Understanding Who Owns Your Art
Taylor Swift’s experience sheds light on an important question: Who owns your art? The answer isn’t always clear and impacts your work.
Marketing
Pitch Slapped: How to Properly Pitch Publications
As one of the four people behind The Writing Cooperative, I receive a lot of pitches. Besides the two-dozen submissions received daily through our submission process, another dozen arrive unsolicited via email. As writers, we want our words in front of as many eyes as possible. This requires pitching publications and growing our bylines. So…
Building The Writing Cooperative: How Internet Strangers Developed a Writing Community
The Writing Cooperative is an online writing community with over 100,000 followers on Medium and 2,200 members on Slack. Despite its massive size, The Writing Cooperative started with just two people who never met. The Early Days In late 2012, Ev Williams launched a new writing platform, Medium. A year later, with the platform fully available…
CNN Ruined Twitter
Twitter was the Wild West when it launched. The lack of product definition meant anything was possible. Brands had not yet invaded, nor had celebrities, or other marketers. Everything was fresh and new. A year after I joined Twitter, it’s stitching began to fray. CNN acquired the @CNNBRK account from a London-based user in 2009….
Seeking Validation
The gamification of our lives has conditioned us to care about things like leaderboards and hearts and little badges on our Twitter accounts.
How Not to Reach 25,000 Followers and Make Money on Medium
A few days ago a story popped into my feed explaining how to make $500 writing on Medium. Cynicism forced me to see what kind of “advice” was being invented. The sum total was: Follow everyone and hope they follow you back Pay for the author’s Medium course to know the rest Exactly as I…