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

Crisis versus opportunity

One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity.

Joe Konrath or somebody predicted that the big publishing crisis would occur in mid-2011.

In some ways he was right. Borders disappeared, taking about 650 brick-and-mortar bookstores with it.

In Canada, a major distributor, who handled pretty much all the traffic between publishers and bookstores, also bit the dust, when H.B. Fenn filed. The month before, their own imprint Key Porter shut down after laying off two-thirds of staff.

Yet other sources predicted the big crisis would come in 2012, without specifying any particular scenario. Presently there is much talk of Barnes & Noble either suffering falling share prices based on uniform doom and gloom across the industry, (plus their own challenges,) ultimately disappearing from the landscape, or in another scenario, taking on the new giant on the block, Amazon, who launched a number of their own imprints in the last year. Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader may or may not be enough to save the company.

At time of writing, e-book sales are quoted at about 17 % of market share, presumably in developed markets. Yet in undeveloped markets, the share might soon be much higher, this in a kind of bypass-effect. People who could never afford a personal library of hard-covers and paperbacks, could very well buy into e-readers, some of which are as little as $30, and slam them full of free and $0.99 e-books, without ever in their lives purchasing a new book from a bookstore. I have seen a $30 e-reader, but is this where the market is headed? On the high end, e-readers and manufacturers are looking for more interactive features. There is a case for utter simplicity in developing markets. People may be more dependent on the local library, where they might plug in and borrow a book rather than purchase by wireless or internet hook-up. It’s also a cheap device to make, especially if you’re not subsidizing customer purchases like some of the really big makers.

Then there’s Apple, with a whole new take on text books. Their new product is hypertext translated from esoteric multi-stream fiction, its previous realm, into a kind of multi-media teaching method. My brother Chico and I discussed this, his point being that textbooks are traditionally expensive—because of small print runs, and a captive market. If you knock out the price of ink, paper, distribution and major labour costs, the price comes down significantly. Imagine what happens once there is sufficient market saturation in a country like India or Bangladesh for cheap e-readers. Throw in sound, colour and movement, and you really have something.

Education has always been the poor man’s wealth, and poor people are going to figure that out in vast numbers. For that reason, there will be an explosion of non-fiction in any market you care to name.

In an anonymous article a putative industry insider claimed that ‘Amazon is killing us.’

(On another level, cheap literacy is a threat to established orders, and as far as this writer is concerned, it’s about time.)

What happens when the markets for short fiction dry up? There is a kind of trend where people are self-publishing a lot of short stories in places like Smashwords, and simply taking their chances. This is understandable in a world of $5 and $10 fiction markets, with many magazines start-ups in their own right, ‘fledglings.’ There are two factors, one, the print magazines are facing the same sort of cost/distribution structures as book publishers, and two, this self-publishing of short works by the author is a whole new market of unknown potential. No one knows what is going to happen there. Rather than buy one magazine, a customer may well browse a site much like Smashwords.

If it’s free, you can always delete it and try another one. It’s just that simple.

While it is true that established authors have an advantage to begin with, (not exactly a new thing,) because of name recognition and the cachet of having been published by a major imprint, independent authors sense a real opportunity to carve out a niche of their own. It’s a matter of foresight and patience. At some point, there won’t be anyone with name recognition left. Simple human and corporate mortality will take care of the old paradigm.

Like the dinosaurs, the vitals of the industry will be gnawed away by hordes of cheerful little varmints, who can move faster, adapt faster, and have bigger brains in proportion to body size, which as everyone knows, have to be fed with real resources.

If the industry goes the way I predict, big publishing will find it increasingly difficult to prop up share prices, service existing debt, pay out $25 million dollar yearly executive bonuses, or live on an ever-squeezening margin. Remember, they also have to produce new books as well. At some point mergers and acquisitions will happen. There will be takeovers, friendly and otherwise.

If you have a big pile of cash laying around, you might want to consider this: once you fire all the people, sell off the buildings and the trucks, and send the printing press to the scrap-yard, what you are left with is a treasure trove of intellectual properties including some of the brightest lights in the galaxy, in all formats and all media, in perpetuity. The downside is that conversion is labour intensive. On the upside, whenever you want some more money, you simply release a few more exclusive titles.

A relatively small staff, a good website, and you’re back in business—selling e-books—just as you should have been all along. Industry execs know that in the future, reading will be 95 % digital.

The future has caught up with them. If nothing else, major publishers are and should be putting out e-books on a priority basis, both as to urgency and content/title selection. They must go for the other 17 % of market share that they will miss without e-books, and forget about desperately trying to justify continued investment in traditional ink and paper products.

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