when you need a lot of money to enjoy summer, celebrate Christmas and New Year with friends and generally take a vacation. So I push hard as early as September to make sure that I'm fully booked for the period. How do I do that?

1. Look for end of financial year business - for some client, December is the end of the financial year. So it's a good time to remind them around September or so that oustanding projects that need to paid for within that year's budget need to start as soon as possible.

2. Fit in with clients' new year resolutions/plans - Nearer the end of the year, business owners also make plans to market themselves more effectively. Some may decide to spruce up their web sites/brochures or use social media more effectively. Nail down the business as soon as possible, with the promise that they can have all the summer fun they want knowing that they'll come back to a new web site/ brochure/catalogue to approve before it goes out to clients.

3. Find long-term projects- It's nice to have long-term projects at this time of the year. The festive season gives you the opportunity to push the work forward, or catch up with milestones if you were a bit behind.

4. Do your own projects - Maybe you wanted to refresh your marketing material/develop a new web site or blog? Or maybe you have a book/short story that you've been wanting to write but client work has been taking up most of your time? The festive season is a good time to start on that project.

5. Look for international business - Just because South African businesses take a break over the December/January period does not mean everyone does. Most international companies, whether big or small, remain operational throughout this period. So for them, it's business as usual and if you hook up with them, you should remain as busy as ever.

When you have a deadline and you're not well

For the past couple of days I haven't been well. First, it was summer flu. Then I had a very bad toothache which resulted with me having an extraction yesterday morning. If you've ever had a wisdom tooth removed, then you know the kind of pain I was in yesterday. I took heavy painkillers, but while they numbed some of the pain, they also made me loopy. I slept a lot and when I was awake, my brain was not functioning well. Today was not much of an improvement.

The problem is that I had deadlines to meet and requests to do assignments. And while clients are also human beings who understand that illness rarely gives one a warning, I also don't want to be a liability.

So how did I juggle deadlines with my sick?

1. See a healthcare professional - Over the years, I have learnt that my health is one of my greatest assets. Without it, I can't function well. So it's better to address health issues as soon as they arise, instead of trying to be brave.

2. Inform your client - The client needs to know as soon as possible that you're not well and what impact this will have on the project. I'm still on a learning curve on that one, because I hate to be HER. You know her, she never delivers anything without drama. When the deadline looms, she's either sick/has a death in the family/had car trouble/her computer crashed. Usually, there is no way you can dispute her excuses, because they sound so reasonable. But clients usually wish she'd just give them what they asked for on time, without issues. So balancing the issue of disclosure with having as little drama as possible is still difficult for me.

3. Do what you can - If there is anything you can push through to your client as a matter of urgency, do it. The client will appreciate it.

4. Ask for help - This is not always as easy as it sounds, because once you get involved with a project, you gain insight that allows you to move quickly through the work, while someone coming in late in the project will take longer. Balance those issues and decide whether it will benefit you to wait until you're better ( if it's a temporary health issue) or whether you should shout ask for help. Help can come from your freelancer friends, or it can come from the client, depending on your arrangements.

5. Learn to say no - I felt bad for a regular client who contacted me yesterday, asking for quick help on a project. But I was in no shape to finish what was on my plate, never mind taking on additional responsibilities. So I had to say a firm NO.

Anyhoo, these are the coping strategies I learnt the past couple of days. I hope they benefit you too.

Taking it slow

Dr Bissoon extracted my right bottom wisdom tooth this morning. The operation itself was painless ( thanks doc), but later in the day I was extremely sore. Took more painkillers and napped, then tried to work some deadlined work. Taking is slow though...

Things fall apart

No, not along the lines of the Chinua Achebe novel Things Fall Apart. But I'm feeling frail at the moment: just when I fix one part of my body, another starts having problems.

Summer cold almost gone, except for the heavy cough that happens sporadically. Spent the whole weekend drugged to the gills on Myprodol (strong pain killers) though, because I had a bad toothache since Saturday afternoon. And lucky me, dentists around here close around 1pm on Saturday and don't have emergency hours. So i just had to persevere until today. Didn't move from the bed beyond getting more Myprodol every four hours and knocking myself out with sleeping pills at night.

Feel better today; at least, numb enough to work. Have set up an appointment with dentist for later in the day.

Looking forward to author sending me book 6. Once that's done, I'll be able to focus more on the holiday season.

Work ethic

Today I gave up on working with a friend. It's been coming, but I didn't want to see it. Basically, we have different work styles. For me, paying work is work I'm grateful for. Sometimes I enjoy the project. Other times, the assignment is a means to an end. For example, the project may open a door to more interesting projects or it could just be a job to pay bills. I also have a strong sense of urgency when I work, which means that I wake up each day and do as much as possible, even when I'm not feeling well (as long as I'm not in danger of dying) or don't feel like working.

While my friend needs the work, he complains when the work is dull. He doesn't make an effort to exceed client expectations and needs to be babysat for every step of the project. And he doesn't seem to understand that when a client needs a project delivered on Day X, you do whatever you have to do to deliver on Day X.

Basically, he doesn't just sit down and do it. And I can't blame him: waking up each day to sit on a chair and write/edit IS hard work, especially when you don't even have a smidgeon of interest in the topic at hand. It's tempting to take as many smoke breaks as possible. To go out to lunch with a friend. Or take a nap. But you can't do any of those things because in the end, writing is a job like any other. And if you don't work, you don't get paid.

So I've decided that my friend is on his own when it comes to his fledgeling freelance writing career. I will ask how he is doing, but I'm not passing leads or work to him anymore. I have other freelance writer/editor friends who need the work and have proven to be more committed to delivering a good product, on time, without complaining the whole time they're working on the project.

I feel a bit sad to be cutting my friend out like this. But working with him is very stressful and quite frankly, takes out more out of me than the benefit of his help.

I hope that other people don't feel like that about me though.Because word of mouth, referrals from friends and other freelancers are a very important element to landing work.

It's official: this summer cold is not going to kill me

Yesterday I dosed myself with cold meds and slept on and off for most of the afternoon and night, drinking more meds every time I woke up. Also slept in this morning. So now it's official: this summer cold is not going to kill me. I know, I know, I'm being a baby and a cold doesn't kill. But sometimes it makes me feel so miserable I wish it would so the torture would end!

On the work front, today I'm getting book 5 ready to submit to client. Book 4 and 5 are based on book 1 and 2, so they are a bit easier to work through. Yay me!

I've also started to aggressively look for another project for next year. It will be a while before this publishing project ends, but I don't want to come out of it and find that I don't have another big gig moving forward. Long-term projects are what give me security: I wake up in the morning knowing exactly what I need to accomplish. They also buy me the time to write creatively, because with the freelance writing and publishing on course, I have the space to think about my creative writing and self-publishing goals. It's much like having a fulltime job. Without the commute. Or the water cooler gossip. Or the medical aid and pension fund.