Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Does FREE work?

To narrow that down a bit, does the posting of stories, novels, and art for free downloading, reading, viewing, and even sharing, make any difference in print book sales, in attracting more traffic to an author's or illustrator's blog, in doing anything to help that artist's career?

I give away a lot.  I have a whole blog dedicated to some of my Creative Commons licensed content.  I post my art regularly here on theophrast.us, on Flickr, deviantArt, and other art forums and presentation sites.  I posted an SF novel Nanowhere almost four years ago under Creative Commons license.  I post 3 to 5 panels for my web comic Saltwater Witch every week. 

Free, all of it.  Free to download, to read, to share, some of it out there for years. 

Does it work, giving all of this away if you're just starting out?  (I know it works if you're an established author, celeb, marketing guru, so I don't need the Doctorow, Scalzi, Anderson, Godin, etc. cases). 

I'm curious to hear what other writers, illustrators, and readers think.  Maybe you can guess what I think by what's on my blog or the Saltwater Witch site.  I'm considering posting my entire novel Seaborn, which came out last July.  And I'm wondering about the effectiveness of free.  I completely get Tim O'Reilly's aphorism that the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.  Maybe my real question is does giving things away solve that problem?

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ChrisCommons
Saltwater Witch Web Comic.

UGCX show day one

Packed panels, great speakers, this has really turned out to be an interesting and fun con, and we're already making plans to attend and even get on a couple panels in October when UGCX is out in Boston.  Day one keynoters were the founder/CEO and COO of iStockphoto talking about what it takes to start, operate, be successful in the social media world, six sort of cute--but important--factors: passion is the glue, innovation is imperative, communication counts triple, outsource to the crowd, IT is it, flexible focus is the foundation. 

I dashed between panels and hanging out at the Ozmo kiosk answering questions--and we got a lot.  I didn't look up that often, but we seemed as busy or busier than anyone else.  UGC licensing, it's HOT!

Looking forward to Guy Kawasaki's keynote this morning!

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Off to the UGCX show in San Jose

I'm heading out the west coast in a couple hours, spending a few days in SJ, mostly at the convention center for the User Generated Content con and expo.  Stop by if you're in the area!

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In Creative Commons news!

How cool is that?  The service I've spent the last year designing and developing--Ozmo--has a nice big post on the creative commons blog along with a description and links to the genius behind the Ozmo video, Ryan Junell.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10832

Ozmo provides commercial licensing services for bloggers, photographers, illustrators, anyone with online content.  We're out the door with support for text and image licensing, and we'll be following up with video and audio (music, podcast).  We play well with Creative Commons, using CC+, so you can create a CC license along with your Ozmo license.

More: www.ozmo.com
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Out in SF

I'm out in the Bay Area on business, talking to Creative Commons, Six Apart, and a couple other companies and orgs about commercial licensing of blogs, images, video, etc.   I love San Francisco.  Checked into the Hotel Nikko late Monday and the manager upgraded me to an Imprial Suite.  How cool is that?  Even cooler than you might think.  A room on the 22nd floor--special key access, great view, it's own audio system (along with the giant plasma display), another TV in the mirror in the bathroom--and the bathroom had this giant glass shower and a separate bathtub. I felt very...imperial.  Totally recommend the Nikko if you need to stay in SF--which I truly hope you have to at some point.

ChrisCommons

I kicked off something I've wanted to do for a while.  A page linking to everything I have that's Creative Commons Licensed.  Check it out here:  ChrisCommons

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Even better link to it!

The full URL is: http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/chriscommons/

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