As usual, I had a great time at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference, which was held last week in Las Vegas.  I had the honor of conducting one concurrent session and two Morning Buzz discussion sessions.  If you weren’t able to make it, here are some resources that you can still take advantage of.

Morning Buzz: Going Out on Your Own

I hosted a morning discussion session on starting your own consulting business.  If this is something you are thinking about doing, I encourage you to visit your local office of the Small Business Administration, Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), or Small Business Development Center.  In most major cities, these organizations have free or low-cost workshops and one-on-one assistance on how to get started.  You can also check with your local chamber of commerce for additional resources.

And for those of you who live near the Washington, D.C. area, check out the Metro DC ASTD chapter’s November meeting, which is a panel discussion on this very topic where you can get personal insight from other consultants and small business owners who have “been there” and “done that.”

Morning Buzz: Becoming a Self-Published Author

We get asked questions all the time about our experience self-publishing our E-Learning Uncovered book series.  There are a number of reputable companies out there.  We’ve been working for years with CreateSpace, which is an Amazon affiliate.  We have been very happy with their print-on-demand publishing service and with how easy it is to get our books up and running on Amazon quickly.  There is no sign-up fee, and without even setting up an account, you can use their calculator tools to figure out pricing, costs, and royalties.

Concurrent Session: Streamlining Your E-Learning Production Process

For those brave souls who were still going strong during the last round of sessions at the conference, I discussed some of the things we have done recently to make our production process a little more efficient—everything from using myhours.com to track and analyze our production data to a new Google spreadsheet to keep track of online changes.  We’ve put many of the resources, templates, and checklists online for you to use.

Hope to see you back in Vegas next October for DevLearn 14!  (Or TechKnowledge in January or Learning Solutions in March or the Lectora User’s Conference in April.)