Category: Insurgent Creative

Christmas Day, and we come to the end of our Advent Calendar. I figured that not too many people would be checking this entry, busy as they are with the holiday, seeing family and friends, etc. So I decided that I would use this final entry as a summary of the entire series — an easily-linked-to page with all of the entries.

• Day One: Introduction — including John Roger’s theory of “4th Generation Media” (4GM).
• Day Two: Kickstarter — crowdfunding of your projects.
• Day Three: The Free Content Model — including Howard Tayler’s keynote address to the Utah Open Source Conference.
• Day Four: CwF+RtB=$$$ — including Mike Masnick’s presentation on the model to the MidEmNet conference.
• Day Five: Scrivener — an overview of the software that should be the weapon-of-choice for Insurgent Creative writers.
• Day Six: Fans, Friends & Followers — Scott Kirsner’s book and the related video presentation to the Bay Area Video Coalition.
• Day Seven: Webcomics.com — Brad Guigar’s website, and the accompanying book.
• Day Eight: Bandcamp — sales and delivery for music and merchandise for Insurgent Creative musicians.
• Day Nine: Kindle Direct Publishing — overview of the market-leading independent epublishing tool.
• Day Ten: Createspace — sister program to KDP, offering print-on-demand books and more.
• Day Eleven: Spoonflower — custom digital printing of fabric for textile designers.
• Day Twelve: OneBookShelf — the premiere digital download site for Insurgent Creative game designers.
• Day Thirteen: Wreckamovie — crowdsourced film and video production.
• Day Fourteen: Gettin’ Paid — payment processing for Insurgent Creatives: Paypal, Amazon Payments and Square.
• Day Fifteen: iTunes U — educational tools to enable an Insurgent Creative being a Jack-of-All-Trades.
• Day Sixteen: Freelancers — hiring additional help to cover things you can’t do yourself.
• Day Seventeen: ImagineFX — Magazine with tutorials and tools for Insurgent Creative artists.
• Day Eighteen: FutureMusic & ComputerMusic — Magazines with tutorials, tools, and samples for Insurgent Creative musicians.
• Day Nineteen: Mag+ — a service offering free software for production of publications for digital tablets, without coding.
• Day Twenty: Spielmaterial.de — a supply house for game components.
• Day Twenty-one: Other Publishing Options — Covering the 30-40% of the market not held by Amazon.
• Day Twenty-two: WordPress — site design and content management.
• Day Twenty-three: Cafepress — print-on-demand merchandise sales.
• Day Twenty-four: Grab Bag! — a digital delivery service, a wordpress media creation plug-in, and a Flash game creation platform.

So there you go — One advent calendar down. So what becomes of Insurgent Creative in 2012?

Well, the response to the series has been great — obviously there are quite a few of you out there who are interesting in giving the Insurgent Creative life a try — so I will definitely be continuing in the coming year. I’m considering a few things, including the possibility of an Insurgent Creative podcast, a dedicated website, and more. I would love to hear your input, so please leave your comments below.

Thank you for reading this far, and here’s to a creative 2012.

Storm the gates!
 
 

We’re down to the wire, folks, and there are so many more tools and tips out there. So today, we’ll do a holiday grab bag for you, looking at a digital delivery service, a wordpress media creation plug-in and a Flash game creation platform — each of these could easily have merited their own entry in the series, and are really worth checking out. It’s Christmas Eve, the family is gathering, so let’s not delay any more — here we go!

Anybody selling digital products should look into Payloadz which runs ecommerce and file delivery. Payloadz features secure file storage and delivery from their servers; integration with your site or sites like eBay; support for Paypal, Amazon Payments and more. Here’s a brief introduction video:
 
 

 
 
Powerpress is a free, open source media creation plug-in for WordPress (which I covered a couple of days ago). Perfect for integrating a podcast or vlog onto your site (using HTML5 audio and video players), adding iTunes-compliant feeds to your site, along with the ability to upload and update iTunes listings and artwork. PowerPress is developed and maintained by Blubrry, a media company and community providing tools and resources for media creators to measure, monetize, publish and host media content. No membership is required to use Powerpress, although it can also be used in concert with Blubrry’s other services (like Media Stats and Hosting).

Stencylworks is a platform that enables game designers to create iOS and Flash games without coding, by using their online library of functions and graphics (or via uploading your own). It’s available in a free “lite” form (which watermarks the final game, and does not publish it to the app store), and a pro version costing $149 per year, which removes the watermark, gives you access to private forums, and publishes your games to the App store. Plus, Stencyl is currently working on expansion into the Android market and HTML5 development (instead of Flash). A brief overview video follows:
 
 

 
 
What tools have you discovered that we haven’t covered so far? Please share via comments below! We’ll see you back here tomorrow, for our final Insurgent Creative entry of 2011. What do we have planned for 2012? You’ll have to wait and see….
 
 

There are a number of sites on the internet that offer print-on-demand production of merchandise: shirts, mugs, iphone cases, refrigerator magnets, widgets, what-have-you. You upload your designs to their specifications, and when a customer orders, the object is manufactured and shipped to them. You pay no inventory cost, no warehousing, and earn a percentage of the sale. Of all of the sites offering similar services, I have the greatest amount of experience with CafePress.

Cafepress was founded in 1999, and currently has more than 13 million users. The site produces over 250 different types of products, ranging from poster prints and banners, to drinkware, to all manner of clothing. The process is simple — you create your storefront (which can be customized to match your website), upload your custom graphics (following the free downloadable product templates), set your price (Cafepress will tell you the cost of production, and you set your mark-up above that price — which is the amount that you earn per sale), and activate the product for sale. Cafepress handles the sale, the production, and the shipping, and pays you your monthly commission within 45 days of the month in which it accrued.

If you wish to run sales entirely through your own website, Cafepress also allows you to buy your own merchandise at cost, with price breaks for bulk ordering — so you can order inventory if you prefer to handle all aspects of the transaction yourself. Given the ability to customize a Cafepress shop to match your own, and embed it using simple HTML (iframe, for example), though, there’s not many drawbacks to simply letting Cafepress handle most of the back-end. If you follow the templates provided, I’ve found that the quality of Cafepress’ production is excellent. The poster that we did for THRILLING TALES, featuring the artwork originally used for the classic Justice, Inc. cover, turned out so well that I had a copy framed at a local art store and it now hangs in my living room.

The creation and sale of merchandise isn’t likely to be your primary focus as an Insurgent Creative — I suspect there are few of us who say “I want to design and sell original T-Shirts, gifts, stationery and more” (and those of us that do want to will probably figure out some way to traditionally produce inventory, as it brings the costs down significantly). However, for writers, artists, musicians, game designers, etc., the ability to have merchandise available that is branded for your property serves not only as a nice way to market your main property, but also acts as a good source of additional income. Whether you’re looking to have merchandise available online, or you’re interested in having some stock produced for sale at conventions or other events, Cafepress is a good option with minimal headaches.