My Hanukkah songbook at Createspace: does print-on-demand seem too slow for the holiday season?

CLICK ON THE HANUKAH SONGBOOK IMAGE TO ORDER OR FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT IT...

I painted the picture on the cover of this Chanukah songbook on October 26; when the paint was dry half an hour later I scanned it and sent it off to createspace. Three days later I had the proof copy of the book in my hand - minutes later I approved it and it was available for sale! But in October people aren't thinking about Hanukkah...

... and, besides, it takes a while for a new book, or a new lens about a new book, to be found by search engines... and a holiday songbook is a time-sensitive purchase ...

Createspace is very, very fast - but I wonder if potential customers think it takes a long time to get books made specially and individually for them - I wonder if they worry that, by the time they're thinking about Hanukkah gifts, it's too late to order a book that's print-on-demand?

Hannukah begins December 11 this year - that means it runs through sundown on December 19, 2009. When I ordered copies of my book as a customer, they were still in my hands within a week. That means theoretically a person could order my TJC Hanukah Songbook on December 9 or so and still have it arrive during the holiday. That's another whole week of buying opportunity! But would people already think it too late?

Just wondering whether print-on-demand is a failure at holiday time. What do you think?

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How to avoid Christmas entirely!

It's a subject near to my heart, I've been trying to formulate an answer for years. I'm a convert to Judaism - you could say I'm a refugee from Christmas. My kids think my aversion is peculiar. But in case you share it, I have a lens for you - How to Avoid Christmas.

I realize it's sort of a heretical concept in our society - after all, it's Christmas shopping that drives the economy. But the thought of all those presents eventually hitting the landfill depresses me...

I give big whopping checks to the Nature Conservancy and Nothing But Nets and Mercy Corps and then I make delicious treats and send them to my relatives, and punto as they say on the telenovelas.

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Give to get

Even though squidoo is mostly geared towards selling - after all, only the quixotic (like me) would lavish so much time on this with nothing to be gained - it's the personal lenses, and the personal connections, which keep people coming back.

When I saw all the work Jaguar Julie had put into her friends thank-you lens I decided to make my own - for each of the 120 or so people on my fan-club list I included their picture, name, and one of their lenses which I most enjoyed. Then I published, and went around to the guestbooks of the lenses I'd featured and said thank-you individually.

Well, I learned a lot in my travels through all those lens lists of my fans, but what I wanted to tell you now is that many of those fans have come back, looked at my lens and given it five stars, and said thank you right back at me! I think I made more friends in the course of this project... and those are people who are more likely to look at my other lenses.

I have two kinds of lenses: the kind related to my work and creations and those I made for the heck of it. The "heck of it" lenses include, for instance, more than a dozen on puppets, small and large. I'm not selling anything on them. They're just there.

Then there are the lenses about the things that matter to me in a more creative sense: showing off my paintings (see the latest images for my Zazzle store, Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart), my songbooks like the Solstice Assembly Songbook, etc. I take them much more personally and they get fewer visitors, but hopefully, a rising tide raises all boats, and if people are happy I've featured their lenses, maybe they'll visit my songbooks.

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Another thing I like about Squidoo: helping out my friends

I'd like to think I'm making some headway in promoting some causes that matter to me - or matter to my friends...

For instance, I wrote a lens on Chai Lifeline, an organization that provides help to many families with desperately sick children, including a summer camp called "Camp Simcha." My son went twice - it was the only place he could go, sick and weak as he was after his cancer treatments, where we knew he would be taken care of.

My lens, Chai Lifeline - helping sick kids make it through, is quite modest but it meant a lot to me to write it, and I hope it provides another way for people to find Chai Lifeline when they need it.

Another example: there is a really worthy but little known rescue center for carnivores in our area. My friend Mark is a donor and is trying to get them more publisicty so I made a lens about the Conservators' Center which is on the first page of google results just now.

A few more examples:

• I made a lens for my painting-buddy Mark's paintings and gave it to him: The paintings of Mark Chandler (in real life he is a neuropsychiatrist in Durham)
  
• I made a lens for another friend, Sam Margulies, the best divorce mediator in Greensboro. (Disclaimer: I built his website - though somebody else is tinkering with it now - and in partial exchange he gave me a miniature horse, Superman, who also has a lens of his own.) My lens, Can We Have a Good Divorce? doesn't get a lot of visitors but it does get click-throughs to Sam's site, so I hope it helps.

I encourage you to think of somebody - or some organization - that could use a new arena of publicity, and make a lens about him, her, or them. It's fun and probably helpful.

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More fun with rss feeds

Did you know you can make an rss feed out of almost any page at all? I have an rss feed in my newsreader now, for instance, that shows me the newest purple star lenses as soon as they're awarded. You can use it too: just paste the following url into your newsreader.

http://feed43.com/squidoo-purple-star-lenses.xml

You could also make one, for instance, for your fan club. That way you'd know when somebody new joined you. Want to learn how? I made a lens about it: Making an rss feed from your fan club.


You're welcome!

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Touring the "purple star" lenses

Since I've received three purple stars (one for my Mexican mask lens, one for my deer fence lens, and one for a lens about my Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart Zazzle Store, I got curious about the program and looked into it.

Did you know that as of today there are 640 purple star lenses, out of the hmm, maybe 900,000 lenses at squidoo?

Here's a list of all the purple star lensees. I visited most of them - starting from the bottom up - and I've done two lenses showcasing my favorite purple star lenses - there's a plexo so folks who've won purple stars can add their lenses to the list. It's fun to see which of the many excellent lenses by giants have gotten this award.

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Squidoo gives you lots of reasons to grow.

I'm a member of the "Fresh Wonders" group on Ning - a community willow created to encourage quality lens-building - and there is the occasional weekly challenge.

This week's challenge: to make a lens using illustrations which are not photographs. It was posed by MeltedRachel; she wrote:

I want you to make that lens that you always wanted to make but thought you couldn't because you didn't have any photos of it. It could be a holiday that you lost all the photos to or a ghostly encounter.

I've made lenses about art exhibitions that I couldn't photograph, imaginary places and places I've never been and I want you to be able to do the same.

This made something click for me. I had been wanting to do a lens about Chai Lifeline, the organization that helped my son when he was in treatment for brain cancer, but I couldn't bear the idea of using photographs - it seemed like a privacy issue.

So I used Rachel's idea and drew pictures instead. Here is my tale of Chai Lifeline and its wonderful summer camps for kids with cancer and other mortal illnesses:

Chai Lifeline.

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Learning by doing: I discover the benefits of irfanview by doing a lens on it

I hadn't really been planning to go for the 100 club, but I'm so close I've started thinking about ideas for lenses again.

Today I was using Irfanview, my favorite (and FREE) image editing software, and I thought: this would make a good lens. So I started building one, and that made me peer into all the menus, and DANG! I found lots of way wonderful features I'd never even noticed!

I wrote some of them up but not all. I'll be able to revisit this topic over time and try out some more features I wouldn't have seen if I weren't making a lens.

This lens had the added benefit of showing off some of my stuff I (theoretically) sell at Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart Zazzle Store - I used my images as examples when I illustrated features (here, I made a text box on a photo of a tshirt with a celtic knot I painted).

I used the "PoweredBy" class to label the images, with links to the store.

So you can visit my Irfanview lens and see what I'm talking about - and download the free software through the link I provided - and see how I used my images in the course of explaining the program!

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Writing up a project for squidoo: The Day of the Deerfence

I've been thinking about writing about my marathon couple of days erecting a deer fence around 1550 feet of my property, but I finally got to it yesterday and finished at 2:30 am! Here it is: Build your own deer fence.

It was fun re-living the experience, going back in my mind and remembering what tools and equipment I needed and how I'd researched the project. Research wasn't quite as easy eight years ago. Now practically everything you need is on Amazon so I loaded the lens with Amazon spotlight modules and used the "description" text box to describe the way I made the fence.

Do you have deer problems? Maybe this would help!

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A great to use Squidoo: learn as you go, and document.

Here's another reason I love Squidoo: it gives me a second motivation when I'm thinking about launching a project.

For instance, not too long ago I got very interested in giant puppets, and went to see a local show given by the Paperhand Puppet Intervention troupe, and thought it would be a fun thing to do with my young friend Jeimy (I'm a mentor through the Blue Ribbon Mentor Advocate Program: here's a lens about mentoring).

It seemed like a lot of work, though, and I might have sighed and not done it, but then I thought: "Oh, I could take photos of the process and make some lenses!" and so I did.

While I was on that kick, I thought about the song I sing with my musical partner Bob Vasile (we're the Pratie Heads British Isles fiddle tunes and songs duo). The song is about that blood-thirsty villanous puppet Punch and his antics; I made a lens about Punch and Judy so I could put our song on it and that got me started learning how to cast a plaster mold for paper-mache heads. I love paper mache. And that got me into a series of paper-mache heads for Halloween!

One more example... about twenty years ago when I was just starting to direct an a cappella vocal ensemble (the Solstice Assembly), we made a Skylark Productions recording called Three Log Night: Uncommon Music for the Holiday Season. I made a songbook to go with it. Twenty years later, I still get emails ordering the cd and songbook! So I decided to re-issue both, mainly because I could also make a lens about them: A Christmas Songbook.

Sometimes - you need a reason to get up and do something. The happy prospect of making a lens has often spurred me to get something done.

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New blogger says hello, and: Why *I* love Squidoo (part one)

Hello friends (taps microphone to see if sound system is working) -

Thanks, Gene, for inviting me to join your Valley here... here's one of the reasons I love Squidoo:

I'm using Squidoo as a filing cabinet of my interests. And when I learn something new, I make a lens about it.

So, now, when I'm trying to remember how to use Yahoo pipes to format an rss feed - instead of digging around my messy desk for the notes I took when I first figured it out, I just look at the lens I compiled as I was learning!...

Same with using the "Wimpy Player" to put music on a lens. It takes about 17 clicks to do it, and I'd have forgotten how by now - except I wrote it up in a lens, so now I can look it up any time I forget ...

I was given a miniature horse in partial exchange for building a website for the best divorce mediator in Greensboro, NC - and people kept asking me about him (the horse, not the divorce mediator) and wondering if he's actually a Shetland Pony - so I looked the matter up online and wrote a lens about it!

I loved the wattle-and-daub houses I saw in Bulgaria and England and wondered about them, so I looked them up and found a bunch of good pictures - and wrote a lens about them. Now, everything I know about wattle and daub is in one place.

Do you use Squidoo this way?

I'm Chapel Hill fiddler, and you can see all my Squidoo lenses here.

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