Seeking Your Help with My Next Book

The project I've been working on for a few months now is about building a fan base in the digital era.

If you are a filmmaker, musician, artist, or writer, how do you attract a big audience online...and ideally build a self-sustaining career with the support of that audience?

So I'm looking for people who have really built their careers on the Internet, not necessarily established bands or filmmakers who've also done cool stuff with the Web.

One example of someone I've interviewed already is Michael Buckley, the YouTube star who recently quit his day job and signed a development deal with HBO.

Other examples of people I've been talking to: the guys at JibJab...Ze Frank ... OK GO ... and Natasha Wescoat. Essentially, people who have figured out how to attract and interact with lots of people online, and who've built business models around that without ticking off their fans.

Would love to hear any ideas you have...

HBO Shows Will Appear on iTunes, Some at a New Price

Apple has been famously inflexible about pricing on iTunes: TV shows are $1.99, songs 99 cents. (NBC flew the coop last year over Apple's unwillingness to alter that policy.)

So now Apple is changing the rules, to be able to add HBO shows to its library (only when they are released on DVD.)

From the Wall Street Journal's coverage:

...It's the first time HBO has agreed to sell downloads of individual episodes of its shows. And Apple, in a departure, has agreed to charge more than its uniform price of $1.99 per television episode. Some of HBO's shows will cost $1.99 per episode while others, including "The Sopranos," "Deadwood" and "Rome," will cost $2.99 per episode.

Variety also has a story. Diane Garrett writes:

Deal reps HBO's first electronic sell-through pact. The feevee channel has been reluctant to cannibalize its subscription fees and DVD sales. HBO did, however, experiment with free iTunes podcasts of "In Treatment" as a way of boosting the aud of the five-day-a-week skein.

It’s no coincidence that “Sex and the City” was one of the first HBO skeins to go on sale at iTunes Tuesday; a feature film followup is due in theaters later this month. Eventually, most of the channel's library is expected to go on sale through the iTunes Store.

Jobs has apparently decided that access to content that will drive hardware sales of iPods, iPhones and Apple TV devices is more important than maintaining rigid pricing. He previously resisted variable pricing on music and TV skeins for the sake of simplicity, although some of the global iTunes Stores do offer variable pricing.

SXSW ... 1,000 True Fans ... HBO's 'In Treatment' ... Movie Production Costs Keep Rising

Just a few links before I head to Austin on Friday morning for the SXSW Film Festival.... I'll be heading up two panels, one on Saturday called Digital Cinema for Indies, and one on Sunday called Animation and Digital Effects on a Budget.

- Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired, has a wonderfully thoughtful essay titled '1,000 True Fans.' Here's part of the opening:

...the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

- Michael DiBasio is cheesed that HBO seduced him with free episodes of 'In Treatment,' then turned off the tap. I'd argue that HBO is going to have a very hard time offering its content online in any form ... whether paid downloads at iTunes, or ad-supported streams ... because its biggest revenue stream is cable and satellite companies, who want that content to be their exclusively. (Why else do people pay $100 a month for cable, except for HBO and Showtime?)

- The average cost of producing and marketing a studio movie in 2007 hit an all-time high, according to the Wall Street Journal (based on data from the MPAA): $106.6 million. Releases from studio "specialty" divisions, like Fox Searchlight, was $74.8 million, a big jump from the prior year. But it was also the best year ever for the US box office, led by Sony Pictures' 'Spider-Man 3.' The studios raked in almost $10 billion (and that's ticket sales only -- no home video.)

HBO's 'Voyeur' Promotion

Tim Clague called my attention to a promotional project from HBO called 'Voyeur.' It's an interwoven set of stories directed by Jake Scott (Ridley Scott's son) that let you look inside a building -- think 'Rear Window' with X-Ray vision.

HBO recently projected the video onto the side of a building in Manhattan. It's hard to tell whether they have plans to do this elsewhere, but I'm hoping.

HBO's own Web site is kind of clunky and slow to load -- the best way to actually watch 'Voyeur' is via this version posted on YouTube:

This video is just five minutes long -- but HBO created two hours of material, according to Multichannel News.