Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 28

The benefits of having a PO Box or other Locked Mailbox for your business

This is post 40 of 45 in the series “Sell Their Stuff”

Now that sites like eBay limit buyers from paying via checks and money orders, it’s tempting to forget snail mail, but regular postal mail still plays a part in any business. Not only will your business need to establish an official address for correspondence, forms and other paperwork, you’ll also still be accepting returns and exchanges through the physical mail. While the rest of the world increasingly goes digital, the government on...

Three Padded Walls goes Off Off Broadway at The Bridge Theater this February 20th – 21st

Three Padded Walls, a play I originally wrote in high school and rewrote last year, will be a part of Dimensionspresented at The Bridge Theater on February 20th and February 21st. This is the first production of one of my shows in NYC since Columbia Prepdid The Love of Three Orangesback in 2004 and I’m really excited to see it. The director was kind enough to share this photo from their first rehearsal: Rehearsal photo from Three Padded Walls by Hillary DiPiano.… Read more

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Good customer service is a selling point that can distinguish your services

This is post 39 of 45 in the series “Sell Their Stuff”

Features and Upgrades

Everything in this next section is optional. You can run a successful SA business without adding a single feature above a basic selling service, but what will really define your service and set it apart are the features you offer and the ways you upgrade your service above the bare minimum. While you’ll likely come up with your own ways to make your service your own, this section will get you started with proven se...

January 2016: New Year, New Words

In the interest of transparency, I promised to start doing a monthly recap of my writing life instead of just the big yearly one to give a sense of what I actually do in a given month. I don’t want this to be crazy long so let’s just dive into it.
Here’s whatJanuary 2016looked like in writing…

Goal
I didn’t set a goal for this month, though I did push towards hitting 50k before the month was over when I noticed I was close.

Total Words Written
53,429

Average Words Per Day
1,724

Things completed...

NaNo What Now? Your guide to life after NaNoWriMo is now available for pre-order

Yes, I have yet another publishing announcement. I’m apparently only productive in weird spurts, I don’t know what to tell you.

But in addition to my new play,The She Bear, the big revision ofThe Green Bird(which is live so update your eBook copies), and the brand new one-act version of The Green Bird, I have yet another big announcement to share. My brand new non-fiction book, NaNo What Now?, is coming February 29th, 2016 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon with other retailers to f...

The Green Bird (one-act version) is now available for productions and perusal

I honestly didn’t think it was possible but I pulled it off! After finishing a big revision of The Green Bird at the very end of December, I spent the beginning of January chopping thetwo-hour full length play down to about half an hour. It was such an incredibly different process than crafting the one-act version of The Love of Three Oranges. There was so much fluff and so little plot in Oranges it was no big deal to cut some of it and rearrange things but The Green Bird is very plot heavy.…...

Adapting Giambattista Basile’s The She Bear from The Tale of Tales

Yes, siree, only the highest quality Photoshopping is good enough for my blog…

If you thought The Revenant would have been better if Leonardo DiCaprio & the bear fell in love HAVE I GOT A PLAY FOR YOU!

The second of my Tale of Tales plays is now available for perusal and premieres and it’s The She Bear. There are two different versions of the standaloneplay, beyond the version with the narrator that will ultimately be in the full length. One version can be done with only four performers to o...

Make this the year you start writing or blogging regularly with this simple spreadsheet

I almost never cross post content from my writing blog over here but the lines get a bit blurred when you talk about writing eBooks for passive income to supplement your selling and blogging to promote your items so I’m going to make an exception. I write A LOT, fiction and non-fiction, across plays, blogs, books and more in addition tomy ecommerce business and that’s because I’ve developed a crazy accountability system which I’m sharing for the first time ever. It’s really just a simple spre...

New look for blog & series, more excerpts coming & future audio / video plans

Some quick housekeeping updates for you all…

When I redid thissitein 2014, I knew it was a temporary thing because I wasn’t entirely happy with the new theme but needed to make the site mobile responsive. You’ll notice I’ve recently moved the site over to a another newtheme that should be just as responsive, if not more so, but that I like a lot better. I’m still tweaking things so, please let me know if you notice anything wonky so that I can fit it! I’ve changed how series show up on the si...

Profit, priorities and rolling with changes

I wear more than one hat. In addition to being The Whine Seller and daily conquering all things ecommerce, I’m also a fiction writer and playwright. While this creativity and commerce go hand in hand in many ways, they’re like completely different worlds in others. But while I’ve gotten pretty good at making the mental switch between the two halves of my career over the years, there’s always been one thing I struggled with: priority and profit.

See, if I takean hour and list some items on eBa...