Waving not drowning

Hello! I'm still alive, despite all evidence to the contrary. Announcing that I intend to do anything regularly seems to be a death knell for this blog ;)

Since I last posted back in August, my editing work has picked up. I put in a lot of effort for very little return initially, and then as soon as September hit all the authors seemed to come back from their summer writing retreats and start their search for an editor - me, for a couple of them :)

I have had two manuscripts on the go, which has been stressful and hasn't left much time for anything else. All of which serves to illustrate the ebb and flow of freelance work. Feast one month, famine the next!

Actually this suits my creative side rather well, since while I am waiting for work to come in, I can busy myself with work of my own - stocking up my Etsy shop in anticipation of Christmas (Yule, Winter Solstice, Thingymas, Commercial Season) - and when I have editing work in hand I can put down the polymer clay and get on with it.

I think with freelance work there is a balance to be struck. You will be unhappy if you need to be constantly supplied with work from external sources, because it just does not happen that way in the current economy. You need to have your own interests, and preferably ones that make a bit of an income, so you can be productive and make use of the inevitable down time - perhaps even see it as a perk of the job.

We'll look at how you make ends meet in another post!

The accidental craft-preneur

This is just a quickie. I've neglected this blog a bit over the last month - I took my "allow yourself time off" message a little too much to heart! ;) But I haven't been idle I can assure you. Quite the contrary in fact.

So I want to take a few moments here to plug some of the areas where I am particularly active, because it is all great content and if you're interested in polymer clay, running a craft business in the UK, or any of the other stuff I occasionally write about on here, you'll love what I'm about to show you.

First off is RebelMouse. If you are at all active on social media I urge you (nay, implore you) to get your own RebelMouse page. It's absolutely great. It takes all the masses of interesting stuff  you pin, tweet, post on Facebook etc, and it collates it all in one place and makes it look aesthetically pleasing while it's at it. You can even get it to post tweets from groups for you. And it is a quick win - it takes minimal time to upkeep (did I just verb a noun there? Bad me) and with a little tweaking you can highlight your best content and even delete or edit the stuff you'd rather keep to yourself.

Here's my RebelMouse.



You can also find it waaaay down somewhere on my right-hand nav, although that's getting a bit out of hand these days. I need to shrink it down a bit.

Secondly I want to plug Pinterest. Six months in and I am still addicted - to the point of being mildly obsessed. OK, forget "mildly" - since I got a smartphone with a bigger screen I have used countless battery hours scrolling through and repinning all the polymer goodness on there. It's like crack. I just can't seem to get enough, and now, as if to taunt me, I have a following! Me, with people who want to see what I pin! Over 680 of them and growing by the dozen every day!



So think about it, craft entrepreneurs, by spending time doing something I enjoy, I am reaching out to a whole community of people. Add a link in your profile to your shop, Facebook or Twitter page and that's hundreds if not thousands (one day) of potential customers finding your stuff. Not to mention that you're building a following of like-minded individuals - people with similar taste, background, or hoarding tendencies (kidding) to you. Instant filtered customer base!

So there you go, my quickie update blog post has turned into a lesson in how to get your name out there and get yourself known for the things you do best and what you love the most.

Allowing myself time off

When I saw this in my list of potential blog posts I knew its time had come! I have been beating myself up since last Thursday about not having written a post for nearly 2 weeks, and what could I possibly write about, when the idea for this post slapped me in the face like a wet fish. Allowing myself time off.

Time off can be a tricky subject when you're self-employed. There's not the same concept of annual leave as there is as an employee, and as your own boss the only person who needs to sign your leave request is... well... you.

With a system like this in place you would be forgiven for thinking that self-employed people do half the work that employees do. Well, you'd be wrong. When you're your own boss, you're harder on yourself than almost any other boss would be. You push yourself harder, work longer hours and take less time off. The issue is giving yourself permission to take time off.

It's not like there's another employee to pick up the slack. When you clock off, the work sits there waiting patiently for you to return. As a consequence it can be very hard to switch off. And that is why allowing yourself permission to take time off is so important.

Time out from work is important for our health and wellbeing, for creative renewal, for inspiration, for so many things. In a world where I can be sitting on a beach in North Africa checking my emails on a smartphone, the boundaries have to come from within. I have to be the one to switch off my phone, to switch of my brain, and to choose to relax.

And so I give myself, and you, permission to do that. Factor in some time off for yourself, say, every three months, and stick to it. That doesn't mean turning down jobs, but when a contract is coming to an end see if you can find a few days for yourself before the next one starts. I promise you you'll be able to work harder and have more stamina as a result.

The beach, just yards from my holiday apartment last week.

Rebel with a mouse

Hi there, it's been a while since my last post - shame on me! I had sort of decided to post once a week, on Fridays if possible, and generate some sort of order here. Looks like life got in the way of that one. While I've been quiet on the blog front I have been very busy behind the scenes curating and collating (try saying that one after a medicinal brandy ;)) and generally getting my hands dirty in the world of social media.

Social media has changed a LOT since I last ran a craft business. When I first started out, some time around 2004, the big new thing was Mr Site - a website in a box - and that was about it. I joined Facebook as it was back then, but had no idea how to build an FB page, or connect that page to other websites. I posted on Livejournal, occasionally pimped the website link, did a monthly newsletter, but everything I (and my business partner) did was driven by us and at our pace. This time around I am floored by the changes.

I worked as an online editor for seven years, so I really shouldn't be so surprised with how quickly social media has moved on, but I am. Most publishing companies in the legal compliance arena are just about comfortable with having a Twitter account, perhaps a linkedIn presence, maybe an app or two. I was even perversely proud that I had managed to avoid the dreaded Twitter for so long. Looking back on it now, I think I was steeling myself; plunging into the world of social media is not for the faint hearted or the ill-prepared.

Social media today is not just Twitter, Facebook, Web 2.0 and all that jazz. Social media today is all of those things plus so many more. There's Paper.li, Sulia, RebelMouse, ExploreB2B, Digg, StumbleUpon, Tumblr... there are sites for collating all your social media activity into once place, sites for guided discovery of material of interest to you, sites for networking, groups on Twitter dedicated only to retweeting each other... there's almost too much choice.

So what is a budding craft entrepreneur to do?

My advice is to take it one step at a time. If you try to do too much too quickly you will burn out. After launching my own Paper.li, deleting it, launching a RebelMouse page which I like much better, tweeting and retweeting others, building my network of likeminded souls, after two weeks I am worn out! I want to retreat into my studio (OK, my kitchen) and play with clay. That's the point of all of this after all?

What I intend to do is to get organised about this. I'm gonna get strategic on this mutha-humper's ass. The trick is not to do everything, but to channel effort where it brings the most reward. I'm going to stick to #uketsyhour twice a week, to keep retweeting and promoting the friendly people I come across and to keep an eye on who returns the favour and who does not. I'm going to do my #shoutouts to the people that I feature on my RebelMouse page, and I'm going to share tidbits of fun with my Facebook likers on my FB page. The rest can go hang... for now.

The trick to being a good editor is being able to quickly and calmly filter out the dross. If you try to include every single news story in your weekly digest then you're going to be coding til midnight and nobody wants that. You'll give yourself RSI from all the typing and your readership won't appreciate wading through mountains of irrelevant stories to get at the jewels hidden beneath. Neither of you will be able to see the wood for the trees. The trick is to prune wisely, to focus effort on maintaining an overview, and to know when to stop, take a step back, and review.

So with that in mind, follow me on RebelMouse, like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, and know that the information you will receive will be incisive, relevant and timely, and hopefully occasionally heartwarming and/or funny too, with no extraneous crap. Lord knows, we all have to wade through enough of that as it is without me adding to the noise.