b!X Photo Special Orders Now Available
As something of a follow-up to instituting a new sales model for prints of my photography, The One True b!X | Photos now includes an additional new component: special orders.
While only a couple hundred photos are made available directly via my sales site, there are thousands more in my Flickr photostream. Beginning today, prints of the vast majority of those can be had via special order.
At launch, special orders are available only to U.S. customers, and the only print size available is 8×12. These limitations will lossen up once I make sure any kinks in the process are worked out.
So, if you’ve ever seen anything in my Flickr photostream but were disappointed to find it wasn’t available on my sales site, just follow the special order instructions and make yourself happy at last.
b!X Photos Now Sell For Base Price
As of tonight, all of the prints for sale at The One True b!X | Photos are available at their rounded (to the nearest $0.25) base price. This is as close to free prints of my photography as you can get. In most typical cases, you now will pay more for shipping than for the print itself.
So how will I make any money off my photography? There is now an additional product for “sale”: the financial gift and donation, available atop each of the site’s seven galleries.
Going forward, when you purchase a print you also are invited to add a donation at whatever level works best for you, from a wide range of provided options. Due to the nature of the service I use, these donations technically are provided in the form of digital downloads, specifically of a “Proud Supporter of The One True b!X | Photos” graphic, which you can post online to show off your support, or simply delete. It’s up to you.
This is an experiment. I’ve had nearly a full year of selling prints of my photography under a more traditional model, and now it’s time to try something new. Those of you following me on Twitter might correctly be guessing that the experiment in no small part is inspired by Marian Call, who sells recordings and plays her music live via a similar model.
I have no earthly idea which print sales model will be more successful. I have no idea if the model works in this context at all. Certainly I don’t sell so many prints that I’m putting anything even close to a steady flow of income at risk. This simply is an experiment I can afford to conduct, and the premise intrigues me too much not to do so.
All photographs which have been for sale as prints on the site remain for sale, including some new ones you might have missed. Nothing has been removed. I’ve tried to make the new model as clear as possible in various parts of the site. If anything is confusing, or if some part of the new process isn’t working as intended, please let me know.
Addendum: See the comments below for some discussion of the old model versus the new model, based upon the first order under the latter.
Addendum: Under this “optional donation” model, buyers also could opt for barter or some other alternative form of donation, such as gift cards. Just use the email link on the sales site to make an offer.
Addendum: I can now take special orders of photos that aren’t on the sales site but exist in my Flickr photostream.
Connui Go!
I can only assume that there are many names for it, that inevitable and cloudy confusion which descends in the wake of a major pop culture convention such as San Diego Comic-Con International, which ended a scant two weeks ago. Only one term comes close to summing it up: connui.
Part of overcoming connui, in my case, is the methodical culling of the thousands of photos taken over the course of the event, uploading the chosen few (even when some of them don’t quite satisfy me). This year, after what seems to have been my best experience at Comic-Con in my four years of attending, I’ll add something new, if somewhat cliche.
What follows (because I couldn’t reduce it to ten) are my twelve favorite things about this year’s con, in chronological order.
1. Arriving at the convention center area.
It seems kind of silly, but there’s a distinct and definite rush just upon arriving within view of the San Diego Convention Center, even if you’ve not yet stepped inside. In all likelihood, I have a shot similar to this from each of the past few years. The travel to San Diego complete, here’s where all the anticipation is about to begin paying off. Once you pick up your pass, anyway.
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The Streamys Are Not Just Another Web Series
Yesterday, I read two interesting pieces written in the wake of the Tubefilter Five launching an effort to fend off an alleged hostile takeover of the Streamy Awards by the International Academy of Web Television.
What strikes me most is that both Tim Street and Mike Hudack extoll the virtues of what Tubefilter has accomplished over the past couple of years in eerily similar ways, but then arrive at completely different conclusions as to what should or should not be done with the Streamys.
Remember, the first Streamy Awards Show was a great first show and everything else the Tubefilter guys have done to help the web video community has been awesome. These are good guys who made a bad show and then made some mistakes handling the aftermath. I know people are upset because the Tubefilter guys are trying to make money off the Streamy Awards but it was their idea and they built it. We live in America, why shouldn’t they be able to make money off their ideas? Why do they need permission?
Imagine if you had a hit web series and then made one bad show and the people that you had brought in to help you tried to take your show away. It’s crazy.
I believe that the IAWTV, as a non-profit membership organization representing the community, should oversee the Streamy Awards. I also believe that responsibility without power does not work. I have learned this lesson in managing a start-up. You simply cannot give people the responsibility to accomplish a task without empowering them to do so.
In the particular case of the Streamy Awards power comes from ownership. Ownership is the power that must accompany the responsibility. There is no other alternative that I can see, although I’m listening and my mind is open to other ideas. Without a transfer of ownership to the IAWTV the awards can never be said to belong to the community. And that is where power comes from. And that is where legitimacy comes from. The community.
It’s striking to me just how divergent are their respective senses of what’s at stake. For one (Street), what’s at stake is the independence of five web series creators. For the other (Hudack), what’s at stake is the community’s right to be represented by itself, rather than by five people.
In the excellent Liz Shannon Miller piece also published yesterday, it’s made abundantly clear that the Tubefilter Five are attempting to position themselves simply as independent web series creators (producing a series whose episodes occur annually) under a kind of assault. It’s a framing readily accepted by Street.
But what Street conveniently misses is precisely the point seized upon by Hudack: that as much as all credit is due to the Tubefilter Five for creating, launching, and shepherding the Streamy Awards to this point, the show simply is not just another independent web series reflective of the interests of its creators.
Rather, the entire point of the Streamy Awards has been for members of the various web video communities to come together to honor and celebrate each other’s work, and the medium they all are helping to grow.
The jockeying for position and the strained, convoluted attempts to frame the issue, in essence, as a matter of protecting the Tubefilter Five’s property rights to an event meant to reflect not just them but an entire community stands in stark contrast to the more celebratory and boundary-crossing Celebrate the Web event (which occured mere days after the debacle that was this year’s Streamy Awards), whose lingering communal aftereffects now risk being swept away.
So much for bringing everyone together.
Which is a good point at which to bring in yet another bit from Miller’s piece, an observation stemming in part from a rather blunt tweet from Felicia Day after Rebuild the Trust launched.
[B]y attempting to turn Rebuild the Trust into a movement for change, and by casting the blame for the lack of transparency surrounding the Streamys at the IAWTV board, they’ve succeeded in alienating six powerful members of the online video world. And frankly, when you implicate Felicia Day as being a part of a “classic attempt at a takeover,” you might as well go ahead and punch Julia Roberts in the face while you’re at it. Alienating Day and her fanbase is not the way to get web series creators on your side.
Which is not to say, of course, that Felicia Day’s opinion is the be all, end all (and, in fact, that’s not what Miller suggests). But, I think, it is to say this: in the wake of a disastrous Streamy Awards event, the various web video communities rediscovered just how much they cared about their work, and about each other. Rather than capitalize upon that rediscovery, various parties seem to have preferred to stake out positions of opposition and confrontation.
That does little to reflect or represent the web video community as a whole. Which makes the past two days a whole lot like this year’s Streamy Awards.
My Suggestion For The Streamy Awards
As I finish up listening to the entirty of Post-Streamys Breakdown and a New Season of The Guild, episode 12 of New Mediacracy, I’d like to pass along a constructive suggestion for next year’s Streamy Awards.
Rather than the typical hackneyed “and the nominees are…” videos for each category, package those videos as testimonials from other web video creators. They don’t have to be nominees themselves, or even representative of the category at hand. The point, of course, is to enmesh into the awards ceremony the simple premise of members the community gathering to celebrate each other’s work.
The “and the nominees are…” videos are present across the length of the event, which makes them a good candidate for helping to build a thematic and tonal scaffold for the awards. Whatever else does or does not happen along the way, that spirit of members the community gathering to celebrate each other’s work would resurface every single time a new category’s nominees are introduced, firmly and inescapably implanting that approach into the hardwired structure of the show.
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