Email Start: 1464
End: 1100
It was a busy day, went to the dentist, face was cremated, so the rest of the day went to trash, but did get to class, and had a good class discussion.
Category: Crazy, Disconnected Stuff…
The day ends fairly well accomplished:
errands completed
Start of day email 1600, end 1454
Progress made on:
- Scheduling filming meeting
- Phoenix Comicon
- Vul-Con tournament
-2012 Quickbooks file
- Marketing
- completed cover for The Healer’s Legacy
Tomorrow is all school, dentist, and more emails… youu hoo!
Really not much happening here, except working hard on promotion and new products…more later.
Busy day today, but the results are slow…
Emails at 1080
More tomorrow…
Email count is 1,006, officially crisis mode…
Some group of spammers thought it was cool to send me product “Questions” about some BCM stuff- why do they even bother?
Great day otherwise, got January Newsletter Out the Door, will cover a bunch of Poetry stuff, and a laundry list tomorrow… would love to see a great bounce in stats tomorrow…
lots of book stuff to follow up on and lots of editing to do as well. Lots of nebulousness apparently…
Oh, I did send one story to editing today, and really kicked forward on a second, hoping to have 3 done by the end of the week… ok, bye..
Off to see a bad Movie, but I wanted to document today’s activity. Contract for Sharon’s book signed, sealed and delivered… Art BCM site totally revamped and almost ready for content. very excited about that… lots of work to do in the next day or two on it, but it is looking MUCH better… 2012 is less about infrastructure, and all about content!
Email is at 769, haven’t pruned in too long…
Big night for the Audio site, did ALOT of infrastructure work to try and catch it up to the book site… Audio has been deteriorating fast because I haven’t been paying attention to it, so I wanted to really get back in the swing with it. I feel good about where I ended.
686 on the email today, did no purging.
Big Day tomorrow, delivering some flyers for J.A. Giunta’s reading on January 7th, having lunch with the awesome Sharon Skinner and will be doing more website updates, sending out an email newsletter for both Anthology and Brick cave Media. Got some shopping to do, and some decorating to finish.
Gotta finish a couple stories soon as well and get them out.
good day, down to 765 messages in the in-box, tons of Christmas music played, couple jobs applied for, and new stuff added to the store. Breakfast with Joe. Lasagna for lunch. You probably don’t much care.
Lots of database work today, which really helped me get books back into Barnes and Noble that I had pulled from a 3rd party… AND sets me up to move much more efficiently with the flood of new material I’ll be dealing with in 2012… Mandatory City Power Outage in the AM means I’ll be mobile for most of the day, then a flood of audio and video work tomorrow night…
I use Filemaker (don’t hate), and I’ve been working with an awkward database to track Brick Cave Media’s products, create product numbers and sort of act as a “master reference” whenever I needed information about a product. like, “What is the uRL of Joe’s book at Amazon?” kind of stuff.
Problem was, I hated it, because it was not particularly dynamic (in design, the software was fine). Years ago, when i had Anthology magazine, I had a sweet FM database setup to track submissions as they came in, got reviewed, and were accepted or rejected- it was sweet dynamic, we kept track of contacts and the whole nine yards.
This database was none of that, it was flat, and cumbersome to utilize the data I wanted when I wanted it. Since that time (2010), I have created a new database for keeping track of our relationships with bookstores in the country, and while it didn’t need to be all that, I pulled the two together because I wanted to access the BCM product numbers as choices to document what we sent to the bookstores, and I just felt sad for it. It was pathetic.
Pathetic no more.
I broke down today, because I needed to get a set of books back into B&N that I had pulled from Smashwords (nothing to do with Smashwords, they’re cool), and I know I just needed to spend the time and fix this database and make it right.
So I reformatted the whole thing, top to bottom, built in the dynamic fields to track ISBN’s by store and keep track of changes and updates. I can now pull up a list of the URL’s for each store a product is in. I reformatted my product Identifiers to make them more streamlined.
My next phase, which I did not get done today, but laid the ground work for, was tracking sales by store and breaking out reports based on whatever bat-shit crazy thing I decide I want to measure. Eventually, i would love to be able to import data form each store and have it populate the sales information for me, but that’s a bit above my pay grade at the moment
The best part, all the books got back into B&N lickety split, and it felt awesome…
