The recession has hit
Ok – there’s no getting around it. The recession has well and truly hit me. Having decided at the beginning of the year to plough money and effort into advertising my work in an attempt to grow my business, I find myself at the beginning of March with little to show for it.

By putting a huge amount (£40 per day) into advertising on google (my best source of business so far), I’ve got one job, and a few positive enquiries from January, but nothing at all of any use in February.

I can’t keep up that level of spending, so I’ve taken the decision cut it right back. Which in turn means no chance of getting the work that is out there.

The other strands of my advertising are more positive, but not any more promising. I’ve now had two email mailing lists compiled:

One of 2,000 museums to which I’ve sent a note letting them know I’ve written a guide to commissioning animation. This is a very “soft sell” – I’ve offered them a feature they might find interesting along with a note that they can contact me if they need any animation done for future displays. From this, I’ve got lots of people saying how much they like my work, and that they’ll keep my details for the future – but no actual work right now.

The other, of 500 aquariums to which I’ve offered a very specific animation idea – to create a “virtual fishtank” containing animations of extinct, or un-exhibitable sea creatures. It’s a much more direct offer (albeit one at quite a high value), but the response was pretty similar “love your work, but haven’t got any money” was the overwhelming view.


Although the responses I’ve received have all thanked me for sending my email - I also did a little checking, and am worried by the legalities of sending out mail unsolicited – (something I hate doing – but running I’m a little short on ways to make people aware of my work). It turns out that generally, you can send out emails to companies as long as you give them a valid email address to respond to and tell you if they don’t want your emails. You also have to not disguise who you are.

The one problem is that you can’t send emails to named individuals. Only there’s no way of knowing whether you’re talking to a company or one individual trading as a company, so it’s all a bit confused.

Anyway, this means I have to worry about the legal side of emailing, but it doesn’t mean I can practically do anything about it.


In addition, the company I’ve employed to build up my website traffic by writing a couple of articles about my work and putting them on sites which link to mine have come back to me with the articles to check – and they’re awful! They’re really badly written and say absolutely nothing of any value. I wouldn’t be happy having my work associated with them at all, so it doesn’t look as though that avenue is going to work either.


To make matters worse, my website stopped working this week – somehow it’s code became corrupted (possibly as a result of someone hacking into it), and it’s taken 3 days to get it working again and I’ve changed all my passwords.


All in all, I’ve been a bit despondent - there’s not a lot of work out there. By the looks of it, there isn’t going to be for a while, and I have to re-think my strategy. And this is not going to be a cheap year – either professionally or personally…

Solutions!
I’ve worked out that if I finish the documentary project I’m on now, and manage to keep the monthly newsletter I write for Pinnacle (there seems no likelihood of that going under – in fact it may expand) and I get a few more pieces from magazine articles, then as long as the images I’ve got on stock libraries keep generating income, I’ll make enough to survive.

This also depends on the tenant in my property in Manchester starting to pay his rent again (he hasn’t been able to pay for 6 months now and the council are being scandalously slow in processing his benefit claim. I may have to evict him.


So what else can I do? –well, my new plan is to develop a series of emails making different offers every month to different sets of people… the next one will be a very low-cost offer (just a few dollars for giving video footage a certain “look”). It’s not something I can make a lot of money at – more of a “loss leader” but my thought is if people aren’t buying high-cost projects, might they go for something much lower cost initially?

There are a few other low cost, small projects I can pursue – like writing articles and doing one off illustrations… but I still need to get the work.


Relentlessly optimistic
Ok, so to be optimistic about it. The good thing about having no paid work is that it means I should have the time to work on some of my own projects that nobody’s going to pay me for anyway. Having no other work means working on personal projects isn’t taking time away from paying ones, so if I’m organised, I should be able to do some of the things I’ve really wanted to do:

A feature film documentary idea about something I think is really important… and a children’s animated series. Both, huge undertakings, but if other work is short… I’ll do a breakdown of just what it would take to get these projects off the ground…

Hmmm….