Welcome Back, Hopefully to Stay

Well, it has been a while since I've been back here.  Things have been hectic for quite a while, and I've let some things go.  This was one of them, and the one I regret the most.  But I'm back, hopefully to stay.

It's been a whole year since I started this crazy thing. Actually it's been more like a year and a half, but I just submitted my first year's corporate taxes, so I call that the end of year one. For those of you who don't do your own taxes, it is every bit as horrible as you have been lead to believe, especially if you're not that good at keep records, like me. I really need to work on that.

In any case, I now know exactly how well (or how badly) I'm doing. The news is not great, but it's also not all that bad either. I did suffer a loss, but it was under $3000. That's significantly less than $300 a month. I don't want to continue perpetually like that, but for now I can afford it.

The loss is not terribly surprising. Last year it was a constant struggle just to get enough content to fill a bimonthly magazine. This year my goal is to increase readership of the free edition (sign up today at www.speculativefictionstories.com wink wink nudge nudge) and to build some awareness for the premium paid version. Things are going a little better than projected really, since I actually made some sales this year. I hope to continue that trend.

For those who feel that $300 a month (well, closer to $250 but I prefer to round up on these things), is too much to lose, and unaffordable, take heart. I haven't done everything totally on the cheap. There are a lot of areas where I could have cut costs. My hosting and merchant services total about $60 of that $300 a month, so 20%. You can reduce hosting to about $5.00 a month and merchant services to no set fee by using freely available services. You just wouldn't be able to accept credit cards directly, only through a payment processor like Pay Pal. There's nothing wrong with that, it just wasn't the way I wanted to go.

I also did make some payments for advertising, and it has borne some fruit. I've been using Aweber, a paid auto-responder, lately instead of free alternatives too. And I've got my Trueshare account for when I need it. Those things all add up and are not necessary for all business models.

In fact, about the only thing that really is necessary is a web site (so around $5 - $10 a month, less if you can pay a year's worth up front), and something to sell. Everyone has that last one, they just don't know it yet. We're all experts on something. We can all make something that some group will be willing to pay money for. All I did was go out and do it. There's nothing particularly complicated or epic about what I'm doing. I'd bet pretty much anyone could do it too if they really wanted to. And I'm happy to offer advise and guidance as much as I can to anyone interested.

Now, moving forward into the new business year. I'm going to be adding my site to as many e zine directories as I can find. Yes, it\s been 18 months and I've only just thought of this now. Rethinking that advise and guidance aren't you? I'm also going to be making my presence known at conventions, including a plan to get a table at Edmonton's own Pure Spec. Not sure what all I'll have available for people to look at and hopefully purchase, but I've got some plans.

I'm also going to be offering audio copies, print copies and CD archives of the magazine. I've found an economical way to produce and market the physical items through Cafe Press (yes I also just found out that they do Publish on Demand books and Data and audio CDs).

So, the coming year is looking bright. I may even have losses of less than $1000 this year....no, wait, dream big...I may BREAK EVEN THIS YEAR!!!!!

Here's to the coming spring. I live in Edmonton.  It hasn't arrived as yet.

It...Is...Alive!

A lot has happened since I last posted here, as you might expect with nearly two months going by between postings. The big news is, there is now a website. You can find it at www.speculativefictionstories.com. I know, it's a long name, the next project is to register a shorter secondary domain name for initial typing. Fortunately, direct links are easy to do at Blogger so you don't actually have to type the domain in.

It may well be asked why I chose such a behemoth of a domain. The answer is search engine optimization. The magazine is full of speculative fiction stories, so I felt that the domain name should include that. It's long but it's not that hard to remember, I don't think, and it connects directly to what the site is all about, so that seemed a worth goal to aspire to.

The first issue of the magazine is also out. It weighed in at a little over 300 pages, contains 30 stories and poems, and was a challenge to get together. I've learned quite a bit about how to build a magazine using Open Office that I hope I will be able to put to use for issue two, due out at the end of the month.

Gathering the stories was not difficult, in fact, I had more than I needed, and thus have some in reserve for next month, which will make life easier for me. The problems were in formatting the whole thing. First off, I neglected to consider that my computer, despite the English operating system, is still a Korean machine, and hence tends to default to Korean standards, such as A4 rather than letter sized pages. Since I want people to be able to print these things out if they wish, that wasn't going to work, so I had to change the paper size mid-edition and then go back and fix it everywhere. This proved easier than it sounds due to the Styles formatting options, since a change to one page of a style automatically resulted in changes to all other pages in the same style. Next time, I'm going to set the styles up first, get the section openers, which I place some graphics on, done up and then put the stories in as a plainer style, but make sure to keep all the page sizes and margins the same.

Never the less, the issue is done and has been sent to the contributors and is available for purchase as a single issue or as part of a subscription.

And that leads to another thought I had. I'm publishing serialized fiction in these magazines, so anyone starting a subscription after the first will probably find some part 2s or 3s or so on at the end of the edition. I'm thinking that in order to reduce the cost of getting the whole story if they so desire, I'm going to change the subscription options to allow people to buy continuous groups of past issues as a bundle. So if you buy a 12 month subscription knowing the first issue will have part 4 of a story you want, you can set the starting month for the subscription to three months ago, and get the whole thing. If you just subscribe and find part 4 of a story, and really want the first three, you can go back and purchase the previous three issues at the 3 month subscription price and get a bit of a price break. It's probably tough to do this with a print magazine, but with electronic publication and distribution, it's fairly easy.

So, that's all for now. More news as issue two gets slowly assembled.

Surging forward

Since the last post a lot of things have happened.

1) The posting at Writing.Com has generated a great deal of interest. There are now four members of the story review team to determine the suitability of material for publication. There have been some questions about submitting artwork as well. Most importantly, we have received several writing submissions. Several of the submissions are parts of serieses, or suitable for serialization, and thus good for more than one issue. I'm very happy with the response and hope things will continue.

2) I've signed up with a site builder and marketing tool suite. They provide easy to use applications for building an online store, including draft pages for products, privacy policy, contact information and more. They also have integrated drop shippers for those who wish to sell physical products, integrated merchant accounts, so credit card payments can be accepted and more. The start up price was fairly high, but worth it in my opinion. I am going to a second session with them on Monday to get more advice on how to structure the business. after that I plan to talk to a lawyer about incorporation, and then get moving on building the site and launching spectacular publishing.

3) Expansion of products. The first month there will probably just be the one title, but I think in fairly short order I will need to launch a companion title that focuses on younger readers. More information as the idea develops.

4) The review team has been set up at TrueShare and so far everything is going great. They're able to log in and collect the stories and feedback has been coming in. They're a great bunch and I truly appreciate the work they've already done.

All in all, I'm very happy and excited about the progress that has been made, and look forward to moving further along in the next week.

More moves

It has been a long time since the last post. The main reason for that is that I have moved from Korea to Canada, and that took a lot of time and effort to finish off. Now I'm here, and things should start moving forward faster.

A few things have already happened since the last post. First of all, the fine people at True Share have been in touch with me and offered me a free trial of their services. Thus far everything is working great, and I see no reason why I won't be making them my file storage service for the long term. I'd advise anyone looking for a good file storage service to check out True Share.

Second, I have started advertising Spectacular Publishing. I will be placing an add in one local SF club newsletter that I belong to, and I have also added information at my Writing.Com account. I've been a member there for many years and should be able to get some authors and readers interested. I've also posted forums for potential readers and writers on my public portfolio there, and set up pay for click advertising for the forums and for this blog. Their click prices are quite reasonable, although you should have a site that involves writing somehow if you wish to get clicks from them. It is very targeted traffic, so it should be of some value.

I have also got three reading editors for selecting stories to appear in the anthologies and have worked out ways to get the stories to them and their opinions back to me. So things are now starting to move forward much faster.

Colin Neilson

Some moves forward

It's been a long two weeks. I've been working a lot of extra hours which has cut severely into the time I have to plan and implement ideas. This also resulted in another missed week of blog updating. Sorry.

A few things have moved ahead. I've decided not to wait for the official web site to be up and running to begin advertising. I can accept story submissions and requests for more information from the business email adress, and I have a couple of places to advertise already. The main one I'll be using right now is a writer's site I've been a member of for several years, Writing.com. I know a lot of people there, and should be able to get some good stories for the first and subsequent issues. I can also advertise a bit on a low budget.

Adding to that decision, I've decided to set October as the tentative first issue date. This will give me a couple of months to get things together and get everything up and running before the first issue has to be out. Also, I can run a contest on the writer's site and possible advertise it on other sites. The contest will be for Halloween, and the winning entries will be packaged into a special supplemental edition that will be provided free to anyone who has a subscription for the first issue, or who buys it during October. Starting the whole thing off with an extra freebie is always nice.

I've downloaded a copy of Sea Monkey and did a little playing around with it. It looks suitable for my need. It's pretty easy to use, you can work through things much like writing a word processor document, it's easy to construct tables, and best of all, you can switch back and forth between WYSIWHG and HTML coding. So I'll be able to do everything I was able to before, but faster and easier, and then go in and tighten up the code and add meta information. I plan to learn CSS later, but right now this should work.

I did discover a potential problem, however. Aweber, the email acceptance firm I plan to use does allow attachments in emails sent through them, but only up to 1MB. I may outgrow that fairly quickly. This should be fine for the free newsletter I'll be offering, but I had to do some looking to find solutions for delivery of the actual ezine. I have three options and I'll probably use two out of three over time. First, if early editions are less 1 MB I can just attach them directly. The more I thought about that, however, the less I liked it. I have no way of knowing if every subscriber's email will allow largish attachments, and some people may not like them in any case. My second option is to send a download link in the email and let people download the issue at their leisure. The problem with that is how to keep people who shouldn't have access from having access. It didn't take too long for me to realize I was grossly over complicating everything. There's no way to end the problem of unpaid access, so I just decided to set the download link to have a long random character string in it to make it hard to just type it in at random, and leave it at that for now. The third option was a file storage system.

There's a lot of file storage sites online these days. I was using one called Webhard when I was doing some freelance work with a Korean newspaper. It was pretty easy to use, but I didn't think it would meet my needs. So I did some digging and found a site called Trueshare. This one lets you have as many users as you want, has large file storage space for what seems like a decent price, and lets you send out direct links with password protection to groups of users. Not only will it work for storing the actual magazines, it will be a good resource for writers and artists to upload their work for use in the magazine later. I consider this a jackpot, since it solved a problem I wasn't even thinking about.

So, a little bad, a lot of good, and things are going ever forward.

Getting Started

Now that I've planned out what I need to do before the business can get going, I need to get some things together so the business will be ready to run when the infrastructure is built up. Some of my decisions will have to remain unmade until I decide for certain whether to incorporate or not, while others can be taken care of at any time. I plan to start getting everything as ready as possible so that things can go ahead smoothly and quickly once I'm home.

1) Payment Processing
There are a lot of options for this one. Fortunately, the decision is a lot easier than most because I can always add or change processing methods as time goes by. Adding is better, since it will allow customers who paid through the old systems to keep doing so, of course.

Naturally checks and money orders will be accepted for people who prefer to mail payments. I'll have to work out a plan for how to handle checks, clearing them and whatnot, but generally checks are fairly secure. The tutoring company I used to run never had problems with checks or money orders.

For credit card payments, I'm currently planning to accept Pay Pal and Google Checkout to start with. These are both big names in payment processing and offer a variety of options. If I incorporate immediately, I will also set up a merchant account and potentially be able to accept credit card payments directly. If I choose to do that, I will most likely go through the Toronto Dominion Bank. I had very good experiences with them in the past.

2) A Web Site and Web Hosting
I've already decided to use Mozilla's Seamonkey Web Application Suite to design my web pages. Now I'll just need to find a host and register the domains. I won't be doing much research into hosting for now, since it will be easier and cheaper to look into it when I'm home. Most likely I'll be looking at a local host if possible, and if I need to phone them to verify anything it'll be much more convenient when I'm also local. I have a few domains in mind for the web site, and so far it looks likely that they are available.

3) A Way to Attract Viewers
As the ideal page viewer is someone who is interested in Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror, I'm planning to add product reviews to the site, focusing on Movies, Music, Books and Games related to those genres. I already write review articles for a club newsletter, so this shouldn't be too tough. This will also allow more places for Google Adsense ads and Some reasonable Amazon affiliate ads. Given some time and effort, the ad revenue could end up paying for the overhead costs of the business.

4) Readers and Writers
Naturally, if the main business is going to be online publishing, I'll need something to publish. As such I'll be posting ads at some online writing groups looking for writers, and probably using my friends to start with to read over submitted stories for suitability. I may use some of my own writing if I need something to fill out an issue. I'll be advertising with local fan clubs and hopefully using word of mouth to sell subscriptions. As time goes on, and money comes in, I'll look at paid advertising, such as PPC ads, particularly Google's Adwords program.

5) Record Keeping Software

I'm going to need some sort of bookkeeping system to keep track of everything. This is an area I'm not that strong in so it's going to take some time and effort to research options and come up with a system I can work with and follow. It's entirely likely I'll need to hire a bookkeeper to do most of the work. I have done that before, advertising through the Canada job board for students from places like the University of Alberta and NAIT. Edmonton has a lot of colleges and trade schools which can provide low cost workers for things like bookkeeping.

6) Delivery System
At the start, this shouldn't be a problem but as my readership (hopefully) grows, I'll need a separate system for sending out the finished product, or I could be at risk of being labelled a spammer. Fortunately there are lots of programs on the net to do just this. The one I see in use most often is Aweber, and this is the one I'm planning on making use of. I'll probably sign up immediately so that subscribers won't have to reopt in to receive the materials. From what I can tell I can grow with Aweber so once I set up my account with them, I won't have much need to change.

Once I get all these things set up, I'll be ready to start the business. In the meantime, I'll be doing more research and working on getting the web page set up. I'll keep posting how things are going to this blog. Any questions or comments, please feel free to send them here, I'm still very much open to suggestions.

First steps

When starting any new project, it's always a good idea to assemble a list of things you are going to need. The next few posts will be exactly that, a set of lists of what I need to get my new business up and running. Naturally any thoughts you the readers may have about that will be welcome, as well as any suggestions about how I can meet these needs.

This post is going to cover the things that will be needed before I can even think about getting the business going.

1) A job.

I can hear the question now, "Why do you need a job? Isn't the point of running your own business getting out of needing a job?" Well, yes, that is a big part of it. The problem is, a new business doesn't generally start making money over night. It takes time for things to get working. I've tried using a business as my sole means of support, and it didn't work out so well. If I have a job, I won't be desperate for money all the time, and so, hopefully, I'll make fewer mistakes in keeping the business going.

Another good reason for having a job before getting the business going is that some parts of the business will require money to get going. It's a lot better if that money is coming from a renewable source so that I can wait out the lean starting months and let the business grow to the point that I can live off it.

On the down side, I'm in South Korea right now, which can make job hunting difficult, since any job I'll be taking will be in Canada. On the up side, we have the internet, obviously or how would you be reading this? There are a number of sites that let a person look for a job around the world.

a) The Canadian Government's Job Bank.
I can look for jobs across the country here. The listings are divided up by industry and location so I can find the perfect job for me. Well, not really, but I can get some leads on jobs I might be able to tolerate while I get my business set up. As a government website, I can have some confidence that these are legitimate job offers.

b) Jobsearch.ca
Lots of resources and links for job searches across Canada. The above two also offer free postings for companies looking to hire. That could be very useful later when I'm looking to hire a staff for my own business.

c) Google
Yes, I know, it seems strange to list Google as a job search resource, but type in "job search" and add your location, and you'll get a lot of helpful leads.

d) Other job search sites such as Monster.com, Workopolis, Craigslist and a host of others.
There are too many job posting services on the web to list here, which is a good reason why Google is up there. There are pros and cons to each one but as long as you are patient and careful not lot let too much personal information get out, they can all be useful.

Naturally, being Canadian, my links are mostly Canadian, but similar places exist for other countries. I'll list some at the end of this post.

2) An idea

There's not much point going through all the steps of setting up a business if you don't know what the business is actually going to do. I already have my business idea, so this step is taken care of. I'm going to produce monthly antholgies of short stories in PDF format. I plan to have more stories in each than other periodicals, focusing on entertainment value and writing skill. At the start my focus will be Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror, since that is what I read the most.

If you don't have any ideas, then look at your hobbies. A business tends to be easier to run if it is tied to something you like to do already. If you are interested enough in your hobby, then you already know a lot about it, and you can share that knowledge with others. I highly recommend thinking about ways you can turn your hobby into a business if you are interested in starting one.

3) A business structure

This is the biggest, and possibly most expensive, step in setting the business up. I know the idea is to run a business with a low startup cost, but this step may be expensive. It also may not depending on what your goals for the business are.

For Canadians, there are three choices: Sole proprietorship, Partnership and corporation. The United States adds different types of corporations and other countries have their own structures. It's best to seek out your own government's business pages and find out what the different structures mean.

For Canadians:

a) Sole proprietorship
This means you are the business. All the money coming in goes into your personal income, and the rules for writing off expenses follow the personal income tax rules. The big disadvantage to this structure is personal liability. If for whatever reason your business is sued, it means you are being sued, and the plaintiff can go after personal property in the settlement.

b) Partnership
This is similar to a sole proprietorship, except more than one person is involved. In a partnership, all partners share in the profits and liabilities of the business. This means that if something goes wrong, creditors can go after the personal property of all partners, even if the problems are from the actions of only one of them.

c) Corporation
A corporation exists as an entity on its own. This means that the corporation itself, not the people withing the corporation, makes money, pays taxes and owns property itself. A corporation provides the most security for the owner(s) but is also the most expensive and complicated business structure. I personally prefer to run a business as a corporation, but due to finances it may not be possible at the start.

I highly recommend talking to a lawyer, preferably one with experience in business law before making a final decision on your business structure. Talking to an accountant would also be a good idea.

4) A business licence and other identification

For me, that means a trip to a city office to get a local business license, and some emailing to the Federal Government to get a GST number. As a Canadian business I will have to charge GST on any sale I make to Canadian clients. Luckily, I live and will be operating my business from Alberta, so I won't have to charge any Provincial sales taxes. In Canada and the United States you are required to collect any Federal, Provincial or State sales taxes to any client that lives in the location you run your business from. That's another good reason to talk to a lawyer before starting up, finding out what taxes you'll have to collect and pay. Generally, getting the required licenses and identification numbers and such is not all that difficult.

So, that's what is needed before the business really gets started. Next time, I'll outline some things that will be needed to actually get the business off the ground. For now, here are some links for the international job hunters.

US Job Search

USA Job Search

This is the official US Government job site, so it's bound to be a good first place to look.

Job Bank USA

An online job search engine. You can also post resumes here. Be careful how much personal information you put on any resume you post online. This one also seems to host popunder ads.

America's Employers

Another job search engine, with a lot of options on the front page.


United Kingdom Job Search

UK Jobs

Judging from the URL, this is a UK Government job posting site, so it should be reliable.

Click a Job

Billed as the largest UK job search engine, the site looks very impressive. It did take a long time to load for me, however.

Jobsite UK

Another job search engine, also allows you to upload your Resume or CV and get job offers by email. As always, be careful how much personal information you put on to an uploaded document.

Australian Job Search

Australian Job Search

The Australian Government job search site, it looks comprehensive and detailed.

Job Search Australia

Australian job search engine, you can also register for email alerts about new jobs.

SEEK

Job search engine that offers a lot of search customizability on the starting page. Choose key words, part time or full time, classifications, and locations at the start.

New Zealand Job Search

Find a Job

Government job search site.

SEEK

Job search engine that offers a lot of search customizability on the starting page. Choose key words, part time or full time, classifications, and locations at the start.

New Zealand Herald

Has a large job listing for all over New Zealand.

You can easily find more options on Google by typing in "job search" followed by the country you live in.