Blogging, Crowdfunding, Kickstarter and The Glif

Yesterday, I attended the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) meeting in San Rafael to hear Joel Friedlander’s presentation about “Author Blogging.” Joel’s an independent book designer who we worked with at Glenbrook to design our book “Payments Systems in the U.S.” – he did an amazing job for us and I highly recommend working with him.

Joel’s blog “The Book Designer” is a wonderful resource for those interested in book design, self publishing and more. You’ll find him on Twitter as @jfbookman. In his presentation, Joel told of his experiences having started blogging just 15 months ago – and doing so has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for him – a great story told with great advice for other authors!

As Joel and I were talking, he pulled out his iPhone 4 which had a little device attached to it – something called “The Glif“. The Glif slips over the edge of the iPhone 4 and provides a number of ways you can “stand up” the iPhone. In addition, for us photography nuts, it’s got a tripod socket – so that you can use your iPhone on a tripod. I ordered one immediately – from my iPhone naturally!

Turns out there’s a wonderful story behind the development of this little device. After prototyping their design, the founders, Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, used KickStarter to raise the initial capital required to launch – and to find an initial market. KickStartr is a great way to publicize interesting projects and raise capital “from the crowd.” If the story is good enough and you reach the project threshold, funding happens – if not, it doesn’t. Simple but powerful idea! The Glif is a great example of KickStartr in action.