Busy Little Self-Employed Bee

So, have now been self-employed for three whole days!

What have I achieved in that time?

1. Continued with the creation of my awesome business plan and procedure manual. (Much harder than one might think, and involves complicated planning like how am I actually going to go from where I am now to running a multi-million dollar business helping people publish their works. Great in theory, just working out the practical steps to get there slightly harder). 

2. Have signed up for a number of writing conferences, to keep my skills sharp (and the all important networking). 

3. Wrote to one of the writing conferences I was planning to attend anyway, and asked if they needed another presenter to talk about creating an online platform. They came back and said they didn't need another presenter, but could I be on the panel talking about marketing and social media. Yah! Buffy Empire Building begins. 

4. Encouraged by that success I then wrote to different community centres and training organisations with proposals to run a short course in self-publishing. Am still waiting for responses, but the only way to build my experience and reputation is by actually doing it!

5. Using YouTube, I have taught myself to do basic covers in Gimp, and have created two covers for my brother's short stories. Pretty, no? (Hey, for half a day of learning, I think they are pretty good. Think what I will be able to do after an entire week!)

I'm still going to use my graphic designers for proper novels, but for free/cheap short stories, it is easier to do it myself. (Graphic designer has so far been mucking around for a month with Dave's other cover. I did these in an hour each.)

6. Following on from doing the covers, I edited both of Dave's short stories and uploaded Tom Grafton Vs. The Sambar Spiker onto Smashwords yesterday, and Tom Grafton Vs. The Wild Dog Pack on Smashwords and Amazon today.

The first one is completely free and available at Smashwords. If you had a spare 20 minutes and liked hunting/adventure stories, a review would be hugely appreciated. 

The other one is available for just 99c, less than a can of coke and much better for you! Reviews of that would also be great on Smashwords, Amazon or Good Reads. (Am getting Dave's author page up on Good Reads, but might take a day or two...).

Search for "David Alexander Greentree books" in google turns up both Smashwords and Amazon. 

7. Got annoyed with trying to publish on Smashwords from Word, which was being stupid, so downloaded Scrivener (finally!) and taught myself how to use that today. Had to reload Tom Grafton Vs The Sambar Spiker to Smashwords as it was coming up with an error, but after I had played with it in Scrivener for a while, it came good. From now on, all writing to be published is going to be in Scrivener. Long live a word processing program that actually prints like it looks!

8.  Have spent a few hours teaching my father how to set up a Facebook Page (not his personal one), how to do some keyword research, and what article marketing is. It's a slow process, but at least they are paying me. (My parents figured it was that or have me evicted for not paying my rent and sleeping on their floor anyway. It's a fair point). 

So, I think that for just 3 days' work, that's pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though haven't done any blogging this week, as it was meant to be my 'week off'. But still, can't do everything, and can't have it all right now.

Any good tips on cover creation?