I’ve been dealing with a sick horse all day, so this post might not make it through as planned or might be a lot more brief than I’d like. (Note: horse is doing better, I can sit at the computer for a little while now.)
Maybe next weekend I’ll just revisit the same topic to flesh out the idea a little more.
What I wanted to talk about was the products my business will offer. I’m a writer who wants to make a living writing. When Rob brings his products on board, we’ll amend this list and it might become complicated enough to use that Visio software I mentioned at the end of this post.
We’ll start with what’s on-hand and what’s planned and what else might could be done with time.
On-hand
- One novel undergoing editing
- One short story completed, in submission
- One short story completed, in submission
- One photo essay completed, in submission
- One non-fiction article completed, rotting in files
- One non-fiction article with pictures completed, rotting in files
- At least 20 flash fiction stories, semi-corralled on blog
Planned
- One novel still in working first draft
- Collection of photos with flash fiction to accompany
- Traditional Photo-show using flash fiction and photography as mixed media (I’ll approach our local banks and businesses to see about a lobby display/show)
- A series of adventures (short novels) based on one of the submitted short-stories
That’s all I can think of for now, but this is an organic business plan and it’ll grow and change with the vision. I’ll add more to it later since it’ll be linked in the side-bar and easy to access. When I make changes, I’ll make a post to let you know.
Other Skills
There are other, related things I can do to fill income needs but I need a little more education. I’ve noticed there are a lot of requests for contract technical writing jobs but they all require knowledge of a particular software, Visio. From what I understand, it’s for drawing flow-charts and diagrams. I’m not familiar with it, but I’d like to learn that one, PageMaker and InDesign. Until I have more time I won’t be able to do much about this, but it’s in the distant future plans.
Offering the Products
Even though I have products to offer, without clients it doesn’t do a lot of good. This is where marketing comes in and there’s a lot of sub-topics under that giant umbrella. A few include this blog, submissions and queries, word-of-mouth, traditional advertising media and social networking. That’ll be next week’s topic.
Visio is pretty intuitive once you pick it up. The version I had two years had a good tutorial embedded, and after going through the tutorial I was able to use it decently enough. Good luck with it.
Thanks for that! I’d thought about taking a class at the community college close to where I work, but I haven’t checked to see if they offer it even. I’m usually pretty good at learning software on my own, though so I might just get it and see what’s involved.
If that doesn’t work, let me know. I have an ex-employee who was a whiz at it. He might know some on-line resources for learning it. I learned it, but it was a bit too linear for me.
Okay, thanks. LOL, too linear, meaning you think in a more convoluted way?
Phew busy! Good luck with it all!
Yeah. My flow charts always ended up looking like schematics for the space shuttle’s fuel system–pretty convoluted.
This is a good idea to incorporate the versatility of your writing products. It will help give you a fairly steady stream of income from multiple sources. That is smart thinking!
And how is your horse today? I hope much better. xo
Jeannie Shasta was back to her usual cheerful self this morning! I was so relieved. But today I am sore from pulling her around all day yesterday, lol. She gave me a good workout.
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