Adapting Methods to Madness
Imagine a scene in your head. I'm sitting in some large conference room with some ad agency representing some client. I fire up my Powerpoint and explain my strategy to use unspeakable horror and some of the darker emotions in the artistic palatte to tell a story about the risks we don't pay attention to. I get to the slide where I'm supposed to make the argument that helps them sell more LimeWidgets. I click "next" and there is nothing but a blank slide, mocking me and my stupid idea.
Then I wake up and remember that the heart of independence is that I don't have to get anyone's permission to do Eldritch Errors. I don't have to have a sponsor. I don't have to convince someone of the marketing efficiency of the storyline. In fact, if I really think my idea is any good, I should be able to figure out how to wring a return on that investment myself inserting LimeWidgets, GrapeWidgets or brand new SchmeldritchWidgets I come up with myself.
There are certainly advantages to getting someone to say "yes" because frequently the question they are answering is "will you give me money to do this wacky thing that we think we can convince you will work?" It also means that someone else's goals become central priorities in that new collaboration ... which begs the question: if we didn't have to incorporate other goals, what would be our priorities for establishing our own goals?
At the PM chat, someone asked me how that Eldritch business model is coming along. That's another way of asking the same thing -- what goals did we set, and how's it going? I tried my best to narrow it down to the six most central guiding principles (and I'll probably change my mind on a regular basis):
- An independent's highest goal is to produce new fans: fans are the ultimate raw resource of all indie models. Trying to make revenue without fans is the most difficult task in the world.
- Patience is a virtue: in the race of the tortoise & hare, the indie does better thinking like the tortoise.
- There is no better marketing than the evangelism of fans.
- The most probable outcome is that an indie will lose every penny they put into their project, but they'll have a thousand opportunities to mildly improve that outcome (which can add up to success).
- You can always cease & desist if someone complains.
- You probably don't need as much of anything as you think you do.
Those six rules don't sum up our entire perspective and strategy, but they do strike at the heart of what we think the Web (and thus crossmedia properties) offers as the most exciting new potential for indies: the opportunity to get around traditional (ie, dependent) solutions to the finance and distribution problem.
We see ourselves as building a long-term sustainable project and we don't plan on forcing the timing of that. We expect to put as much money into Eldritch as we would into an indie feature film before we start to see that tide really turn to sustainability. In the meantime, we want to produce the best experience we possibly can for our fans and grow that fan base in size. Spending $50,000 on Book One production is a smarter overall fan building strategy than spending 80% of that on advertising to produce higher numbers in lesser metrics (and rule one states that all metrics are less important than producing new happy fans.)
In our perfect world, we'd start to see signs of Eldritch's revenue generation in 2008. The really interesting options don't start becoming viable until 2009. Conceivably, in 2010 we could be talking about how little the investment was for the seeds that grew into the forest. The humbler reality in 2007 is that in most scenarios the small amount of revenue that could be generated is better invested in fan development -- any revenue skipped now is low-hanging fruit anyway, and rules 1 and 2 mean that the long-term value of the fan is worth more than the short-term revenue tickle.
Back in 1996 at the Sundance Film Festival, I watched Roger Ebert heckle John Perry Barlow. John had dared to express an idea to a room full of filmmakers daring to hope they might finally make a little money from their work: your value isn't the work you've done, your value is the next work getting ready to do. There were literally boos and hisses and cries that not everyone could be Grateful Dead. The more sophisticated criticism would have been, "the cost of production and fan building is still too high for indies." The panel, though, was apty titled "The Future of the Internet."
In many ways, Barlow's idea is nearly perfectly expressed in ARGish narratives -- because they play out in real-time instead of disconnected from the flow of time, the ultimate value in the relationship is immediate. What happens next? Play that cycle correctly (and learn from each round of feedback) and each subsequent "what happens next" should be more valuable than the previous. That's the fundamental payoff of having a relationship with your fans while you are creating.
When the aspects of Eldritch that generate revenue start appearing, they won't ever change the inherant social contract with our fans. The best metaphor might be the t-shirt: it might one tiny way to generate revenue, but not something that alters the core experience. That t-shirt might even have a sponsor's logo on the sleeve, to continue the hypothetical example of where revenue comes from. The important aspect is that this is an additive element to the core experience, never a replacement or a gatekeeper on participation. In the meantime, don't worry too much about business models: any business model we have is predicated first and foremost on a high-quality experience and enthusiastic fans.