Friends

Starting October 15 and once a day until we’re done, I’ll be posting a series of blog entries taken from a paper I wrote with Kit O’Connell and the help of Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At 4th Street Fantasy Convention this year, everyone was curious about the possibilities for making money as more venues move toward the internet. We’re in a transitional time where many different ideas are being tried, scattered all across the ‘net, but in many cases it’s too new a trend to gauge long-term patterns and successes.

As Kit and I researched our paper and presentation on 21st century storytelling, we found that we wanted to answer the business models questions for ourselves as well as our friends. I also jumped at the chance to help a few of my more business-phobic acquaintances, excellent artists all, to have a more comfortable and solid understanding of business approaches as healthfully applied to art. Contrary to wide-spread and popular belief, the two do not have to be mutually exclusive, and knowing some basics about business process will not take away your artistic powers.

All of the blog entries in this series (as well as the ‘net and text versions) will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.  We want you to learn from and apply the information in these posts so that you can earn income with your own creative works.  We also approve of the various Creative Commons licenses and hope to encourage others to explore these options for distribution.

We’re really excited about this and our other related projects; it’s been very challenging and educational and best of all, tons of ongoing fun. We just had to share it with the rest of you! So stay tuned to this channel for the daily business models blog posts; we’ll have a web version updated with the latest entries here, and after it’s all done we’ll have an edited (and likely updated) text file that will be downloadable. We also welcome questions and comments throughout the series of posts. It’s nearly a sure thing that we’ve missed something in our research, and we can edit the final text file any time in the series. We’re hoping to have as comprehensive a list as possible, and we’d appreciate your help!

Tell your friends, and watch this space. See you tomorrow!

-Reesa

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by reesa. Please leave any comments there.)

Our outgoing flight was delayed for 4 hours at the gate, which caused us to miss our connecting flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. The only available remaining flight for today was for 10:30 tonight (local time), and in our rush to hurry out the door (wish we’d known we didn’t have to!) we neglected to bring the contact liason information for the convention. Could someone please let the ICON folk know that we’re fine, just stuck here for the day? Thanks!

EDIT: found an email contact and sent them this message, but will leave it up here so the rest of you know at least the bare bones of the happenings. (And, in case the email doesn’t get through.  It took 4 tries to post this message!)

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by reesa. Please leave any comments there.)

A few months ago we posted about looking for musicians and bands to help us with a project. I’ve been passing on your recommendations  to my friend Theo Drumsthemoon, who runs a concert venue called Lufton Runner, for his new Tellurian Music Series. I’m pleased to say the first concert in the series, featuring the artist Gfire, was a huge success. You can check it out on Lufton Runner’s new website (or follow this direct link to the concert page).

I’m already working with several of the artists who responded to the last post to arrange future performances. If I’ve contacted you and I’m waiting to hear back from you, please respond soon. If you haven’t heard from me, you will. We’re still looking for more bands, so feel free to mention yours or a friend’s here (or email them to kit at dreamcafe dot com or booking at luftonrunner dot com) if you missed the chance in the last post. The Luf is a very eclectic venue, so all types of music will be considered.

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by kit. Please leave any comments there.)

About 24 hours from now, I head off to Tel Aviv for Icon.  I should be back in about ten days.  Until then, I don’t think I’ll have access to email.

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by skzb. Please leave any comments there.)

(reposted from personal journal by request)

When working on a big project and trying to come up with cool ways to draw people into your created world, it’s sometimes hard to guess which line to straddle in how much and how fast you disperse your information. You want to make sure any early adopter fans are in on it soon enough that they feel their specialness, but you don’t want to escalate so quickly that you run out of entertaining content too soon or overload yourself.

On the one hand, when you’ve been cooking a big project for a while and it’s time to start manifesting the results, it’s very easy to want to spill everything all at once. “And here’s this cool thing I did, and this one, and this too, and ooh shinyoverhere!” But while you might hook in some people with the elegance or intricacy of your scaffolding, for most people you’ll catch their interest with the thing itself first. Peeling back the draping comes later.

On the other hand, it’s also difficult to get an outside perspective on how subtle or obvious to be when scattering project references that you hope people will put together to find your baby. Something that looks incredibly obvious to you, the people working on a project for the last n months, might not have such readily apparent connections to those encountering the ideas for the first time.

Part of the fun of creating little tidbits for people to find and geek over is watching their reactions as they encounter and interact with your work. For the creators, it can diminish the fun slightly to make carefully balanced hints and clever approaches only to have to go back and slap a big neon blinking glowing pointing finger sign all over those efforts. The reaction enjoyed by someone watching someone else find an in-character email isn’t at all the same when the first person has to ask “so, didja get that email?” (And in that example, you might not even know whether there was a tech trip-up that caused the email in question to not be delivered, or whether it was caught by a diligent spam filter on alert for unrecognizable origins.)

However, if you’re trying something new, and especially in the early stages, sometimes you have to do a little more hand-holding than you might otherwise be inclined to do. This doesn’t mean swing the pendulum all the way into showing everything you’re doing all at once, but does mean that you have to be willing to launch with a simpler and more obvious approach if your well-crafted more devious plans fall short of your goals.

I’m not sure whether these will be of interest to anyone else, but they’re some of the thoughts flowing through my mind as I attempt to patiently wait for people to start noticing our little venture. It’d be nice if I did more posts like these; I should consider that thought.

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by reesa. Please leave any comments there.)

Draft of Iorich sent off to Teresa.  Now to find out if she can read it.

Meanwhile, on to work on Super Sekrit Project.

(Originally posted at Words Words Words by skzb. Please leave any comments there.)