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Don't Hire Someone to Run Your Kickstarter Campaign: Or, Why Attitude is More Important than Aptitude

06.25.12 @ 4:41PM Tags : attitude, crowdfunding, kickstarter, lucasmcnelly, manchild, marketing, sethgodin

First of all, I want to start this post off by saying I have a tremendous amount of respect for Lucas McNelly. Not just because of the articles he’s written for numerous websites, but also his A Year Without Rent project in which he traveled to work on indie films for free for a year, as well his free VODO film Blanc de Blanc (I haven’t had a chance to see his other work yet). As someone who did my own year without rent, I feel an affinity for Lucas despite never having met him, and I think he’s great for the indie film community. Lucas, this is not a personal attack on you by any means, and I’d love to get a beer with you at some point should we ever find ourselves in the same city or at the same festival. HOWEVER, I want to take this opportunity to talk about Lucas’s criticisms of some Kickstarter campaigns — mine included — and how I believe attitude and criticism affects creativity and productivity. I’ll also talk about the rise of the professional crowdfunding consultant. This is going to be a long, rambling post with a high risk of TL;DR — don’t say I didn’t warn you. More »

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Recommended Reading for Artist-Entrepreneurs: 'Linchpin' by Seth Godin

11.5.10 @ 10:00AM Tags : book, books, sethgodin

Whether you choose to go to film school or not, the idea behind NoFilmSchool is to self-educate in as many ways as possible. Our goal as artists is to make something different from our peers; to me, sitting in a classroom with the same syllabus as everyone else isn’t the best way to self-actualize. Any such theories aside, however, it doesn’t matter whether you discover a helpful book in a syllabus, via a friend’s recommendation, or via a web site like this one. Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin, is a bit hard to describe. It’s not a marketing book, it’s not a self-help book — it’s more about a gradual cultural shift away from factory-based wage labor, and how artist-entrepreneurs need to escape the “lizard brain” that instills fear in us in order to ship our art. More »

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What Could a Bestselling Author's Switch to Self-publishing Mean for Filmmakers?

09.1.10 @ 12:03PM Tags : books, distribution, egoods, publishing, sethgodin

Lately I’ve been reading a number of books for independent creatives — in film, in art, in business — and the one I’m currently working my way through is Linchpin by Seth Godin. As soon as I can find the time I’ll post reviews of these books, most of which I believe are very helpful in planning an independent career — and most of which align very closely with my own manifesto. Recently Godin announced that Linchpin will be the last book he’ll publish “in a traditional way.” For me to say I’m interested in distributing films in a new way is not news. For Godin (who has written twelve bestsellers) to say the same thing, however, is worth noting. And as it turns out, the decisions he’s faced with as an author aren’t much different than the decisions we’re faced with as filmmakers. More »