Launching

Launching tomorrow: www.incorporationforartists.com

It's really truly amazing how long it takes to put up a simple website. Or at least, how long it takes to put up a simple commercial website. Because as much time as we spent creating the site itself, we spent more time doing the invisible behind-the-scenes stuff that will allow us to actually sell a product online.

A lot of that time, for example, was spent putting together bonuses, like an email series that will be sent on the first day of each month to everyone who buys the book, reminding them of what documents are due that month. Had to compile the information, write twelve emails, set up an auto-responder, and schedule each "broadcast" individually. An enormous amount of very tedious, repetitive work--but the goal of it is to have everything automated. So I spent a lot of time up front, but now I shouldn't need to spend too much time at all. Once a year I'll have to update the emails, looking for changed due dates and new documents and so forth, but that should be it--otherwise, everything now just kinda happens by itself. (In fact my October email just arrived this morning, and for a moment I looked at it, thinking "Incorporation for Artists? Who are they and why are they sending me email? Oh, wait--yeah, it's me. Well whattaya know.")

The harder part was getting testimonials from people. I'm lousy at asking for something for nothing--I have no trouble asking for things when I've got something to offer in return, but here I really could offer nothing except my enormous gratitude and an unspecifiable "huge favor" back, someday. And yet a lot of people took the time to read the whole book, and some even were able to offer really useful comments that have helped the book a lot. (A friend of mine from college, Melissa Klein, who I haven't actually seen in something like twenty years--we say howdy on MySpace from time to time--lives in New York and was really helpful on the sections that deal with the requirements in that state. How nice is that?)

So it's all ready now, finally. We'll take just a little time today to test all the links and processes, then we'll swap out the "Coming Soon!" page with the real thing and see what happens. Upon which we immediately turn our attention to doing exactly the same stuff with Marc's internet-marketing online course, which we hope will move along a little faster since we've now been through the process so recently.

Next--actual progress is made on the guitar.

Coming Soon...

I looked around a couple months ago and realized that over the past few years I've started three companies. (Really, I looked around and there they were, strung in a line behind me, staring back and blinking.) There was the not-for-profit NOWtheatre back in Chicago, which alas does not exist anymore (this one seemed the most forlorn, and blinked only in memory), and then there are the quite-alive-and-still-blinking Zenmovie (an LLC) and Lightwheel Entertainment (a C corp.)

And I realized that every time I started one of those companies, I kept wishing that I could find, somewhere somehow, a list that would tell me the stuff I needed to know in one place: what documents are due to the various government agencies, federally and locally; how much money to pay; and on what dates said documents and payments are due. I scoured the internet blah blah blah, and never found such a document. So finally it occurred to me: I should make one.

So that's one of the things I've been doing. Finished the first draft about a month ago, whereupon my friend Buffie did an extraordinary annotation that led me through the second draft, which I finished last night. Now friend Marc will help me set up a website and, probably early next month, we'll launch the book on the web and see if others find it as useful as I believe it to be.

The book bears the beautiful and mellifluous title Incorporation for Artists, Writers, Musicians and Filmmakers. It ain't literature, it's information, which was an interesting challenge in itself, turning off all my let's call them Thereby-esque writing instincts, my automatic tendency toward the prolix, in order to just convey information. But that's one of the things Buffie is extraordinarily good at, so all praise to her, and I can't wait till we can get this little devil out into the world.