"Designing Obama," a Few Dollars at a Time

Reflections upon the Obama campaign's design work? A crowdsourced fundraising effort? Total techPres bait, but Obama campaign design director Scott Thomas is involved in an intriguing quest. Wanting to chronicle the art and design that both was created by the Obama for America campaign and developed organically by supporters, but to put out a book with considerable production values, Thomas decided to avoid traditional publisher, go DIY, and fundraise himself for the production of Designing Obama -- using Kickstarter, what Thomas calls an "Obama-like fundraising model."

The finished product is set to come in an 360-pages of hard-bound art and commentary.

Think few people would prepay $10 for a digital version, or $50 or more for a print version of a book they haven't seen yet? With 13 days to go, 883 backers have contributed $57,000 of the $65,000 target Thomas set for the first run of the book.

Comments

Really?

It seems like there are times when it's better to go the "traditional" route. My guess is that this book would sell enough to make it worth going with a publisher with distribution muscle. Maybe he'll make it work on his own. Others certainly have, but this may be one instance of missing out.

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Publishing a book

Publishing a book on your own is a massively daunting task. It takes a lot of work to get the book seen, marketed and sold. I hope he can prove that it can be done on your own and this story will be interesting to follow. sauce