This year has been one long slog. It began last year, with my decisive move to split my website into two. To sum: I developed Puppets in Melbourne from a small blog, and grew it with articles and tutorials. The latter were popular, but as I moved more into shadow puppetry I felt the site was serving two masters. And so the content went one place (School of Puppetry), and the shadow puppets stayed here. (More info in last year’s recap)

Whilst I tended to the migration, improvement and new creation of content for the second site, and developed new web designs for it, Puppets in Melbourne stayed in a relative freeze. Having joined a new group (KUKcrafters) and taken a trip to a local designer arts market, I realised my puppets weren’t up to scratch. And so I’ve spent most of 2011 researching and prototyping new designs, coming up with characters and generally thinking more than actually making things.

Looking back at the year, whilst I don’t feel as though I’ve gotten much done, it has been pretty successful. Moving the content has been one of the best business decisions I could have made. I no longer receive random emails on commissions that I no longer am interested in from an artistic point, with the added bonus that I can dip my toes into trying other puppets without committing myself to it full time. The idea of using SOP as passive income and PIM for active has worked out well. It’s clear from the split that it works that way whether I like it or not: despite seasonal sales, SOP has no marketing and manages to sell patterns/books on a regular basis (even the teacher’s guide, for which I’ve done no marketing because I’m still migrating content that the book refers to); whereas PIM has had one sale the whole year.

SOP continues to grow too, despite being less than half full of the content I originally wrote for PIM. Stats have risen so high I’ve moved over to an American web host (they often have ten times more bandwidth on their plans than local hosts) despite absolutely loving my local one. Budget-wise, it just wasn’t working, and I ended up losing potential sales due to the site being down at least a week of the month. Even though the initial migration of the site in mid 2010 saw a huge drop in visitors and sales, I’m happy to report that I’ve tripled both over the year. And there’s no sign of slowing down. Likewise, with very little effort, I managed to sell advertising space on the site for the whole year.

With the latest web design and easier navigation, and the slow migration of content, I’ve also seen a marked increase in people referring to the site in articles, a couple of Wikipedia entries, and other places; as well as people actually googling for the site name/URL because they wanted to come back to it. (Of course this meant a downside to, which is that now people are actually plagiarising the content too)

With all this and the continued good feedback and sales, I no longer feel beholden to the content the way I used to. Yes, I still find posting even once a week a struggle, but it’s now mainly due to other projects and lack of time and not content-burn-out as before. All in all, an excellent move, and not something I’ll regret.

Next year, it will be more of the same: continuing migration, creation of content, sales, and so forth.

Moving on to the shadow puppet side of things… well, I’m not happy with the amount of progress I’ve made, but I am happy with the quality of the progress. I’ve come up with a bunch of characters I’m really interested in making, including a signature character that I adore. I’ve developed precisely what I’m going to make, including a bunch of other things that are not puppets but will sell in local arts markets. Some considerable time has spent thinking on how to present and showcase these things at markets, and I’ve even started creating a more up-to-date web design that will suit the new style and logo I recently had remade. Several prototypes have been made, and despite a whole year of attempting to find a different method for rod attachment, I have come full circle back to my original concepts. A lot more money will be necessary to create and sell these puppets, and so from here it will be a matter of further development and then selling one or two things for a bit whilst I earn enough to move onto the next product.

But let’s not forget the other projects: working on the UNIMA Australia website, which I gave up not too long ago, as it was too time consuming (and voluntary); and the other site design for Pockets Full of Fun. The latter was both more enjoyable and profitable, and a recent look back at all I did for it still surprises me just how well it came together. I have tried drafting a couple of other design ideas since, for other sites, and I honestly don’t think I could come up with a clear path to web design again. PF0F seems to have been a fluke where concise planning, proper positioning for content, and aesthetics came together.

In total it’s been a fairly good year, although as usual things take longer to do than I plan, or stuff suddenly appears and gets in the way (my site/s being plagiarised for one), and there’s still so much to do that I often wake up in the morning stressed from the thought of never getting it done. But slowly, slowly, I am catching up to old things, working my way through the new, and with any luck, 2012 will be a little easier. Over the next two months I will be setting aside time for a large clean out of materials and so on, and with a lot of paperwork out of the way, should be able to move forward on one new shadow puppet or two; along with some great tutorials for School of Puppetry.

Lately I’ve found it difficult to multi-task, and so this is one of the reasons I have not been blogging much updates in regards to the new shadow puppets I’m working on. Mainly because I haven’t been working on them. (Really, I’ve hit a snag in that I can’t come up with a good rod attachment, at least better than the one I already have. I’m continuing to try though)

Instead, I have been trying to accomplish something I’ve been putting off for ages. Paperwork.

That’s right, I have been sorting out my email accounts, receipts, taxes, etc. Why has that made me so blind to everything else? Because in 2008 or thereabouts I changed my email from Yahoo to my official one. Along the way I managed to rack up two other email accounts (both gmail, one of which exists purely to filter out spam), and the Yahoo one I had for 10 years. Suffice to say the number of emails to move, sort through, delete, forward, and stress over is well in the 10 000 range. (It doesn’t help that Yahoo only provides bulk forwarding in their premium accounts, for which I’m not going to pay for)

I’ve additionally made it hard on myself for being incredibly behind in keeping my emails straight, since I’ve actually had to recover my official Outlook account once and never got around to dealing with that. Did I mention I also never had a system in place before for keeping financial records? I mean, I have all my usual hard-copy files, but emails of expenditure and receipts of sales have just been lying around in my inbox. For several years.

I’m 90% finished, with just some files to clean up on my computer, a few bank statements to locate (which could take ages because apparently my room and workspace is as out-of-date in terms of tidiness as everything else) and some entries to input into my book-keeping. Amazingly enough, it’s both heartening to know that I now have an easy system in place; and depressing to have to backtrack through about 15 years or more of my life in order to do it. Suffice to say I have a very statistical view of jobs that I’ve applied for and not gotten; conversations started and never finished; people who said they’d do things but didn’t; sales improving despite my impression of it being worse; how many false starts I’ve had with puppetry ideas; and most importantly, how quickly I seemed to have spent my earnings from my last full-time job (in 2007).

I am really looking forward to getting back to the puppet building. But first, I probably need to clean my workspace… Sigh… Before returning you to more interesting things, I will share a sentiment of a fellow puppeteer, who responded to someone tweeting a link to my site:

Thanks @Ted Russ to share the good work of Naomi Guss! She deserves it!

It’s things like that that help me get through the day