Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
- Ferris Bueller
And then I woke up one day and, much to my surprise, it was a Thursday in late-April 2012. I don’t know if that is a reflection of how much distraction there has been, how busy I’ve kept myself, or a sign of abject-laziness. In the six years I’ve been writing in some form or another, I haven’t ever gone so long without putting fingers to keys just for the sake of doing so, and I can feel a bunch of knots in my head needing to be unwound, something the keyboard is particularly good for. At least for me.
I haven’t just not been writing though. If anything, I suppose I got a little tired of just talking about things, I wanted to do some making. The first thing was a collaboration with my friends at Projucer, along with a few otherspecialindividuals. The Meaning of Mate started off in my head as some sort of digital shrine to the word “mate” and how Australians (and, to be fair, Kiwis and those from the UK among others) use it in a variety of situations. Thanks to friends in low places, we racked up over 250,000 views in the first week and wound up on YouTube’s Australian homepage for Australia Day.
Next up was Shitter, with a much simpler premise: take people’s Twitter feeds and print it onto toilet paper. The tagline? Social media has never been so disposable. We thought people would have a laugh, and that the tech press might join in on it. We never expected to wind up in Forbes, on TV back in our native Australia, and a host of other channels and outlets. The euphoria of a successful launch turned into the pain of actually fulfilling on the manufacturing and shipping of the product itself, but it’s been a great learning experience.
All of this has been done under the banner of Collector’s Edition which is a company I’ve formed with somefriends. I’m looking forward to writing more about it all over the next few months as we continue to launch projects into a fairly staid media environment, but I’m also looking forward to just writing more. It feels a little clunky at first, but in the words of your friend and mine Katie Chatfield, “Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, tell me what you did.”
I have a new post up at Uncluttered White Spaces, looking at the art of making mistakes, and the challenge we inherit when we stop making them:
When you’re right though, that’s when the trouble starts. That’s when the business grows. That’s when the phone rings. When you’re right it’s a call to arms, it is life asking you to step outside your comfort zone. You can of course ignore the call, and stay being right, but who aspires to a lifetime spent saying “I told you so”? Being right is an opportunity to be wrong, to make a whole new set of mistakes, to learn that which cannot be taught in a classroom. And the only benefit that comes from being right is more opportunity to be wrong. That is, my friends, a good thing. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, complacency did.
Hope you enjoy, and I’d love your feedback, over there or in the comments below.
That statement was made as part of a talk I have referred to and shared so many times now you would think I was on some kind of commission. The source, Richard Nash said it as part of a keynote he gave at a gathering in Toronto of book publishers. It’s available here, you should watch it if you haven’t.
At the time Richard was in the process of pulling together a start-up, Cursor, which is a socially-driven publishing platform. He’s of course not the only one, Seth Godin and Amazon have a much-publicised project together to try and “re-invent publishing”, and most of the major publishers are, in various ways, throwing whatever they can at the wall in the hope that something, anything, will stick.
This quote was ringing in my ears though when an email arrived from Amazon a couple days ago. @author is a service they’ve just launched to allow readers to pose questions to certain authors from either their Kindle or from the Amazon site itself. The tagline? Connecting writers and readers.
I somehow don’t think a call-and-response mechanic was what Richard had in mind when he made the above statement. It will be interesting to see how they build this out, particularly in light of their moves to become not just seller but publisher of original works. The most famous face among the authors featured, Tim Ferris, has already said his next book will be published exclusively through Amazon. Tim is no stranger to experimenting with what it means to have a relationship with your audience through writing, going so far as to put on a workshop detailing how he has managed to achieve his success with both the Four Hour Week and the Four Hour Body. That bootcamp of writing and marketing would set you back $10,000 - if you could still get a ticket. It was well and truly over subscribed, with people filling out a form TED-style in the hopes of having the chance to attend.
Ferris’ approach is a little closer to what Richard had in mind, though I wonder if he had figured it as brazenly commercial and unapologetic as Ferris’ execution. Regardless, its experimentation that the industry needs. If the music industry went about things in this manner rather than simply creating new contracts that tapped into revenue streams that were traditionally out of bounds for the major labels, you might see something as interesting, and potentially even more ludicrous, than a $10,000 work shop bearing all the hallmarks of attendees who have failed to beat, so are paying to join.
(If I had a spare $10k, I’d probably be doing the same)
Hi, I'm David. I love, in no particular order, wine, coffee, technology and music. Actually I love that last thing the most. These are other things I like, I hope you like them too.
