It’s been too long. After my last post you’ll probably wonder what has happened. Not much and quite a bit

Let’s see, where I left you all last, I had just injured myself working on my second super secret project. (Ah, alliteration…) We were getting ready for the film shoot, and I stabbed myself accidentally by kneeling on a staple. (I’m fine!)

Surprisingly, I haven’t blogged after that. It’s a little bit of blogging fatigue, and a little bit of working on some other things. I’ll get to that in a minute, but for the moment I’ll continue on about the film shoot.

As should be obvious I can’t reveal too much about the whole thing. It was for a music video, and I do know they’re currently editing it… when it’ll be released is anybody’s guess although I’m sure it will be in the next couple of months. This was really the most professional shoot I’ve ever worked on; the others being a couple of five minute videos for live performances I’ve worked on, mostly student-run affairs.

I made up four puppets - one for a quick scene and three for the final shoot. The final shoot was all about me believe it or not. I had managed to get myself the actual puppeteering role, so the entire day was spent working on each scene. It was a lot of waiting around (of course), but quite a lot of fun as well. I hadn’t needed to perform since my uni days, and despite hating all aspects of performance, I enjoyed doing this. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that puppetry is less about having your face seen and more about working an inanimate object. Either way, it was quite good… I even got to use my old bunraku hood from my days with Sticky Apple Legs (the first puppetry company I set up with my friends).

The set up itself was a bit chaotic, being done from a room in the designer’s house. You can imagine how hectic it was to fit in sets, props, puppets, crew, camera, lights… and me… all in a small space.

I wrote a bit about the shoot on Puppets and Stuff, some of which is worth repeating on my own blog:

The good news is that I had a lot of fun today, and everyone loved my work, and hopefully I’ll be able to show all of you what I was up to in a month or two. I didn’t get to see much, as I was actually puppeteering most of the time, but what I saw looked really cool.

It also helps that I was working with a great bunch of people, and despite a lot of waiting around for things to be set up and a small injury (see my blog from Thursday night), all went well. I’m amazed that even with the puppets nothing broke or stopped working outside of a minor problem that was easily fixed in a few seconds. I never had to make repairs outside of adding a piece of tape!

Also, the design is a lot of fun, I had a challenge making the puppets and they were all simple solutions to complex problems… and they worked exactly as planned. At one stage I had to get one of the crew to help me with manipulation (it was planned that way) and despite neither of us knowing what we’re doing we managed to pull off a good-looking scene that was tricky to perform.

A long day, but totally worth it. Especially for me when I’m so used to theatre where you bump in (get in) in less than a few hours, and don’t have time for food. I was well fed, well treated, and even got a lift home
Ah, being the star of the show is nice…

… Funnily enough breaking into puppetry for film was one of the ideas I wanted to follow through as I know it’s excellent marketing as well as good paid work. This was voluntary but I really didn’t mind because it was just nice to be able to do something active for once, rather than relying on the net for sales/interaction.

Hope I get to do it again one day.

… Oh yes, I knew there’d be lots of waiting around. And I’m not complaining, there’s lots to be done and plenty to be set up and checked and tested. It’s just very different to theatre where you can’t afford to be building sets the day you bump in, or spend 2 hours talking about frame speed instead of getting on with rigging (I’m assuming part of it is that with theatre everything has to be pre-planned in order to get everything done in time for opening, whereas with film you can be more flexible with a schedule and have more details finalised last minute). It’s a very different way of doing things… mainly it just weirded me out because I’m a trained techie and being the performer meant I was watching everyone else run around doing stuff. It’s not in my nature to just sit around watching everyone else work especially when there’s so much to do and so little time to do it in.

Catering is a nice addition, especially since we were all working from about 9am til late (they shot my stuff morning-eve, but were still going when I left at 10pm). Understandably having food/drink available for such a long day is something you’d want to do just cause it helps break up the day and makes everyone less grumpy

Actually it was really awesome to have lots of food and drink. Rehearsal day I had lunch provided, and shoot day lunch/dinner and snacks. I have to say I know how hard film work is just because it’s common sense, but I’m far more appreciative now of runners, general crew, etc. While I was busy trying to get a scene right, someone else was making dinner without me realising that’s what they were doing. They cleaned up afterwards so the rest of the crew could get on with setting up and shooting… It’s some serious dedication to art to do stuff like that, especially when you’re not getting paid.

In terms of theatre, there’s less of that done, but in general you’re trying to get 10 hours worth of stuff done in 2. I’ve been given bottles of wine as a thank you, or treated to an occasional meal/snack, but that’s been more from people who I’ve worked with on a profit-share basis. You definitely don’t get that sort of comaraderie [ie. buying of food] from pro theatre crews. Unless it’s “buy you a beer after the show” kind of thing.

Returning to my other tasks I’ve been doing: I decided that a celebration was in order on School of Puppetry. I was looking at the archives of the site and realised that May 2007 was the first month I started publishing articles on the subject of puppetry - rather than plain blog posts. Even though there’s still 65 or so items to migrate over to that site, I thought five years of writing is worth celebrating. So I made a little announcement.

The other thing is that I am very much going through a bit of a burn-out phase at the moment. Part of it is due to worry about finances, for which there’s been a noticeable dip in pattern sales lately. The other is a constant churn-out of material for both SOP and Puppets in Melbourne. It’s hard to be creative all the time on one subject, especially when you’re also the marketeer and web admin.

To fill in the income and to give myself a bit of a mental break, I’ve signed myself up for a freelancing website where I can earn money by doing what I’m good at: writing. The benefit is that I don’t need to go anywhere or change my schedule much to fit this in, and I’ve already gotten one job already after applying for a few things over a couple of days. You’d think I’d be too burned out to write anything, but actually it’s refreshing writing on a new subject matter for once. And it gives me a mental and physical break from puppetry without detracting from the potential income.

Unfortunately this means that I’ve done absolutely nothing in regards to my original super secret project: even though last week I paid for my registration to the summit. Whether or not I’ll have it done in time, or whether I’ll go ahead with it after all… I’m undecided at this point. Going full blast on puppetry for four or five years is exhausting, especially when you have little to break it up with and not much else to do instead.

No matter what though, being able to get out there and see my puppets used for once was highly enjoyable and a great way to get rid of a lot of the rut. It’s also nice to see them work to plan, because normally making puppets to sell or patterns doesn’t offer me the opportunity to see the results. And I’m very excited to see this video now…

I thought I would write up a small comparison of the two sites, now that I’ve been using E-Junkie for about a year, and I used Lulu for roughly the same amount of time.

Basically, Lulu.com is a website which allows you to sell pdf ebooks and soft/hard copy books. It’s POD printing; Print On Demand. This means you can print as many books as you want, as compared to the old version of publishing/printing, where you had to order (often large) quotas of books at a time. Lulu.com also acts as the sales point, meaning all you do is upload your file, select some options, and press save. Lulu collects the customer’s info, takes payment, prints and ships the books/sends download info, and sends you the royalties via Paypal in a lump sum at the end of each month. (I’ll note that at the time I was signed up with them, they also offered CD/DVD publishing, but they don’t offer it anymore) Caveat: I have not used Lulu for over a year now. This and the following is based on my memory of how things worked, but not necessarily representative of any changes that have occurred to their service since.

E-Junkie is slightly similar, but only in regards to ebooks - they don’t offer POD printing. E-Junkie is more of a Paypal with features - you upload files to E-Junkie, select a few options, press save, and place a button or shopping cart on your website. When the customer orders, they order using a custom Paypal-like (or whatever online payment system you use, such as the one Google offers) page; the payment is made directly to your Paypal account (as compared to Lulu’s own shopping cart system) and the file link forwarded via email. This means you can also use E-Junkie for actual products (and I should mention, other media files, such as .zips, images, video, etc), and so it’s one up on Paypal because you don’t have to do endless coding in order to create a button or shopping cart - just add your product details and go.

There are a number of differences between the two sites, and mostly I will compare between how each handles sales and ebooks.

Ebooks: E-Junkie does not create the files for you; you have to do that yourself. However with Microsoft Word (or substitute) and a free pdf creator, it’s not all that hard to do. Lulu does create the file if you upload with a Word document; alternatively upload the pdf yourself, and it will be used instead of a Word file. Either way, it’s not much different. Because E-Junkie does not do POD printing, and Lulu does, this is the main reason for Lulu being the only one to ‘create files’… Lulu needs to create a special file in order to send it to the printer.

Fees (aka what you pay to use their site): E-Junkie requires a monthly fee to be paid (on a scale system depending on how much storage space you require for your files); Lulu.com requires no monthly fees, but does take a percentage of your sale price as administrative fees. Initially I was reluctant to pay the money each month to E-Junkie, since it will be paid out whether I make a sale or not - Lulu doesn’t take money when you don’t make a sale - however, as you’ll see from my other comments below, it’s been well worth the price.

Royalties (aka your profits): E-Junkie takes no money and then sends it on to you, instead the money goes direct into your Paypal account, no different than if you have an actual Paypal ‘buy’ button on your website. This means you get all of the sales price, every time. Lulu.com collects all the money from every sale, removes the fee from each, then adds up and sends the monthly amount to your Paypal account. Whilst either option is basically the same in terms of dollars, I find it far more satisfying knowing I don’t have to rely on a third-party to pass on the correct amount every time. (It’s also nice from a customer perspective as many people don’t realise the difference between a person selling through a third-party website, and a person selling through their own. Many customers when I was using Lulu kind of assumed I was in charge of it)

Reports: E-Junkie sends an email notification every time I make a sale. This includes relevant info, such as the customer’s name, email address, and IP address (useful for tracking down sales in your webstats, which are not often linked to E-Junkie itself). There is also a transaction ID - which actually matches up with the Paypal payment ID, which I’ll get to in a second - info about what they bought, and so on. Because E-Junkie processes the payment directly through my Paypal account, I also receive a normal Paypal notification of payment. Additionally, as a seller, I can set it so that I receive the email notification that gets sent to the customer, which has info about how to download the ebook and other instructions which I can manually set in E-Junkie’s account. Lulu sends a ‘daily sales notification’, which is basically an email that tells you what products were sold and how many. No customer info is retained or forwarded; this will be important for further discussion of Lulu’s service. I often had daily sales notifications disappear for no apparent reason, even though my Lulu account settings were checked to receive them. Making a complaint to Lulu customer service never resolved this; luckily for me I have the Paypal payment records from Lulu. (Again, this impacts on my comments below) I will also add that all emails to the customer via E-Junkie use my email address, so it appears as though I’m the one sending them; whereas Lulu uses their own email addresses and so customers might get confused as to who they’re dealing with.

Stats: E-Junkie provides all the info available from the email notifications in a list in the seller’s login area, plus the ability to see when/if the ebook has been downloaded, and with how many attempts (it expires after a number of attempts). The list can be downloaded, and I have done so in an Excel file. The list can be downloaded for all sales from the beginning of your use of the site, or it can be done for any and every time in between. Lulu provides limited statistics, such as how many products are sold over a year, which ones, and the total $ of each. No customer info is retained, no stats available to compare with sales strategies or referral links.

Process of downloads: E-Junkie provides a thank you page after a sale is made, where you can manually write your own text, as well as advertise other products and give further instructions. An email is sent to the customer, which explains they need to follow a link in order to download the file. Upon clicking the link, the customer is taken to a page which provides a ‘click here’ to download instruction; along with any other info you’ve manually added. (So all three steps you have custom text if you want) Lulu provides a thank you page after a sale is made, no custom text. The customer is provided a receipt/email, however, they must be smart enough to relogin to Lulu in order to find what the customer service reps tell me is a very obvious button to download the file (more on that below). At no time can you edit the info provided to the customer, nor can you change the process by which the download is offered.

Service options, additional: E-Junkie allows you to manually reset download links once they transpire, as well as send free downloads - basically an email with a download link, but avoiding the payment system as usually required in order to access the files. Lulu doesn’t allow resetting, but does allow a ‘private’ download which can be accessed only if someone already knows the correct URL. It’s not protected the same way a download link is (the link/file does not expire), but it does the same basic thing.

Customer service: E-Junkie, in my year using it, has only had a couple of problems. One was uploader-related, and was likely due to a browser issue (upgrading Firefox did the trick); the other was a problem from a customer who couldn’t download the file. Likewise it was browser related. I have used both the forums and private customer service with E-Junkie and have received pleasant, helpful advice within 48-72 hours. Lulu also provides forums (mostly user-to-user help, although that may be true of E-Junkie as well, but I’ve had limited experience browsing in the latter) along with private customer service. The forums were a nightmare to browse, and still are, and I found little if any response from other users. Customer service was on average 3 weeks to make an initial response, and several weeks more if there were follow-up emails; additionally curt and unhelpful and often required re-explaining to multiple service reps. Lulu’s website itself was often frustrating to work with in terms of uploading and selecting options, but mostly they were aesthetic issues which seller-wise don’t fuss me enough to mention. More info below on customer service for Lulu.

Customer satisfaction: This is in reference to the people buying my stuff, not my own satisfaction with the services. Whilst using E-Junkie I may have had all of 3 or 4 people emailing me wondering where their download is. (Let’s say I have had 200-300 customers per site, most of whom never contact me) In all cases - so far - this is a ‘user’ problem, whereby they either are too impatient to read the instructions in emails; needed to upgrade their browser or pdf program; or thought it was a snail mail pattern. In all cases I have endeavoured to clarify my instructions on the sales page/thank you page/email receipt, and a polite yet clearly-worded reply with instructions usually solved the confusion. Additionally, E-Junkie’s stats mean that I can login to my seller’s account and double-check whether or not there have been downloads from a customer, if I need to reset their download link, etc.

Whilst using Lulu 3/5 customers would email me wondering where their download was. 3/5 customers couldn’t follow the instructions given by Lulu, even when I directed them to Lulu’s FAQ which had screenshots of each step of the process. 2/5 customers would give up after trying several times, and I have had to resort to snail mailing them a CD copy at no extra charge. (These too were Lulu products, but I ordered a batch of them to keep at home in case of problems like these) As Lulu doesn’t send actual customer information to the seller, ie. me, I had no way of verifying that the person even bought the item, let alone having transaction IDs that I could follow up on. On the occasions where I suggested the customer directly contact Lulu (because of my lack of info/ability to track problems), I have either had to contact Lulu myself because the customer never received a reply, or the customer simply gave up and requested a replacement CD. When I complained - and I did several times in their forums, via customer service, and even here on my blog - about the download button issue as a design problem, Lulu acted as if the majority of my customers were just plain internet-newbies. Instead of taking proper feedback on board, they made me feel like I was just not giving my customers enough information; even though I have no control over how customers use another company’s service or how that service is designed and run. If the product itself - Lulu’s print and delivery system - wasn’t enough to put me off, and it was, then their customer service sure did.

Overall: I currently pay $15 USD for E-Junkie per month. And it’s worth every cent, even if it is on top of my other website bills. Over time of using Lulu I paid out that and more just sending replacement CDs of ebooks I was selling; often overseas. Lulu wasted my time and money, and in addition to that, provided less services and badly too. With E-Junkie, I have more control over how I deal with customers and how they deal with me, and have only twice (out of hundreds of sales) gotten an irate email from a customer; as compared to the tens of irate ones I received before using Lulu, including several that call me a ‘thief’ and threatening to report me to the Better Business Bureau (yes, customers don’t read my contact info before purchasing, and apparently most people on the net think that you live in America if you sell online). I make more sales now than I did before, although that’s probably not from the change of third-party service but moving the patterns over to School of Puppetry. When I make a sale now, I know it will work 9/10, instead of the 3/10 from before. I don’t get stressed out wondering if every few sales I will have problems. And there were problems with Lulu from day one. E-Junkie however, has been easy to use, I’ve never woken up wondering if I’m going to get irate emails, I’ve been happy with the customer service and their product, and as far as I’m concerned, $15 is cheap for peace of mind.

If you have any questions about my experience with either site that I haven’t (clearly) covered above, let me know and I’ll try to answer them.

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