I just recently completed my longest, most physically painful, exhilarating and inspiring project of my life. For the past nine months I've been inundated with cute little clothes, books, pictures, you name it, with incredible designs and illustrations. Time after time the same thought would fill my head: "I wish I could do that!" I've been dreaming about an illustration career for years. Why can't I do that? Really, why couldn't I? There was absolutely no reason why I couldn't. Sure, I have a full time design job, a new bundle of joy to take care of, but why not just go for it? This is my first journal entry in a series of 12 entries (published each month) dedicated to my process of self promotion.

I wanted to keep a monthly journal for two reasons:

1. To encourage others and let them know successful promotion can be done and how one person was able to do it. I am always on the lookout to see what other illustrators are doing. I've found a few illustrator's sites who have blogs that sometimes mention their promotional endeavors but never seems to give updates on their progress.

2. To keep myself accountable and to follow through with my dream. Keeping a personal deadline had always been hard for me. I always put it off and let something else take precedent. With this commitment of documenting my process, I know I can keep myself accountable not only to myself, but to all the people who will follow this series. My goal in all this? To become a full-time illustrator while being a stay-at-home Mom.

I have had a website dedicated to my illustration work for a couple of years now, but have done little to promote it. One thing thing I have done is link exchanges. By linking to other designers' and illustrators' sites (and them linking to me), my name comes up more times in search engines. You'll be surprised just how many hits you'll get from another person's site. Just this week I received two emails from people who had seen my site listed on another designer's site.

Last year I had 1,000 postcards printed with plans to mail them out to potential clients. Today I have about 990 of those cards still left in the box. Why? I over critique my work, as I'm sure most people do. I started not to like the image I had produced specifically for the card. This time I am approaching it differently. I realized that I need to pick one of my best pieces for the promo card and not try to think of something specifically for it. Why it took me this long to figure that out, I'll never know!

So, I have my website up, I have an illustration to use for my postcard, and I have a growing list of names to send them to (thanks to the Artist & Graphic Designer's Market, Children's Writers & Illustrators market books, people emailing me to be on my mailing list, as well as companies I've found by using keywords on Yahoo! and Google). I am now officially ready to move forward!

I encourage your questions and comments so please feel free to email me. See you next month!