SXSW 2012: DIY Promotion
By:
August 15, 2011
In 2012, the SXSW Interactive Festival will run from March 9-13. HILOBROW’s editor-in-chief Joshua Glenn has been invited to participate in an entertaining and useful panel on the topic of DIY PROMOTION. HiLobrow readers — we need your collective thumbs up!
Between today and Friday, September 2, you can help make this panel a reality. Go here, log in or create a SXSW account, and vote for the DIY PROMOTION panel.
Also: spread the news! Please encourage your friends, fans, and followers to vote for this panel, here: bit.ly/rn3vZ0
The DIY PROMOTION panel is being organized by Jeff Potter (author of the wildly popular Cooking For Geeks). In addition to Potter and Glenn (who moderated a panel on “Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web” at 2010’s SXSW Interactive), the panel will include Laura Fitton, CEO of the social business consultancy oneforty. HILOBROW’s friend Anindita Basu Sempere (executive director of The Writing Faculty) will moderate.
From the PanelPicker blurb:
We’ll discuss similarities and differences between our projects and approaches, exploring the “meta rules” that apply across the board to help you understand what you might encounter when promoting your project. We’ll cover what surprised us, what mattered more than we realized, and what you can do to be better prepared for managing exposure of your projects and work.
HILOBROW’s Peggy Nelson is on the panel You’ve made Something Good, but is it Art?, which is organized by friend of HiLobrow (and former Artist in Residence) Andrew Sempere.
Friends of HiLobrow are on the following panels. We hope you’ll vote for these, too!
The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices — organized by James Bridle. Our friend Joanne McNeil is a panelist.
Remixing Engineering Education for Creativity — organized by Deb Chachra
The Revolution Will Be Published — organized by Richard Eoin Nash
Self-Publishing: A Revolution for Midlist Authors? — featuring Carolyn Kellogg
PS: Josh has been publishing and self-publishing for 20 years now; he’s learned many lessons (and been surprised many times) about what makes promotional efforts succeed or fail.
* In the ’90s, his intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut was praised to the skies by Salon, Wired, Lingua Franca, The Atlantic… but its greatest success in reaching a receptive audience didn’t come until the teen girls’ magazine Sassy described Hermenaut — whose cover resembled a teen fanzine — as “funny and smart.”
* In 2009-10, Glenn and journalist Rob Walker started the Significant Objects project, which aimed to scientifically measure the effect of story-telling on the value of objects, by using fiction — written, by famous and up-and-coming authors, about thrift-store finds — as eBay item descriptions for those objects. Significant Objects received a torrent of publicity, in part because the project offered insights valuable to designers and marketers, economists and fiction publishers… but also because it sneakily used eBay as a litmag.
* More recently, HiLobrow (which Glenn co-founded with Matthew Battles) received a huge traffic boost when it was named one of the Best Blogs of 2010… by (middlebrow) TIME Magazine.
* In 2011-12, Glenn will seek novel ways to promote his brainteaser iPhone app KER-PUNCH!, and his forthcoming books The Wage Slave’s Glossary (Biblioasis, September 2011), Significant Objects (Fantagraphics, Summer 2012), and a TBA book from Bloomsbury (November 2012).
The DIY PROMOTIONAL panel is a great idea. Please vote for it! And spread the word!
