This is an extension, a record of the conversation we had in the break-out room on creating a community for your work. It would apply to any creative situation where an audience is willing to engage with the content created. A community of consumers or patrons to sustain the project. I have been always interested in books, specifically architectural books, and design books, was in publishing for around 4years, and now documenting the landscape of architectural design publishing in India. It is a useful book but of a different niche category. To give a background, architectural books in early modernist times were instruments to push theories and manifestos of spatial planning and design strategies. Then it became about pitching how the architectural practice practices, an office portfolio. Current trends, of what I have been able to identify are research projects by practices that get made into books. It has also become relatively easier to produce books hence offices also now have a periodic interval where they compile their work into books for sale. Almost all of these are printed books, with very expensive production costs. On kindle though, there are a few local authors putting documents out. You come to know about them through conversations or sometimes on Facebook. But then they are very few in number and most of the material from the newer batch of authors especially from a non-research design background I am very critical about. Printed books, who produce them are established architectural practices. Most of them have fans but that number is reducing. This brings me to the point of community building around ideas.
An important aspect is different platforms have different people groups who create content in them. I like reading on kindle and I like it as a space to consume ideas but it is essential to note that there is specific demography who kindle works for therefore only certain ideas would sell on the site. Ideas that I work with don't have a market in this space. This is based on whatever I could find about the landscape till now. My thinking about books comes from the point of view of ideas that can be made into books instead of the other way around where Rob is firstly catering to the reader first and then the content. The attribute to look at is how do you generate an audience for a book. Now Rob builds it on the go but that isn't always possible or it could be seen as one of the ways. It may be how we are trained but we were told to focus on work and then let work generate its own audience in time. The need for an audience for a book I would say is a very current social media urgency with an aspiration to sell. But to sell what you need is to be popular. Popularity is a form of patronage that makes at least a certain amount of material consumption after production possible. Of late doing something interesting on social media can get followers while in the process, pitching them ideas that could be anything from t-shirts to podcasts to books. Early entry into any virtual space these days can draw attention and therefore an audience, in addition to benchmarks of production being very low.
NFTs are a good example of this, case study to observe why certain jpegs sell. Looking at the history of roam and #roamcult is another worthwhile example of community building around ideas and how it is sustained. For every community to grow you need evangelists who will push the pitch for you. Ideally, those are the people who will build the audience for your work by explaining it and customize the ideas for different use cases. Both of these roam were very successful in the early days. The other tires of the community that an idea generates are the believers and then the extended, you could call worshippers who occasionally visit. 1. the gospel, 2. its evangelists, 3. believers, 4. worshippers, all communities of consumption need assembling in some way. Critics the fifth category is now tricky to address. These are the various tires I have observed in online community-building activities. Rob's work is now just at the gospel stage that we have access to via the book. Because of how the book is linked with other books I have purchased his other two books as well. So there is a lot more in the works that make books successful than just testing audiences. We are also in a time when teams are essential to selling ideas, even Rob works with the buddy who does certain aspects of the work. The exercises even if its state has a single author is at the end a partnership. It is a network that builds ideas and helps in sustaining them. For a book to reach the numbers Rob projects there is a lot of work. What I didn't crack during my work was distribution. Rob's main focus is distribution. All of the community building falls in distribution. Writing of a book is one, its distribution and maintaining sales is completely another is the argument I push here. The author at times can only focus on producing text and it should be just fine is my point.
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