In modern Internet business you have the opportunity to outsource many aspects of how you deliver content and products to your customers. Some solutions have become almost ubiquitous online — the number of people who accept Paypal for payments online probably far outnumbers the number who have their own credit card processor. While there are many legitimate concerns about Paypal and its ilk, it’s also an extremely convenient way to collect money. Beyond taking money for your products, you can even go so far as have others make those products for you — such as using Cafe Press to sell t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other merchandise.

At almost every stage of developing your business model — from selling advertising space to merchandising to creating a shopping cart system — it is important to examine your options and decide whether you want to outsource or “roll your own.” There are usually significant advantages and disadvantages to each approach. For example, if you had a webcomic and wanted to make t-shirts, you could purchase equipment to make the t-shirts yourself, pay a screen printer to do it, or use a service like Cafe Press. The first two require more time and money up front, which you might not have to spare. On the other hand, the former approaches allow you to exert more direct control over the quality and appearance of the product you sell.

Every time you’re giving up direct control of some aspect of your profit model, you’re probably also sharing a percentage of your profits. Paypal takes a percentage out of most transactions; the popular craft site, Etsy, charges a small fee each time you list an item for sale then takes a percentage of successful sales. At the same time, a site like Etsy gets many more visitors than almost any personal site could hope to achieve, and while that means more competition with other creators it also means more potential customers.

In many cases a hybrid approach is best. To return to the webcomic example used above, you might decide to use Cafe Press or a competing service at first to gauge interest in your t-shirts before deciding if you invest in the equipment to make them yourself. The independent music label Artificial Music Machine makes their artists’ albums available both for direct download from their website and from the popular iTunes music store. It should be noted their albums are cheaper when purchased directly and about twice as expensive on iTunes. We think this approach is a great one — it rewards fans for loyalty while simultaneously making the music available as widely as possible.

When doing your research, carefully examine the agreements you enter into with any of these services. Etsy, for example, has restrictions on selling items on more than one site — which could be a conflict with a roll your own shop. The nature of your content is important to consider as well — Paypal is notorious for shutting down the accounts of anyone who could be perceived as offering ‘adult’ materials.

We’ll revisit the question of whether to outsource or roll-your-own as it arises again in relation to future parts of this series. In our next part, we’ll examine another potential profit stream for your work.

Other posts:

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Artist Business Models (13) – Rolling Your Own

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

Wave 0 was our pre-launch wave. Although the Continuous Coast project is accepting donations from the start, Wave 0 is mostly about collecting early-adopter fans and beginning a viral word of mouth campaign which we can build on later. In Wave 1, we will be launching the central portal to the site and offering a diverse array of content both for free and pay, as well as physical objects for purchase.

Selling Content (Wave 1, Tangible Items)

Today we’re going to talk about selling content online — that is, making any creation available for download for a fee. You might sell books online for download, or issues of virtual magazines as Jim Baen’s Universe does every month (we’ll be addressing the subscription model, also used by that site, in a separate part of this series). You could offer video games for download, artwork like Digital Blasphemy, music files like Magnatune, or many other variations.

In many ways this model is not a truly new one, but represents taking the old models of publishing and translating them onto the Internet. It’s important not to lose sight of the differences, however. For one thing, customers are reluctant to spend as much money for something purely digital — an .mp3 file or a .pdf — as they would for a physical, printed book or CD with liner notes. In fact, it helps to include extras — such as cover art or those liner notes. If it’s appropriate you can include interactive elements or access to other special features which would only be possible online.

In other words, try to help your customers feel like they are getting a good value, either with a reduced price over the physical version, extra features, or both. Experiment with how much content to offer, and of what sort — if it seems like too much to charge $1 for a single short story, consider collecting several stories into a virtual anthology and charging more. Consider selling custom artwork, music, or audio files with your story too — though this may mean sharing the profits with more collaborators, it may also make the content more attractive to your buyers.

Another important issue to address when selling your work online is piracy. Although anything can be pirated, content in digital form is much easier to copy or share than a creative work in more conventional form — anyone who wants to upload the file to a file-sharing network can do so, without even having to go through the trouble of converting it to digital form. While DRM (digital rights management software, or copy protection) is sometimes used, we feel that is more trouble than it is worth: All DRM is eventually broken, it frequently prevents or increases the difficulty of legal use by your fans, and any use of it tends to garner bad publicity.

Instead, it makes more sense to acknowledge that in a digital world people will use your content in all kinds of ways you might or might not intend. The use of a Creative Commons or other open source/open content license can help encourage your fans to play fair in how they use your content; it can also (depending on the license) encourage them to make creative derivative works which will get you more publicity. You can also include a simple notice in your work (for example, on the copyright page of your virtual book or in the liner notes for your album) which says something like, “If you got this from a friend and enjoyed it, please consider visiting our website and donating.”

If fans can choose to get your work on a filesharing site, why would they ever go to you? There are actually many reasons: the convenience of getting all your content in one place, the safety of knowing your files won’t contain viruses, or the reliability of your site versus a slow filesharing network. Of course, this puts some responsibility on you: your files must be virus free, easy to access, and quick to download. In his excellent article, “Better than Free,” author Kevin Kelly discusses eight reasons fans spend money in a post-scarcity digital economy.

While some will still choose to copy your work instead of pay you for it, consider this: they still have that ability even if you don’t make your work available online. We believe it’s better to give them the opportunity to pay you directly. Remember, if you make fans they will want to support you, though they may not feel the same loyalty toward your publisher, the recording industry, etc.

Selling Content Bonus: If it’s appropriate, consider whether you can make fans feel involved while they support you. Do you want to garner their input on what you are making? Or is there an “in character” way to involve them? For example, consider a hypothetical fantasy world at war — perhaps fans are paying to support the purchase of supplies for an exploratory foray into evil enemy territory, in return for which they’ll be given exclusive access to photos, travel writings, video, or even “artifacts” from the expedition. Even when you start by translating the old models, it’s important to consider ways you can adapt them to the new.
Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
• Part 9: Managing Contributions
• Part 10: Donating Whuffie
• Part 11: 1,000 True Fans
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Artist Business Models (12) – Selling Content for Download

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

Pros:

• share marketing and advertising workload with enthusiastic fans
• a group of people hungry for your work and more of it
• positive feedback directly from your fans
• potentially fun and unique interactions
• potential self-sustainability if large enough fan base

Cons:

• can be difficult finding initial fans if don’t already know people who are interested (such as friends or family)
• occasionally obsessive fan (usually harmless, but not always)
• potentially extra fan maintenance
• see also John Scalzi’s The Problem with 1,000 True Fans

If you have the sort of project where a rabidly devoted core fan base would be helpful, remember that it’s a good idea to take care of your True Fans in ways that help them feel special–people like to be in on secrets and know about cool things before the release date. Plus, there’s also the possibility of developing rewarding associations or even friendships with your dedicated fans. If you decide to explore this model, and your project hits prime-time, if you don’t want to stain your reputation with your fans then ensure that you don’t make them any promises you aren’t willing to maintain regardless of your notoriety level. Your truest fans can turn into your largest detractors if you don’t honor your commitments to them, so cover yourself by thinking carefully about what you offer before you do.

Even if you don’t reach the theoretical 1,000 fan goal, accumulating a loyal following is rarely a bad idea. This model works hand in hand with all the other revenue sources outlined in this paper — your true fans both contribute directly and bring other, less devoted people to your work. And of course, if you do find enough True Fans who want to contribute to you regularly, this model has the potential to generate a living wage with which you can continue to produce more cool things.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
• Part 9: Managing Contributions
• Part 10: Donating Whuffie
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Artist Business Models (11) – 1,000 True Fans

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

Whuffie is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The novel is set in a post-scarcity future where money has become meaningless. Instead, people can award these reputation points to each other, based on how useful, creative, or clever they are. The more a person does for their community, the more whuffie they tend to accumulate.

Obviously, you don’t live in a post-scarcity world and the purpose of this paper is a discussion of how you can make money through leveraging your creativity online. Even so, it’s important not to discount contributions of whuffie or social capital.

One of the most useful ways of utilizing your non-paying fans is to help build your fanbase (some of whom will hopefully contribute monetarily). Encourage your fans to link to you in their blogs, twitters, or in appropriate online communities. Provide small link graphics for them to add to web pages. Most of all, don’t discount the value of “social bookmarking sites” like del.icio.us, reddit, or Digg; these sites allow users to share their favorite links and bookmarks. Digg in particular, which uses a voting system to choose the most popular sites, can be a powerful free way to direct traffic to your website. There are various plug-ins such as ShareThis which give your visitors the option of adding your page easily to multiple social bookmarking websites; an example can be seen at the bottom of this post. Be sure to check the terms of service for each site before you start encouraging your fans to link — some, such as Digg, have restrictions on mature or adult content.

Keep your fans informed of new developments in your project and they will pass the news on to friends that they think will be interested. A blog, RSS feed, or mailing list are an excellent way to keep people informed of the latest. There are many options such as Wordpress for creating a simple blog, most of which come with built-in RSS feeds. If you need to create an RSS feed from scratch, a service such as Feedburner will do it for you. There are also many options, such as Google Groups for the simple creation and operation of a mailing list. One interesting technique for comics or other heavily visually-oriented projects is an RSS window like this one used by FreakAngels.

Your fans can help create a thriving community that enriches the experience others’ will have while interacting with your creations. If it’s appropriate, create a forum for fans to discuss your work with you and each other. It’s also a great idea to encourage fan-created content in the form of fiction, art, music, or other creative works. Not only does this make them feel like a greater part of your project but it also generates substantial amounts of content with minimal work from you. This is one of many reasons that Creative Commons licensing is so popular today; everyone from writers like Cory Doctorow to musicians like Nine Inch Nails make use of Creative Commons licenses. You can even use contests, like this Shadow Unit video contest, to simultaneously generate publicity and content from your fans (but such contests should be free, as we think it’s ethically questionable to collect money while being given free content).

Generating whuffie is an ongoing effort — unless your project is over and done with, and you don’t intend to make more money from it ever again. It’s also important to remember that there is such a thing as bad publicity on the Internet. Don’t betray your fans’ trust by promising what you can’t deliver, or by encouraging fan participation in the beginning then cracking down on it when you get bigger — most of us can’t expect to act like J.K. Rowling and retain successful careers afterwards.

Your feedback helps us shape and develop this series, so be sure to join in the discussion in our comments with your questions, ideas, or other feedback. Tomorrow we’ll examine another potential revenue stream for your project.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
• Part 9: Managing Contributions
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (10) – Donating Whuffie

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

The more objective your measurement of contribution worth, the less room you leave open for hurt feelings among your creative team. However, when dealing with art, it’s often difficult to find a system of “objective” contribution measurement in such a subjective medium. If you are trying to compare and contrast works across artistic media, it’s even harder.

One option is to make it completely subjective; the choice of who is a contributor is decided by the people in charge of a particular project, through assessments of project worth that are not easily quantifiable. (”They feel like a right fit for the project” or “their prestige is something we want” or “they’ve significantly helped shape our art.”) This way has a fairly high chance of interpersonal drama unless roles for each person are clearly defined from the beginning of their inclusion in the project.

There are a few ways you can measure even artistic projects more objectively, at least from the creator viewpoint. The one least likely to appeal to most artists is tracking participation through number of hours spent working on the project. In addition to questions raised of abusing the system through idling “on the clock,” the similarity of this method to the timeclock-focused jobs that most artists want to avoid means that there are only limited circumstances where it is useful to certain projects.

Other more quantifiable tracking methods that might be marginally more palatable to a team of writers, for example, would be to track number of words contributed to the project in a given period of time. However, depending on which media your project use, even this could easily get difficult–is a picture really worth 1000 words? How do you quantify a hand-knitted shawl or a set of crafted dishware in wordcount numbers? If the project incorporates a group blog or multiple characters posting on a Twitter feed, how can you share profits when you aren’t even sure which contributor is who? How do you quantify hundreds of single-line message contributions per month? Again, there seem to be no hard rules, simply decisions that suit particular projects in answering these questions.

Another way to log participation would be to track the number of contributions (again based on an arbitrary decision of what determines a contribution). This gets prettily heavily into subjective territory again, though; does someone’s one-line Twitter post weigh the same as another person’s 100-hour oil painted masterpiece? Something else to consider is for what period of time does a contribution count? Someone who is posting daily blog and Wiki content for a world isn’t contributing on the same level as someone who contributes two pieces of art and never visits again.

Now that we’ve looked at some tracking options from the creator-determined side of things, there are also ways to measure project involvement as determined by the end users, the audience for your art. We can see a range of subjectivity assessments here as well. User-determined tracking could be things like monitoring the number of unique hits a specific page on a website receives; tracking the number of times someone downloads a story or picture; number of sales of crafted artifacts; or even a Digg-style social accounting system to measure the popularity of different project parts. One benefit of using such systems is that it eliminates much of the chance for hurt feelings toward the central creative team, since they aren’t the ones making the judgment calls on individual contributions. On the other hand, if you have a large project, tracking all the various parts can get quite complicated.

To summarize some options then, you could have non-specifically designated donation income distributed arbitrarily; distributed communistically; kept entirely for website maintenance and project growth; distributed through a percentage allocation system; or some combination of these. For example, you could have all the income up to a certain amount go toward growth and maintenance costs, but once an income goal per time period is reached, share the remaining income on an equal share basis or percentage basis. Now is the time to start making specific decisions on what are the needs of your particular project.

And what about the fans or contributors who can donate loyalty, love, and even time…but little to no art or money? Tune in tomorrow for an entry from Kit discussing Whuffie and how fans without money can contribute to the project.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (9) – Managing Contributions

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

One method we’re contemplating for our project we fondly refer to as “the ticky box method”. For this to work, the order of operations is crucial; a fan presented with even a simple list before donating is more likely to be discouraged from completing the process. Instead, you accept the donation as a general, unallocated donation, but after the transaction is complete the donator is presented with the option to specify to which part (or person) of the project they want their money to go. The initial menu options should be simple, as broad categories as possible; a drop-down menu with more options could be incorporated to list specific authors under the “Writers” category, for example.

What about the funds that stay general and don’t get allocated? Well, if you have a small group of collaborators in a fairly closed-circle creative environment, it might be that a simple percentage allocation per time period is the option to choose. Through vote, consensus, parley, or whatever other method you prefer to use in making group decisions, decide which group members get how much percentage of, say, monthly donations. Then divide up the donation income each month based on those calculations. Shadow Unit has not only done this, they’ve publicized their monthly donation income.

But, you say, I have an unwieldy large group of individualistic artistic collaborators from different genres working together, how do I divide the general donation income among those?

A series of semi-arbitrary decisions, we say. Depending on how much your project blurs the lines between artist and audience, the first question to answer is what defines a contributor to your project? Which contributions “count” for the purpose of earning income?

On one extreme end, the central creative team keeps all non-specified donations for project maintenance, growth, and personal income. Any sharing of this money is done at their discretion and whim. At the other end, anything made above and beyond site maintenance is equally shared among everyone defined as a contributor. Most people are going to pick an option that falls somewhere in-between these two extremes. It helps to remember that finding your middle road will involve yet more subjective judgments on how contributions are measured and weighed for worth. The more subjective judgments govern, the higher the risk for hurt feelings among the collaborators. Tune in tomorrow where we’ll explore some of the options for measuring contributions to a project and how to manage the artistic temperaments involved.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (8) – Dividing Donations

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

Yesterday we discussed the organization of our business model into waves. Wave 0 is our pre-launch phase, when we encourage early adopters to visit our sites and become involved with our project. We hope to capitalize on the prestige of being the first to be “in the know” about our project by encouraging these earliest fans to be among our most vocal and most devoted.

Donations (Wave 0, Support from Fans)

Almost everyone who is making money online (or trying to) provides some way for their fans to easily throw money at them in adoration or support. One of the major lessons of our research into 21st-century storytelling is that people want to support the creators who entertain them. Accepting donations is one of the simplest ways to promote this “patronage” from your fans.

Some sites will have a donation link on every page of the website; others will nestle it discreetly at the top or bottom of just the main page. You can also provide a dedicated donation page which explains how donations support you and encourages fans to to give generously. It is up to each creator and the needs of their project to decide how prominent or subtle to make your donation buttons and other calls for financial support.

Pros:

• Donation buttons can be placed anywhere
• Donations can be one-time gifts or monthly recurring donations from dedicated fans
• You can accept donations overall as an artist as well as for a particular project
• Can offer fans incentives or bonuses for donating (see supplement below)
• Can be discreet or obvious
• Works well in conjunction with deliberate fundraising drives
• Can be used in other creative ways — for example a storytelling project might find an in-story explanation for why the characters need money, turning a fundraiser into a way for fans to participate as well as financially support

Cons:

• Limited control over how much or how often donations are received, or what percentage of fans give
• Not a viable stand-alone source for most projects
• Collaborative projects may complicate how donations are allocated — who gets what percentage?

Unless the listed cons rule this out for you, this is a good option to consider, especially in the early stages of your project. It has no initial cost to set-up and takes minimal time to manage. However, except in rare circumstances, you are unlikely to be able to make a living-wage solely from donations. It is usually best used in combination with one or more of the other models.

If you’re interested in arranging to accept donations on your site, here are a few links to research. Remember that most of these services restrict the ability to register an account to people with bank cards, and certainly not everyone has a bank account even now. Are you providing some way for a potential non-account-holder to still get their donation to you? Or do you assume that percentage is small enough that it isn’t worth the extra work, and just accept online donations? Do you want to post a p.o. box address to accept snail-mail donations? Or is that part of an outdated model for your needs? Do you list suggested donation amounts? Or let the fans decide?

Common services for accepting donations:

• Paypal
• Amazon Honor System

Donations Supplement: bonuses for donations

One way to encourage donations is to offer some sort of bonus for those who do so. This has been done for years with public broadcasting fund-drives, where organizations will offer various items “free” with different donation amounts. This concept can easily be adapted to creative projects. One example which comes to mind is the browser-based game Kingdom of Loathing, which offers players a special item for every $10 they donate. These items can be traded in for other special items, sold to other players, or displayed for prestige.

Although later on we’ll talk about some other ways of encouraging patronage through giving access to extra features or content, consider that even simple methods — such as public thanks or adding a special flag or message to a user’s public profile on your forums — can make donating a great deal more attractive to your fans.

Other projects supported by donations (two out of thousands!):

• Shadow Unit – online storytelling project
• Escape Pod – SF podcasts

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Artist Business Models (7) – Donations

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

***

Water imagery is among the important elements of our newly-created shared world, so when discussing the various stages of releasing our project we began imagining it like waves of the tide coming in: first the water just a little further in, than a bit more, creeping slowly enough that it’s easy to miss at first, and then you notice the beach is flooded. (Remember the “incoming tide” effect described in an earlier post.) Since we have much more time than money–and not enough of either–in the early stages of the project, we decided to start with a small and solid structure that was designed from the beginning with the potential to scale up (we’re optimists at heart).

We examined the available models to determine for which wave they were particularly suited based on the projected growth of our project, and within each wave we determined whether a model’s potential income derived from: interaction with and support from the fans; physically or mentally tangible items associated with the world; or outside-the-project money sources (or some combination of these).

There is a lot of overlap between some of these models, and while some are specific to the phase in which they are introduced, many are meant to be launched at a particular time and then continue through one or more additional stages of your project. In our first wave, we are focusing on revenue streams which required the least up front investment of resources while still presenting what we believe to be substantial potential for income both for us and our collaborators.

Next we’ll begin looking at specific revenue streams, starting with the use of donations to encourage patronage.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (6) – Waves

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

Next, consider the details of how you wish to bring your project to a public audience. There’s the “cannonball effect”, where you start big and splashy and keep escalating from there. This approach may be necessary for the viability of certain projects, but remember that it is also more likely to require a larger than average initial investment of both time and money. Another concern to keep in mind is that unless it is specifically designed to be a project of short duration, sustainability of a cannonball project over the long term can be difficult to achieve; you must either keep surpassing your previous efforts or design a different and new approach to “reset” the bar you measure against. Contrast this with the “incoming tide” effect, where you start small and simple in structure and add more details and complexity over time. This way is much more accessible to an individual or group with limited resources, since you move at the pace determined by your available time, energy, and money. On the other hand, certain types of projects may not be well suited to the start-small-grow-big approach.

There are several stages of development for a commercially-viable large creative project or product: a private pre-release stage, where only those directly involved with the project are “in the know”; a limited pre-release stage, similar to a test screening of a movie, where a small selected group beta-tests the project; the advanced pre-release, where early adopter fans and other followers might join, and advertising and viral marketing often occur; the full public release, open to the public; the added value phase, which includes such things as sequels, DVD extras, director’s cut editions, and other new content related to the original work; and the “long tail” phase where fan-fiction and other derivative works appear. This model can be adapted and applied to many situations, on both a group and an individual level. A painter might have only themselves in the first two or even three stages with the full release stage being the first public distribution; a writer has beta readers and editors and Advance Release Copies and reviews before the story is published; a large group project may have tens or even hundreds of participants by the time the full release launches.

You now have a nice selection of approaches to examine your project for its business viability. Our next several posts will discuss specific possible sources of income and marketing, organized loosely on how we arranged it in our own business model. This is of course only one of many possible ways to arrange a business model, as that should be adapted to the needs of each individual project. As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (5) – Time Vs. Money

©2010 Words Words Words. All Rights Reserved.

1. Prioritize the steps you need to take to launch your project with sound business principles. Knowing what needs to happen right away for optimal success, and what can wait and be built on the foundations you establish first, is vital for a profitable business model. It is good to dream large, but don’t forget to establish steps along the way you can more easily achieve.
2. Make a sequential plan. Know the individual steps you need to take to reach your goals. Try to define your goals clearly, with close attention to detail and a distinct and specific order of operations.
3. Be flexible when needed. Know which parts of your plan you are willing to bend on and which you aren’t. (And then re-evaluate that last point again; know your boundaries and maintain them healthily–but don’t self-sabotage with unrealistic expectations.) Keep focused on your project and your goals, but temper your idealism with a healthy dose of understanding that no matter how attractively balanced or thorough your plans, change and chaos can (and likely will) disrupt your actions. Retaining flexibility in how you address the complications that arise can make the difference between a commercially viable project and one that remains obscure or unprofitable.
4. Set reasonable, achievable goals and deadlines. Again, idealism will not assist you here; be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what and how much you can accomplish in a given time frame. Attempting too much in too short of time is one of the most common ways that artistic endeavors fail.

Surely by now some of you reading along have questions; they are welcome in the comments! Remember that your contributions help us keep this paper current in information, so talk on!

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.

Copyright 2008 The Dream Cafe.

21st Century Business Models for Artists (4) – 4 Simple Steps

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