Hi, it’s Ali and Catie - the PWP summer ‘08 interns!

We’re super excited to introduce our very first YouTube video, based on the Perform at Your Best: Acting Techniques for Business, Social & Personal Success card deck by Jane Marla Robbins. We came up with the idea to make a video that was humorous and unique, which we hope will create curiosity about our products and generate even more positive buzz surrounding Perform at Your Best.

We enlisted Alex Cantatore, a young aspiring filmmaker from White Plains to help us tackle the project - and tackle he did! After presenting us with multiple pitches for video ideas, Alex agreed to put on a tutu, and get to work. It’s definitely turned out to be better than we could have imagined, and it was a fun project to work on.

Head on over to http://www.youtube.com/user/PlainWhitePress to check out the video!

As much as we love paper and ink, Plain White Press hums along on by using the internet to manage our projects and business. We had a conversation with Smart Money Small Business about how we use Basecamp, Freshbooks and other favorite applications.

Harkening back to the days of serialized radio plays, Podiobooks.com offers free downloads of serialized audio books that are written and recorded by their authors. A builder writes about intrigue on the building site and many action-adventure and romance fantasies are indulged here. If you like the stories, donations are solicited, and 75% of the revenues are shared with authors. Aside from that, the site is funded by promotion and advertising.

I showed my daughter this online wordprocessor, and she wrote back…

Proofing manuscripts is perhaps the bane of my existence. Once I’ve created a version of a manuscript, I’ll send it out to the author, a copyeditor, and sometimes an outside reader. Then I’ll coordinate all those comments before the next round. I’ve held out hope for some kind of easy-to-use Acrobat system, but it’s still hard to use and expensive to buy all those licenses too. Enter Proof HQ - this sweetheart new service allows you to upload your proofs and emails a link to everyone who needs to review them. The beauty of this service is that is keep everyone’s comments all in one place. Very nice!

We’re a small office with more work than we can handle on most days, which, on most days, is a good thing. So we’ve enlisted Ruby (www.callruby.com) to answer our phones and Emma (www.myemma.com) to handle our email. OK, there are lots of virtual assistant and email services, but we like Ruby and Emma’s sense of style and the way they handle business. Even my daughter isn’t sure if it’s Ruby or me answering the phone!

I’m often asked to help authors and companies help get their books in print. Sure, publisher’s print things, but we’re not technically printers, although we do know enough about printing to be pretty dangerous. As a publisher “getting things in print” is a pretty loaded long-term, gut wrenching, comma-splicing, proof-checking process — but for most people, printing is just getting that ink on that paper… in the form of a book.

For these kind of requests, I’ve started to use a nifty service on the web, Printellectual, that sends my print quotes to dozens of vendors at once. Within hours, I’ve got several quotes to work with and half-a-dozen new printers that I know to call. In order to get quotes you need to register, but once you have an account, you log in and fill out the specifications. Don’t worry if you don’t know that “case bound” means hardcover, printellectual offers a glossary of terms.

I just returned from an inspiring and contact-filled meeting. What to do with all of those business cards? For the last 3 months I’ve been testing out Highrise (www.highrisehq.com) from 37 signals (the makers of Basecamp and Backpack), and I’m thrilled with this new way of tracking my contacts.

To start, I imported my contacts via a .csv file from my Treo. Once I created the database, I added “tags” and notes to the contacts I use most often. Highrise creates a page for each of my contacts and I can keep all my correspondence here — email, documents, links, to-dos, and follow-up reminders for each. I can even share all or some of my contacts with my team and assign them follow-ups too. Highrise has it’s own email address, so I can forward emails to it, and it matches that email with the appropriate contact’s record. When graphics are attached, they show up as thumbnails in the record — making them so much easier to find than by name!

Two things I’d like to see here: I want to get my contacts back into my Treo for the road, and I think I waste too much time finding just the right image for everyone’s record. I wish the program came with a set of friendly avatars. Nonetheless, in the short time I’ve been using the program, Highrise just keeps getting better, and I’ll never even consider using Outlook again!

Today’s visual thesaurus word “titivate.” This one makes me giggle for the same reason my middle-school-age girls would giggle, but, really it means “to make tidy.” What a great word!

The visual thesaurus is a rich language website — I subscribe to their daily word in my email, and I visit when I’m stumped or when I’m seeking inspired new words, a new product name or just to get unstuck. The elegant spidery display leads you from word to word to word in a pleasing and graphic way.

Writing a business plan, especially crunching the the numbers and putting it all down on paper was perhaps the toughest part of my first year in business, but once that plan was written, things started to change pretty quickly, and the plan was outdated in no time.

Plan HQ (www.planhq.com) is an ingenious site that makes working on my plan and on my business (actually) fun. I was able to just cut and paste chunks of the plan I’d written, and filling out the plan was a simple step-by-step process that made me (re)think about each facet of how I wanted to run my business.

The graphic site is divided into separate sections for a solution, sales & marketing, and operations. As a creative entrepreneur, I love the idea that I’m using a template to create a plan that will make sense to potential investors and partners, while at the same time it helps keep me on track. Line graphs track budget vs. actuals and when the numbers turn red or green, it’s pretty easy to understand how the busines is doing. PlanHQ offers a free trial to start and then plans (varying on how many people you share the plan with and how many goals you are pursuing) start at $9/month.