On Sunday night, I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, a site that provides a platform for small business owners, filmmakers, writers and others looking to launch and manage on online fundraising effort for their project.
It’s been a humbling 48 hours. As you can see from the following screen grab, we have plenty of “crowd,” but no “funding” yet. It stings a bit, but I want to share this stuff because there’s some good learning here that others looking for this kind of funding might benefit from.
This traffic report from IndieGoGo doesn’t indicate where the visitors are coming from, but I assume most of the views are the result of my promoting the “AdPulp Journalism Fund” on Twitter, Facebook and AdPulp.com. So, I have enough influence to drive people to click and consider, but I’m weak when it comes to motivating conversion.
Weak though I may be, I hope to improve and find new ways to go about raising money for AdPulp. One thing that occurs to me at this early stage is the need to go one-to-one with this ask. That means email, letter writing and in-person appeals. Somehow I need to establish a personal connection to the site for our most ardent supporters.
I want the campaign to work, and I want to learn what works and what does not. I also would love to see my paid email newsletter, “Hungry for Gumbo” take off. Right now, I have nine paid subscribers to the email. As you can see, it’s tough going, this path to the paid content mountaintop.
I’ve been invited to speak on the topic at GeekEnd in Boston in October. The title of my talk is “The Honeymoon Is Over And The Bill Is Due: Paid Content in 2012 And Beyond.” I’d like to be able to share a few personal success stories at that time, but I’m going to need to roll out some innovative new approaches in order to do that.
Sean Power, of Ottawa, Ontario is happily reunited with his stolen laptop, thanks to free tracking software called Prey.
According to HuffingtonPost, Power received a report from Prey indicating that his laptop was in use at a Brooklyn, NY bar.
Power called the police, but they said he had to make a report in person. Given that he was 800 miles away, that proved to be too tall an order. In the meantime, a woman who was following the action on Twitter, went down to the bar and got the laptop back.
Here’s a look at some of what Prey can do–it activates the built in camera and takes a photo of the perp, for one:
Amazon.com’s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less last Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.
According to The Wall Street Journal, as digital sales surge, publishers are casting a worried eye towards the previously scorned self-published market. Unlike five years ago, when self-published writers rarely saw their works on the same shelf as the industry’s biggest names, the low cost of digital publishing, coupled with Twitter and other social-networking tools, has enabled previously unknown writers to make a splash.
“When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them,” says Locke. “Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”
Locke earns 35 cents for every title he sells at 99 cents. Amazon pays all authors who use Kindle Direct Publishing, the retailer’s independent publishing service, a royalty rate of 35% on digital titles priced below $2.99, and 70% on e-books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. Altogether, Locke says his publishing revenue amounted to $126,000 from Amazon in March alone.
Host Courtenay Hameister’s conversation with Harvard-educated Rauch was, for me, the best part of the show. Rauch is an impressive man doing unbelievable work in Ashland. I’ve only been to one play in Ashland thus far, but I’m motivated to go back for many more. Rauch spoke eloquently about the need to support the arts and he’s right. Art creates culture. He also provided some perspective on the uniqueness of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which annually produces eleven plays on three stages during a season that lasts from February to October. OSF is the largest company of actors in the U.S. and Rauch reminded the audience that all classic plays were once new plays given birth in the nurturing environment of repertory theater. OSF is committed to the production of new plays under Rauch’s guidance and I’m excited to know that the power of live theater is alive and well in Southern Oregon (and that the ripples made there reach far out to other lands).
Here’s a look at Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 season:
To download past episodes of Live Wire! Radio, visit the show’s iTunes podcast catalog.
By the way, members of the audience are asked to submit haikus on pre-determined topics and the cast then chooses a handful of them to read aloud during the performance. Darby’s haiku was not chosen, but she’s got a talent for the short form.
Geek Love invites us
to hula hoops and freak shows
Please show me your tail
I did not turn a haiku on a given topic in to one of the designated haiku hotties, but maybe I can make up for it here.
I’m starting a new email newsletter for paid subscribers. No, I have not gone mad, I’m merely inspired to pursue various strategies that pay me to write, edit and publish.
Why would you want to invite me into your inbox like this? And why would I bother to charge for the content and effort needed to create it?
My hope is you’ll invite me in and pay me to return again and again because you, like me, like to have a finger on the cultural pulse, a.k.a. the zeitgeist (and you want it served up in an easy-to-carry package that saves you time and the hassle of preparation).
As for the nerve it takes to charge you–even a token like my introductory rate of $1/month–I’m looking forward to the pressure the paid model creates. When you pay me, I owe you more and more kernels of meaning and wit. Simple as that.
My friend and personal ombudsman, Tom Asacker, advised me earlier this week to find what my audience on AdPulp.com is hungry for and feed them. We discussed some good ideas that are currently simmering before being plated. Perhaps I’ll create more paid newsletters that feed those hungers too, but I want to start here, with “Hungry for Gumbo,” because I’m more than a marketer who serves a highly defined audience hungry for one thing like steak, or fish, or whatever.
I’m a writer and I like gumbo, literally and figuratively.
Interestingly, the email format also lends itself to a more intimate relationship with readers. Email is digital content that can be shared/spread, but it’s provided in a private, one-on-one setting. In other words it can be a place for “loose talk,” in a way that a Web site with comments is not.
Self-publishing is for wannabe writers. Right? Wrong.
Austin, Minnesota fantasy fiction writer, Amanda Hocking, sold over 650,000 eBooks in January alone. She’s the number one selling indie author on the Kindle and the Web is full of articles on her and how she’s proof that the publishing industry–like the music industry and the newspaper industry before it–is being blown to bits by the Internet.
With all the press attention she’s receiving, Hocking decided to address some of the speculation swirling around the story of her success.
Saying traditional publishing is dead right now is like declaring yourself the winner in the sixth inning of a baseball game when you have 2 points and the other team has 8 just because you scored all your points this inning, and they haven’t scored any since the first.
eBooks make up at best 20% of the market. Print books make up the other 80%. Traditional publishers still control the largest part of the market, and they will – for a long time, maybe forever.
Her Kindle eBooks range in price from $.99 to $2.99 on Amazon.com. The prices presents little risk for buyers, which helps to explain the incredible volume of units sold by Ms. Hocking. I have not yet read her work, so I can’t comment on its quality, but whatever the quality, she’s clearly appealing to a large group of readers. She’s also busting her butt to make it happen.
This is literally years of work you’re seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.
Speaking of marketing, Hocking, like so many authors today has invested in video as a promotional tool.
Marc Ambinder is the White House correspondent for National Journal and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. In November he wrote about being “a blogger no longer.” Here’s an interesting passage in his sign off piece about the difference between writing traditional journalism and writing a blog.
Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging (on the other hand) is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view.
So, blogs are first person affairs? Many of them are indeed, but there’s no bloggers’ rule book that says, “Insert your opinion” or “Write in fist person.” Blogging is more about the platform. It’s where writers rush to publish. Again, there’s no rule book that says speed is of the essence, it’s just that pro bloggers feel compelled to publish a handful of times per day.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, in a reflective piece about how he used to write for AOL for a mere $5 per post, says he’s now having a hard time filling RWW’s current opening for a full time tech blogger.
Big league bloggers and writers these days need to be able to write well, in large quantity and quickly. It’s not easy, but who said writing for a living, in an era when anyone can publish with ease, was going to be easy?
In yet another thought piece on the lost art of blogging, The New York Observer observes that the best pro bloggers are writing original material today.
“I think the story of blogging in the last couple of years or more, professional blogging, is that we all do a lot more original content,” said Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. Choire Sicha of The Awl also notes the importance of original content. Specifically, he referenced the flyaway success of their newest property, The Hairpin, which he credits to its editor, Edith Zimmerman.
“She’s not aggregating blog posts about the thing that just came down the wire. She’s making things, and I think one of the mistakes that a lot of blogs make that kind of dead-end them as blogs is covering the same thing that everyone’s covering instead of like creating things and stopping to make stuff,” Mr. Sicha said.
To recap, pro bloggers (or those who make money from their efforts) are no longer writing personal journals while dressed in pajamas. Whatever their beat, pro bloggers have a distinct point of view, create a mountain of content every day and the best of the best don’t just write things, they make things.
According to The New York Times, Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time.
Some shyer students do not socialize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends.
Naturally, this isn’t good. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,†said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.â€
“The headline is: bring back boredom,†added Dr. Rich.
Novelist and NYU creative writing professor, Zadie Smith, went to see The Social Network and came away with some thoughts on the film and Facebook that she shares in a New York Review of Books piece called Generation Why?
Smith is a fan of the film but she doesn’t “Like” Facebook.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
In other words, you can’t reduce the richness of life into a series of posts to one’s Wall. That’s what literary fiction and films are for!
Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor for TheAtlantic.com thinks he understands Smith’s aversion.
When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window.
In other words, professional writers are elitists who can’t relate. Which is odd, given that it is a writer’s job to relate and to retell what people (real and otherwise) are going through with compassion and sensitivity.
Bottom line, it’s not the platform but the people who use it who are responsible for content. I wonder if storytellers from the oral tradition long ago vehemently resisted the use of writing to falsely preserve what was meant to be an organic experience. Probably. And how did the 19th century’s literary masters see the arrival of the telephone? Was it viewed as an imminent threat to the written form? Most likely.
I understand that Smith and others are attempting to confront what they see as frightening changes to our concepts of personal identity and privacy. But this is also about the exchange of ideas through writing and I think we need to recognize where the literary opportunities lie in new media. Facebook and Twitter are platforms for “talking,” not writing. Blogs on the other hand are ideal for writing. A blog post unwritten is the exact same blank page writers have faced for generations. The big difference is the expedited publishing available that electronic media provides. But even this is by choice. A writer can choose to save draft after draft until she is ready to push “Publish,” just like the craftsmen of old. Of course, not every writer does this–I for one unwittingly publish misspelled words and other grammatical errors, and that may well be a blemish on my writing house, but I see electronic media as flexible, and fixable. Unlike print, it’s not “done” when it’s printed. Electronic text can be updated, or rewritten as needed. I hope that’s not seen as an excuse for sloppiness, because that’s not my intention. I merely want to point out how each medium a writer works in has its own rules, and we’re still finding our way through this seemingly infinite new galaxy.
Portland writer Donald Miller, author of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is actively using social media channels to promote his work. But he’s considering quitting his blog in order to concentrate on writing more books.
Miller also notes how the instant publishing format is changing the literary landscape.
There may never be another John Steinbeck, because the next Steinbeck won’t be able to sell enough books to pay for a year or two of writing the next book. He’ll need to speak, and in order to speak he will have to hire an accountant and a travel agent because God knows his creative mind can’t manage a checkbook or get to Detroit by Thursday. And then he’ll be treading water, not honing his craft. And he will never become the next John Steinbeck.
I also recently came across a 2009 essay by Lauren Kessler, the head of the literary nonfiction program at University of Oregon’s Journalism School.
Kessler isn’t wild about filling content holes on blogs. This is why:
It is a burden to produce posts that enhance – or at least don’t scuttle – your reputation as a writer, a burden to produce posts you won’t regret, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day and for the rest of your life.
Personally, I don’t like the concept that blogs aren’t for “real writers.” In my view one of the things real writers do is adapt to the needs of the medium they’re working in. As someone who has written several thousand blog posts, I don’t feel that my reputation as a writer is diminished. Of course, I’m not an academic, nor an author. I might see things differently if I were.
