organization

Made good progress on GHOST IN THE SUN today, so I’m still hopeful the book will come out this week.

Once my brain was fried from editing, I turned to a different project: organizing my stock photo library!

This is actually more important than it sounds. I’ve been self-publishing for ten and a half years now, and in that time I’ve built of quite a large stock photo library from various sources. Previously, I used a very limited form of organizing it. I have an elaborate folder tree for managing my books (of which GHOST IN THE SUN will be the 126th) and for the last ten years I’ve been sticking the stock photos in their attached book folder. Like, if I use a stock photo for a short story cover, the photo goes into the associated short story’s folder, along with a text file storing the photo’s attribution, which is important to include the copyright page of the book.

But! I do a lot of with Photoshop now, which includes making Facebook ad images on a regular basis. Those usually combine six or seven stock photos together (like the one above) which means it’s a lot of work to click through the various folder trees to get to the appropriate stock photo. For that matter, I’ve written a lot of books and short stories, and I can’t always remember which story I used the stock photo for.

So over the past few weeks I’ve been organizing my stock photos into a new library, and it’s been very convenient. It makes designing images go a lot quicker.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that in many areas of life – writing, graphic design, taxes, and others – proper organization of files is indeed important!

-JM