Your Goals Affect Your Planning

Take a picture and try and earn some of the gas money back. Louis.

Louis Shalako

Your goals affect your planning.

Planning should be as flexible as possible in case you encounter fresh opportunities.

When shopping for marketing images I of course became aware that private individuals, pros and amateurs, were uploading the very pictures I was buying to further my career in writing, covers for my books essentially.

So I checked around and found a few other stock photo sites. Quite a number of them have provision for uploading photos. It is the digital age, and the pictures have to come from somewhere.

***

Dimly I realize that this is nothing particularly new to the photographic industry. It’s really only news to me!

But…

No longer is it necessary to sign up for an account, (by mail or in person,) to mail or hand in envelopes full of prints, have an editor with a light table or a magnifying glass go over them, have clerks stack them up on shelves and technicians photo-chemically reproduce them whenever someone, came to the counter, called or faxed in because they needed one.

***

The point is that if I can download a picture in a trice, I can sure as hell upload one just as fast.

And I have a camera.

I take a lot of pictures…I’m actually pretty good at it, although my present camera isn’t very good.

So, the goal of publishing a few books opened up new possibilities, new markets, taking advantage of recreational free time doing something l like. That is true for literature and it’s also true for other creative endeavors.

Okay, so I have opened up an account on one stock photo site.

That’s enough to get me started.

Assuming I can comb through my files and come up with a few images that might be suitable, it might even be enough to begin to generate sales. There will be mostly likely revenue thresholds before payment is made, there will be W8EN forms and all that sort of thing. But the experience gained in publishing crosses over very nicely, no matter what you are selling on the internet. I could sell lawn-mowers on Amazon and still have to fill out the same digital paperwork.

Now, working with images ever more intensely will obviously assist in the learning curve for the development of better covers. Also, one of my goals is to get a new computer, one that is capable of operating Adobe’s latest photo-shop program. I’ve spoken about this before. And Adobe could be used with a good camera and my talent at special effects….(ta-da!) to create photos for upload and sale on a stock photo site.

Pretty brilliant, eh?

Now, now, ladies and gentlemen, when I go for a cruise, a bike-ride, a walk in the woods, or just see a pretty girl behind a rack of cauliflower at the farmer’s market, well now I have the all-important justification, something none of us can really do without, and I can bloody well ask for a picture now, can’t I?

All I need is a cool screen name and a nice portfolio; and a man with some element of charm just might do all right.

I love it when a good plan comes together, as Hannibal Smith would say.

So now, a new goal is to get a better camera. Not only that, I need a big long lens, and a wide one too, a handful of filters maybe, and a detachable flash unit, maybe a remote. A tripod and a bag to put it all in, and ladies and gentlemen, this obviously affects the planning.

That’s because you have to plan in order to achieve your goals.

But what is immediately obvious is also how it all ties together—almost as if I had foreseen all of this quite some time ago. New computer, new software, new camera, it all has to be bought and paid for, and if we can somehow, along the way, begin to build systems so that all of this can be paid for, then that is just one small aspect of our planning.

Planning begins with goal-setting, visualization of the end results, and then working, step by step and piece by piece, one day at a time some days, or even minute by minute when things aren’t going so good, and we work our way to the end result.

Hopefully that makes some weird kind of sense.

And, over the long haul, there are any number of stock photo sites out there, and as the body of work grows, the chances of making a sale increase.

It’s just a matter of putting in the time and getting good at what you do.

All of these little goals go towards achieving a much greater goal, which has to do with independence, quality of life, and how I choose to spend the rest of my life.

So there you go and now you know.

END

Rational Goal-Setting: 2012

Having completed my eighth novel, (of which two remain unpublished,) and having more or less mastered the Lulu and Createspace print-on-demand process, it's a good time to set some rational goals for 2012.

One light, one not so light.

1.) I definitely need another book-length fiction project. In keeping with my one light/next one real serious habit, this one should be a much more serious project than 'On the Nature of the Gods.' According to respectable sources, a series should have new books come out at regular intervals. So this might be the next Maintenon book, and yet there are considerations.

For one thing, I want to do some kind of high fantasy, swords and sorcerers, inspired by none other than 'Conan the Barbarian,' written by Robert E. Howard. In order to avoid the opprobrium of fanfic, this one had better be deadly serious indeed. Some form of originality is also, ah, definitely called for.

I also want to do an 'Alistair Maclean-type book,' of the sort of international suspense-thriller-intrigue with plenty of action, perhaps something like 'The Way to Dusty Death,' or 'Caravan to Vaccares.' Those were some pretty cool books, and of course none other than Clint Eastwood played in 'Where Eagles Dare.'

A more serious story would probably take me six or seven months again, like the 'Redemption' book.

Write more short stories.

2.) Write more short stories. This is important, as a sale is a sale, it brings in money and it gets the name out there even if it's a giveaway. Since I'm not actually working on a book now, which tends to absorb my focus, there is no time like the present. Nice thing about short stories, they are quicker to re-write, add to, or flesh out than a book. They can really grow into something--a 1,400-word story, 'The Four Horsemen' grew into 'On the Nature of the Gods,' which came in at about 67,000 words as a novel.

In my opinion, nothing teaches you more about the art of storytelling than the short story. The quicker you write them, the more you can submit. Sooner or later someone will criticize them, but of course constant rejection forces us to look deeper into the story, the characters, and how we wrote them--and how they might be improved. That's important, because these criticisms are few and far between. If you understand how busy you can be as a writer, imagine juggling a few hundred submissions, a thousand e-mails, etc, a month. So the guy that tells you something about your story is precious indeed.

If nothing else, it teaches persistence and its rewards, and we learn to deal with rejection.

Learn to chat.

3.) Learn to chat. Get some interviews. Get some more reviews. All of this takes, time, patience and effort, but it's not like I have anything better to do. I'v commented on a couple of Kindle threads, and tried to start a discussion, but it's early days there yet. Honestly, I should try to comment on someone's blog once or twice a week, if that's the best I can do, so be it...

Create more products.

4.) Go back through the list and make all e-books available as print-on-demand paperbacks. So far, the interior file for 'The Shape-Shifters' is ready, but the cover needs to be re-done as the text is vertical, on the left side, too close to the trim edge, and the artwork isn't suitable for header-type text. That won't take long to solve. In terms of putting cash into the project, it's like one a month and that's it. But all of those will be out by the end of the year. Many readers still prefer paper and ink, or haven't converted to e-readers. If I do go to a convention, or talk to a group of any sort, it's something to hold in the hand. I can pass it around for people to have a look at, even if it's just one proof copy. Basically it's another product, one which only takes a few hours to produce if you have any sort of a backlist. I could also re-size those titles and put them out on any free platform as PODs, which widens the distribution network.

Other than that, we shall proceed according to the plan and the exigencies of the moment.