Hey folks, thought I’d drop in with a quick work update and let you know how things are going…
I’m currently finalizing the written draft for my first new “piece” of the year, titled “On The Price Of Bread.” Currently it’s at about 3200 words with a 17 minute total read time. I intend to read the entire piece as audio, add it to video, and release both of those as new “full length” content, while also snipping out various parts for short-form, vertical, and meme content to help drive engagement and of course get the message out (which is, as much as I hate to admit it, what ‘driving engagement’ is supposed to be about even though I hate the whole concept and all the MBA buzzwords and just marketing and advertising in general. As I’m writing this sentence the current local time is 3:28pm, and it seems reasonably likely that I’ll manage to at least get the audio recorded before the night is over.
Me sitting here yammering my face at you on video for half an hour is obnoxious, so I need to find a combination of stock footage and relevant stills that I can use as b-roll to run under the video presentation. While this is probably pretty superfluous for the full-length audio broadcast, the work to create that is also like 60% of what would go into selecting specific scenes or parts of the audio, then using just those to create a series of small videos. Trying to maximize exposure while making more out of the material I create is a huge part of that, and something I’ve really been trying to improve for a long time, and I think I’m making some major progress on that front here.
Part of that bigger-picture effort includes not getting into a rush and trying to get a realistic idea of what the timeframe for turning this kind of work over really looks like. I think I want to set a goal of being able to turn a entire idea out including a couple-three thousand words, some images, full-length audio and video, and at least a couple of shorts and still, with a one-day turnaround, but frankly that may not be realistic. Clearly right now it’s not because I’ve been working on this article for several days but I’ve also been doing a lot of other things besides that.
Anyway, just wanted to let y’all know how things are going and what’s going on. Not quite ready to make a solid promise on publishing this new content yet, but I probably will feel comfortable committing to a deadline before I close up shop for the evening. I’ll let you know via status messages. I need to figure out a good way to get that done on an industrial level too, posting my status messages. Seems like Blog2Social was able to do some of that but it wasn’t particularly reliable and that tool is much more intended to be a reposter/scheduler than something more focused on being able to create and observe live content like Hootsuite or similar tools used to be. (Literally noticed as I was writing this that it’s still firing old scheduled posts. I deleted it completely from all the johnhenry.us subdomains now including the archive, so hopefully that won’t happen anymore.
Trying to find that balance between not getting mired in constant talk of what’s coming rather than getting it done, and keeping you all posted and up to date on where things are. Some of my sense of urgency about that will fade as I get back to letting the work speak for itself, too. Let me get back to it.
(Obviously I’ve decided for the time being to not bother paywalling this kind of content, the work updates and such. That may change to some degree in the future, or not, but right now I’m more focused on getting my communication back in order and a semi-regular basis with some reliability than I am on specifically trying to monetize things. I’ll get to that as I get the storefront rebuilt over the next couple of months.)
