Continuing on the Challenge- Week 3
More business set up this week. These are things that have been on my mind as of late. As such this week’s challenge is again another impetus to maintain focus on all those tasks I may not enjoy but I know are necessary in order to do what it is I do. (Which judging by my lifestyle is hardly sleep and try not to spill ink, there may be other activities but these two are front and center right now.)
Anyway onwards and upwards.
1 Decide upon your business structure
This one is simple enough I believe. And in the near future I’ll need to get this in place. I did this once before with Hand Turkey, but in that Jason did the majority of the leg work. I think my main contributions were coming up with the dumb name, signing a couple forms and paying 1/4 the fees.
As of now anything I do is under the business banner of “sole proprietorship” which is okay for now as most of what I’ve done freelance wise has been technically through the umbrella of my old studio. Meaning the work came in, I did it, invoiced the studio and the studio invoiced the client. So while that allowed me a touch of legal separation between myself as a business, and myself as uhm myself (awkward wording is awkward) as I attempt to branch out into things the studio was not set up for it’ll be much less tenable to do so.
Wow the 249 prior words are there purely to say “I need to fill out LLC paperwork soon”, where is all the Russian spam I’m blocking that translates to “brevity is your sister” when I need it. Moving on.
2 Lay the foundations for your marketing strategy
For this section the goal is to pick 10 names to use as a laser marketing strategy. Presumably for later down the road in the challenge. The choosing of these ten names were to be informed by the decisions made in previous weeks. With this in mind, I’m looking up a mix of magazine and book publishers in order to target. With such a small number of names I want to select a bit of a range to the list. Oddly the challenge here wasn’t coming up with ten potential contacts, but narrowing down to ten to focus on. For the time being this is what I’m going with in no particular order, but all have really cool art direction. Some of these selections definitely lean towards my not so secret inner (and outer) nerd.
1: Dell Magazines (The Mystery Place Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine & Ellery Queen, Asimov’s, and Analog)
2: Plansponsor (So much awesome work finds its’ way into this magazine)
3: Richmond Magazine (Benefits of being local, and also having an awesome list of freelancers used)
4: Utne Reader
5: Hi-Fructose
6: Juxtapoz
7: Tor Books
8: Paizo Publishing
9: Fantasy Flight Games
10: Wizards of the Coast
3 Armed with everything you now know about your list of contacts, plan out 6 portfolio pieces that you will be creating in the next 3 weeks of the challenge
1-3 Based on editorial styled work, taking articles from one of the magazines listed above and re-imagining the illustration for it.
4 The Finding a Muse poster design (for Art Order) – This was something I’ve been planning to do, might as well add it to a public list to spur me to sit down and do it.
5-6 Fantasy pieces to be explored. There are a million concepts I want to do, so ideas aren’t the shortage. Time is.