Hello, My Name Is …

Hi everyone, my name is Shelley DeLuca. I am honored and excited to be joining the team here at Bizzia.com! Most of all, I am looking forward to visiting with you each week, getting to know some of you, and hearing your thoughts, concerns and questions as we enter this new phase of the publishing industry—really, it’s a new phase of the business world as a whole in the current economy.

I’ve had the good fortune to work in many forms of media and publishing, including magazines, books, newspapers, news services, and the Web. Most recently, I was managing editor at a multimedia custom publishing group. I spent seven lovely years there, and I genuinely loved my job! The creative process, the industry, the people … it all added up to the best experience of my career.

Then it was over. Our company eliminated hundreds of jobs in the last couple months of 2008. My division was asked to eliminate one position early on, and I found myself in the position of having to deliver the message. Yet even after that—right up until my own news was delivered—I never thought I’d be one of them. Ha. Silly me, right? I was just happily doing my job, thinking I couldn’t possibly wind up on that list.

How many people like me are out there? Maybe some of their bubbles will remain intact. I hope so.

But the way things are going it seems as though more and more folks are likely to find themselves in a similar predicament. And like a lot of my former colleagues—many of whom had worked at the same company for much longer than I—they will find it’s a lot like trying to pick up and start dating after being married for the last 20 or 30 years. Times have changed.

I feel pretty fortunate to have had the experience of supporting myself as a freelancer at one point in my career. It’s never easy, but I suspect I’m a little better equipped than folks who haven’t done that before. I have a few industries to choose from—best of all, a few more have popped up since the last time I was a freelancer. Not to mention all these cool tools, such as Facebook and Twitter!

So far so good; I have gained a couple new clients and rekindled my relationship with a couple old ones. Things are looking up! But I remain cautiously optimistic because I suspect—the way things are looking in the news right now—more and more folks will be joining the ranks as freelancers. Or independent contractors, if you prefer. Whatever you call us, our ranks have begun to include a lot of people with skills that were never traditionally considered to be freelance jobs.

Which is why I am really pumped about the opportunity to start this conversation with all of you. Call it a revolution of sorts. No matter where we were last year or what we were doing, we’re all likely to have to reinvent ourselves, our business plans, our marketing strategies, and our household budgets in the coming months.

What’s cool about Bizzia.com is that it gives us a place to talk about it—to share our dreams, our successes, and our frustrations. I am sure I’ll have plenty of all three to share with you, and I hope you’ll do the same. My goal will be to round up whatever tools I can find to help us all along the way.

I’d love to hear from you—let me know your thoughts!

Best regards,
Shelley