Webstock Workshop: Jim Coudal

Sketch notes from Jim Coudal's Webstock workshop about firing your clients - incorrect title of workshop on this sketchnote

Jim Coudal is confident - or at least he appears that way. Success breeds success, he says, If you look successful people will believe you are successful. Does that mean he's faking it until he makes it? I don't think he has time for that sort of carry-on because he's too busying making it. Making jewel boxes, an ad network, Field Notes notebooks, and short films.

He says the first step to selling something is the hardest, once you get that boat moving out of the harbour, it's much easier to correct to suit the opportunities or obstacles as they appear. Jim Coudal works with a small team of talented people, who use their varied skills and crafts to make things. Sometimes those things sell and they make money, sometimes they don't, and the direction is tweaked or morphed or dumped and they move on to the next idea from their creative pool.

All Webstock Workshops are worth attending, but not all workshops are the same. Some have a very practical component, while others are more of a conversation. I particularly appreciate this latter style of workshop where we sit around and discuss ideas, look for solutions, and share experiences. Merlin Mann did that in 2010 and this year Jim Coudal engaged us all with ideas, new and old, known and unknown, and rubbed a little bit of his confidence off on us ("Don't be creepy" Merlin Mann).

PS: Jim Coudal has a super power, which will be revealed on Thursday - what is your super power?

Webstock workshop with Jim Coudal - photo from Webstock's Flickr stream

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Webstock Workshop: Craig Mod

Sketch notes from Criag Mod's Webstock workshop: Subcompact Publishing

Super, great morning at Craig Mod's Webstock workshop entitled Subcompact Publishing.

We spent the morning talking about publishing systems, the jump between the physical artifact and the digital version, and the boundaries between HTML and books.

When talking to people, I particularly enjoy hearing about how they do things, so hearing the process behind Craig's 7 year journey to build software to share good quality, long form stories was really interesting. He let us all log into the software and we left the workshop to capture content out in the wild. Basically, he got us to do the first round of user testing for him. It was great - he sent us out for ten fast minutes to take photos and record our thoughts - then asked us to extend those thoughts when we came back into the workshop. This blended well into the next subject which was creating Kindle books.

While he told us that using this Amazon system to create digital books was like the "ugliest sausage-making process" and the compiler was built by "people who hate people" he still regarded Amazon's Kindle had the most bang for one's buck suggesting that one can get 80% results for 20% effort.

Craig compiled our "extended sketches" (the content we'd gathered in our ten minutes out in the world, and ten minutes fleshing out the content back in the workshop) into the Kindle format and published to the Amazon Store. It was amazing really - I hadn't really thought about it before but I thought it would've been more difficult to do. It was inelegant, and probably annoying with the inexplicable errors thrown by the compiler, but there were no checks on content or quality so basically, if you have the desire and the software, anyone can publish a book this way.

Pretty awesome, really.

It does beg the same question the evolution of blogs brought with it: if anyone can publish a book, doesn't that mean that there will be lots of really crappy books out there? Craig assured us that there were already lots of crappy books out there, and maybe lowering the bar might bring some wonderful diamonds within our reach that may not have had a chance before.

I'm looking forward to Craig's talk at the Webstock conference (proper) on Thursday morning too, stay tuned for more notes.

Webstock workshop with Craig Mod - photo from Webstock's Flickr stream

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