Welcome to Episode 112 of my podcast. The view from the crow's nest and it is Friday the 25th of September, 2020. And today, I put on sale. My 2021 calendar. And so, this is an interesting little product or story or what have you. So I first started doing my calendar, about four or five years ago, and each year for the first three years, I guess, basically up until last year each year. It got a bit bigger in terms of sales, not a lot but bit bigger each year a bit bigger each year. So each year I'd use the proceeds from it to buy some more photography gear or what have you, so I could do more interesting calendar the next year and each year. I make the project more and more involved. So last year, I thought right I'm gonna go really all out. And I did this whole thing, focused on London because we were leaving London, and did London landmark. And then, I did this whole video flogs these video journals of the shoot, the actual calendar shoot and I was talking a lot about it. And then I did a whole bunch of blog posts I think about 13 or 14 blog posts, at least one for each of the photos on the calendar where I did a whole in depth blog post where I'd researched the history of the place that I was filmed that I was shooting and had photos and I had videos and I had links and I had history and facts and I went really to town on it and then I had this whole bunch of emails, you know, over the course of it, talking about it, blah blah and people really like the email so they told me and they like the information in the blog posts and whatnot. When all said and done, I sold far less candidates and I've done the year before when I didn't put in anywhere near the same effort. So this year, I thought let me try again the complete opposite direction. So, not that I'm not going to put in any effort but instead of putting effort into the marketing of it. I just want to get it done, let people know, and sell whatever gets sold and focus my efforts on actually just the photography, you know, and edit it finding and editing the photos and whatnot, which takes a fair bit of time. And so cool. It was a little ding dong somebody just bought one. And then so a couple of weeks ago I asked people. I didn't because of COVID I haven't been travelling around like a normally would have done. And so, I haven't got the shots that I might have taken over the year so I said you know what are people want are they in asked of questionnaire with a bunch of questions do you want. x y Zed nice for people reply to the question so I had almost 100 replies, therefore most sent proper percentage data set. And so today, I just wanted to get it done and ready so I've sent out an email that basically said it's an early bird pre order, and the price is 15 pounds for UK, including postage or 18 pounds rest of the world including postage 18 pounds about $22. And I really tried to squeeze it down as much as possible and out of that I mean, I'd make about two pound 50 to three pound per calendar that the rest is just cost so it really is next to no margin products, but this year instead of thinking about it as something that I, you know, gonna make money on that I can then use to buy gear. I just want to make it as affordable for people as possible and have as many people as possible, be able to enjoy it because actually I'd rather, I'd rather more people enjoyed my photography than making a little bit of money off of it in this in this with this calendar. So, I still don't know what the theme of the calendar is gonna be yet. And so I put it on for sale, and that was another sale while I was talking here. So it's just an interesting experiment it'll be the tale of two marketing. Our marketing efforts. And it's on this early bird price until the fourth of October, so we'll, we'll see what happens then and then revert pricing to something a bit more. In keeping with the previous years, but I wanted to. Yeah, I want to talk about it now. And then we'll review again in a coup
