I’ve “Gone Global”

November 30th, 2009

A week or so ago I finished work on a book for a self-publisher, Jen Hall. The book, Success Is Simply Spiritual, is more than a simple self-help book, but a kind of treatise on achieving one’s dreams. And for that I highly recommend it to anyone looking to achieve things beyond the everyday “stuckness” we all occasionally find ourselves in.

But that is not the point I view this particular book from right now. I have worked on design-and-layout projects for self-publishing authors before. It happens, however, that Jen lives and is based in Australia. Hers was my first book for a client outside the U.S.

I had always wondered about issues like coordinating payment originating in non-U.S. currency—and also, frankly, about dealing with another layer of detail should there be any problem with timely payment. Well, of course, there was no problem. My pre-work conversations with Jen revealed a person—never mind an author and publisher—of the highest integrity; also someone who knew what she wanted and was very easy to work with.

So the project went off without a hitch and I await my copies of the book to inspect my handiwork and read it through as a book and not a “project”. But it wasn’t until the other night, reading Shel Israel’s insightful work, Twitterville, that it occurred to me: I’ve now gone global!

All the more remarkable when I think of how I reached this point. After resisting social media—Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter among them—on a whim, I engaged in Twitter nearly a year-and-a-half ago. Like many people who formed their opinion without actually trying it, I wondered why I should be interested in what someone I’d never met was doing or where they were. More to the point, I wondered who the hell would give a rat’s ass what I was up to.

Well, by superstar standards, I have a modest number of followers, a few over 1,800 and I’ve topped out at following just over 2,000 people. But within those numbers I’ve had some pretty meaningful exchanges—as well as some not-so-meaningful that were just fun—and made contacts or cultivated existing contacts to the tune of three books so far.

In Twitterville Shel describes the forming of bonds that can create a global clientele among people who will otherwise never actually sit in each other’s presence—except perhaps via the kick of videoconferencing (which I utilized with Jen and her copy editor). So now that I’ve gotten to that part of the year where I market myself to publishers in what seems almost like a horse-and-buggy method, email, looking for next year’s work, I am rethinking how far to cast my net.

Truly it is a remarkable time to be alive and a hoot of a way to conduct business.

Entry Filed under: clients,freelancing