The post below was sent as an issue of my newsletter, Ready for Rain. 🤔 Who is Common Craft? I wrote this post to summarize our company and our role in it. If you’re curious about what we do, this is a good starting point. > Read the post ✍️ Indy Publishing and the...
One of the first big challenges of marketing a book is getting endorsements or "blurbs" from influential people. It's stressful because you are not only asking favors of people you admire, but you're sharing the book for the first time. It's easy to feel nervous about...
In October of 2019, a news website called Splinter, which was under the same management at Gizmodo and Jezebel, was shuttered and the staff was fired. So, a group of Splinter writers created a new news site that became a labor of love. It's called the Discourse Blog....
It makes my day when I receive an email from someone who says something like, “I’ve been a fan since the first video!” It’s hard to believe that was in 2007, over 13 years ago. At the time, we were new and different. Our style of videos attracted attention just...
One of the side effects of using YouTube is the ease at which it’s possible to download and then re-upload a video to another account. This violates copyright law and YouTube’s terms of service. But it was difficult to stop.
Big Enough, my forthcoming book, is arriving in May. It’s being published via a partnership between me and publishing industry pros. Below, I’ll explain why I made this choice, how it differs from traditional publishing and why this option might become more popular in the future.
For Big Enough, I plan to throw myself at the marketing beast. My challenge is to learn how to market a book successfully. If I can develop a marketing strategy that fits with my style, I will have a head start for future books.
The lastest Ready for Rain newsletter was meant to fill in essential gaps regarding what events led us to today. Up to now, the readers have seen my life in real-time, with only brief references to the past. I wrote: Over the past year, you’ve had a front-row seat to...
Now that I have a book coming out, I’m facing another kind of explanation challenge in the form of explaining Big Enough. It seems like every time I write about it, I take a slightly different path and I’m constantly wondering if I’ve stumbled upon the one explanation that works best.
In 2007, our lives changed thanks to publishing a series of animated videos that became known at the first “explainer” videos of the YouTube era.
I like to think about Common Craft cut-outs as symbols rather than realistic interpretations. Symbols are more timeless and flexible. They have personality and style.
In 2008, we made quality of life a priority in how we ran our company, Common Craft. Eventually we started to see that we had created a lifestyle that meant we could go camping on a Tuesday and that idea become a philosophy for us.