Video Killed the Blog Star

Wow. It’s been weeks since I’ve written a blog entry. Which is a little ironic, given that just about all I have been doing every day lately is writing.

There are all kinds of writing, of course. These days I’m doing less (make that none) of the stories, and more of the administrative stuff: ad copy, correspondence, e-mail, social media – almost all of which (compounding the irony) has to do with promoting my book. Of stories.

We’re right in the middle of our crowd-funding campaign, doing whatever we can to expand and communicate with our network of personal and professional contacts to make sure 1) that they all know about our effort to publish Past Medical History, and 2) that we want to use their money to do it.

It’s not a charity project. (Not entirely, anyway.) We have lots of incentives, premiums, prizes, if you will, to try and encourage people to come on board and help us print this book. Which can be done by visiting our Indiegogo campaign.

This is the kind of thing I’ve been writing.

Wrote a lot of other stuff, too, leading up to the kick-off of our campaign: Project descriptions, press releases, perk lists (these are the prizes mentioned earlier), and something else I’m not much used to at all:

I had to write a script for the video. This should have been a fun little project, a very short story telling people about our book project, and convincing them that we had the know-how and experience to follow through with the publication, if they would trust us with their money. Simple.

Correlate that story with views of a talking head (me), decorated with a bunch of entertaining artwork and informative graphics, and voila! we have it. (Oh, yeah, that required a storyboard, so I’ve been doing a little drawing, too.) 

The whole project only took a month, maybe two, but it worked. After all that effort, it occurred to me that a video script might make a good blog post. Then it occurred to me that the video itself would make a better one: 

Past Medical History II

It’s time for an update.

2013 started off with every indication of being a banner year for art here at the DS Art Studio. In 2012 I was only able to scratch out 3 – count ’em, three – new drawings, and I wanted the New Year to be different. And so it was; by the end of February I had already doubled last year’s tally, polishing off six new medical pieces that would edge me closer to finishing a long-delayed picture book, and laying out two new larger designs that would be great money-makers for the winter holiday season.

Then I got tangled up in a bunch of short stories. An earlier post tells the gritty details. For now, let’s just say I have written enough stories to fill a book, and decided to try and get that book published.

Turns out, it’s not so easy. And after learning as much as I can about this confusing, capricious, multifaceted and multilayered industry, we’ve decided that if Past Medical History is going to get published at all, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Past Medical History

We’ve been down this road before. 

Several years ago we crowd-sourced the funding for a coffee table book, a collection of drawings from my first twenty years in the studio. That project allowed us to take an idea that we pasted together from Word documents and Scotch tape, and turn it into a reality.

It also gave us the experience of trusting our art customers to support us in a risky undertaking – and that trust paid off. We were able to take our book to press, and our supporters received the first copies of what became a very successful commercial effort.

(Strangely enough, publishers and book dealers actually told us not to do it. They said we were wasting our time, and we would never sell enough of the books to cover our expenses. But we didn't listen – and when the picture book sold out, we reissued it last year in a new paperback edition.)

Well we’re not listening this time, either.  We figure if this process worked so well for a book of pictures, it will work for a book of stories, too – especially when the stories tell where the pictures came from. Only now, we’re not expecting our art customers to do all the heavy lifting. We’re going to tell everybody we know, and a whole bunch of people we never even met.

This time around, we’re planning to partner with Indiegogo to raise the money we’ll need to publish our book.

We’re not quite ready to pull the trigger on our fundraising campaign yet, but everything should come together in another week or two. 

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on the video we will use to introduce the book project to potential donors. We've collected all the footage, gathered all the images, and even have a terrific musical soundtrack, courtesy of our friends from the band Stegosaurus.

Once the video is complete, we’ll kick off our crowdsourcing campaign, giving everyone the chance to get an advance, first-edition copy of the book – and even have their name included in the Acknowledgements.

For now, though, it’s back to the drawing board, er, editing room. Don't worry, I will start drawing pictures again one of these days. One day real soon. I’m sure of it.