It takes a community
J.C. Hutchins’s “Personal Effects: Dark Art” – SuperVlurb from Stephen Eley on Vimeo.
Ok, so you may be asking yourself “Why the hell is this guy posting a video trailer for a horror novel on a photography blog?”. That’s easy, it’s a perfect example of a community coming together to help out one of their own.
Lately I have been looking at my efforts in wedding photography and have noticed that I really need to do things differently. I have always taken my photography very seriously, but when it came to the business side I figured that all I had to do was follow the road map left by others that had made it. The biggest problem with this idea is that the map left behind by those successful photographers may have worked for them, but it isn’t going to work for me. I’m nothing like them, I have different strengths, a different personality, different work. I have fought to make my own way with my photography, to develop my own style, so why would I not do the same in the building of my business.
In my research of marketing, branding (more on my adventures in branding in a later post) and general business, I have been looking at other artistic industries. One field I have been very interested in lately, one that is actually fairly new, is serialized audio books.
Maybe I should give a little back story here. A few years ago I found this great place, Podiobook.com a site that offers free serialized audio books. What is a serialized audio book? Well quite simply, it’s audio book read most commonly by the author and released for free serially once a week/bi-weekly/monthly over the net.
As I was listening to all these great authors, I started to notice something kind of surprising, the authors of these audio books have created a very tight and supportive community. The different authors appear as voice characters on each others audio books and they have even teamed up to write, produce and perform audio books. In general they were promoting and helping each other out, a lot! If you listened to say James Melzer, there is a very good chance you had heard of or listened to the works of Mark Jeffrey, Mur Lafferty, Philippa Ballantine, Seth Harwood, Matthew Wayne Selznick, Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff or Phil Rossi. The community they have build together, all of them working together towards the same goal and supporting each other along the way has produced some amazing results
So what exactly have they done? Well look at Scott Sigler, late last year his book Contagious made it onto the New York Times hardcover bestsellers list. J.C.Hutchinson, the author who’s book is featured in that video at the beginning has had his last series, 7th Son, options by Hollywood and with everyone rallying behind his new book Personal Effect: Dark Art, I expect it to have a very good showing on Amazon. Not back for a couple of guys giving away their work for free eh?
I have talked about community before, I have talked about Twitter, Photography Forms, Facebook and the such, but what these guys and gals have done is truly amazing. It has made me realize that although I have participated in the photographic community to some extent, I need to step up my efforts to play a larger roll in the photographic community, not just locally, but internationally. Thank God for the internet!
Talking about helping out and promoting fellow artists, I wouldn’t want to leave you without mentioning James Melzer’s new audio book, The Invasion coming June 17th. The Invasion is the second book in The Zombie Chronicles. I listened to the first installment, The Escape and it was amazing! Zombies, aliens, clones, how could you go wrong?
Tags: Inspiration, Photography, Social Networking
June 10th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
You know what is so fascinating about this to me? While what works for someone else might not work for you … sharing what you do might spark someone else to come up with something totally unique for them, and in turn might spark something for you … and it goes on and on and on. I think it is part of why I love the online community so much. We *all* have something to share.
Another observation in the photography community parallels what you mentioned about these authors. The ones who support each other and talk about each other, appear on each other's books, etc are the ones that rise to the top. Look at how if you walk into a photography community and ask people to name the “best” in the industry they will most likely name a lot of SoCal people that know one another and talk about and to each other? It is the same thing.
Thanks to the internet, that type of community can happen over and over and over again. Amazing.
Thanks for sharing!
June 13th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Thanks Christine, you are right about the SoCal, but also in Texas and Seattle. I am completely astonished by things like the Seattle Strobist community. When everyone works together you just raise the over all wellness of the community and everyone wins in the end.