Half of being an artist is what takes place outside the studio. No one is going to randomly knock on my apartment door, just to see if an interesting artist happens to be living there. Marketing and promotion matter!
The most labour-intensive project I have been involved with to date is my collaborative project with Brad Blucher, Take a Picture
A few days ago, I was talking to my friend Jonathan (a maker of fantastic things) and he suggested that I try submitting Take a Picture to the Make Blog and Hack a Day.
Long story short, this was wonderful advice, and it started a snowball rolling, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.
To be honest, I had some trouble finding the “submit” button on Make, so I submitted the project to Hack a Day. I didn’t expect much to happen, but I figured, “it’s worth a shot.”
I went thorough my routine of checking my website statistics before bed (yes, I’m that much of a nerd) and I had a moment of extreme confusion. What normally looks like a mountain range had been turned into a hockey stick. The number of page views shot way up! I had a long, straight line, and at the end was a 90 degree bend going up.
“There shouldn’t be that many zeros after the number of views for the day…that’s off by two orders of magnitude!”
That’s when I noticed it. I had been picked up by Hack a Day. I was pleasantly surprized by the depth of their write up. They went all out, read through my website, selected several videos to embed on their site. It felt like they really got it. Hack a Day’s readership is very passionate and engaged, generating a lot of great comments for us.
I thought to myself, “it’s a shame I never found that “submit” button on the Make Blog – then I could be feeling twice as awesome.”
I went to bed very happy that night.
As it turns out, finding that submit button wasn’t necessary. Someone saw the posting on Hack A Day, and they submitted the project to Make.
I woke up to some very good news.
I simply cannot describe what it feels like to see my own work appearing on the pages of the very places I go to when I need some ideas or inspiration.
Unfortunately, I had things to do, so I couldn’t sit around and work on my narcissism as much as I would have liked. I went on with my day, I came home late, and I discovered a whole bunch of other places had seen these entries, and they posted about the project!
I’ve got a big ball of Blog love rolling, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.