What Feelings Do You Have When You Publish A New Lens?
What are you feeling when you hit that ‘publish’ button and wait to see what your new lens looks like? Do you feel relieved to have it over and done with? Do you feel excitement? Trepidation? Exhaustion?
Producing a new lens is like having a new baby. At first you look on it as a strange new entity, albeit one you’ve loved and become familiar with as you put it together, wrote the words, and chose the images to go with it.
Tonight I finally finished a lens I originally set up back in the summer of 2007. It was the last WIP lens I had from last year. I was SO happy to see it finally ready to leave my WIP list and enter the big world of Squidoo.
I felt joy, relief, and fear (of it not being perfect yet)… yet a great weight lifted from me. The topic was Lao Tse – the Chinese philosopher who wrote the Tao Te Ching more than 2000 years ago.
What made me think I could write about Lao Tse? I didn’t know much about him though I enjoyed occasionally leafing through the book and trying to understand the philosophy.
Honestly, writing this lens required a lot of research. I read several pages about him out there in Internet Land. I had to list references on the lens.
It is easier to write lenses about a topic you’re intimately familiar with, but then I’d be stuck writing about what we do at work while we’re waiting for customers to arrive. Personally, I need to expand my consciousness and thought doing research to learn about Lao Tse wouldn’t hurt me at all. I was right about that, and enjoyed finding photos of Chinese paintings in the public domain that I could legally use on the lens.
So now it is over. The lens is alive. The die is cast. The words are written, and the public can see it. I feel SO very pleased.
What is your most recent lens? How do you feel about publishing it?
July 24th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Pretty nice looking lens! Like most people I feel satisfaction when I accomplish something, have an end product I can sit back and look at, etc. Like you, some of my lenses come easily as they are something I know quite a bit about…others require quite a lot of research. Both feel good. Product specific pages are less satisfying but are necessary in my world for some additional revenue.
July 24th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I ditto Mulberry. I feel a lot of satisfaction on completing a task that I feel I did a good job on.
The feeling is even better if people comment on it and say that they enjoyed it too.
Feeling good is what makes it all worthwhile…
August 8th, 2008 at 12:40 am
I enjoy publishing a new lens, but I don’t get a feeling of satisfaction until the lens is promoted and starts to get a steady stream of visitors.
As Poddys said, I enjoy the feedback, comments, and ideas for further improving the lens.
I do this primarily for the income, but it feels good when others enjoy what I’ve written.
Now, if I can finish the research and get my three WIP lenses published. One’s been in the works for months, and that’s unusual for me.
Act on your dream!
JD