Creator Interviews

March 19, 2019

Cherie Hu, the new wave of new media

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed one of the original bloggers, Jason Kottke, who started in 1998. This week’s interview is the perfect complement, as she represents the new generation of online media. Cherie Hu is a twenty-something music journalist from Brooklyn who runs an email newsletter and podcast, and earns revenue from these activities via Patreon.

March 12, 2019

Tiny Teee & the rise of Twitch for creators

Tiny Teee is a keycaps maker who videos her art process on Twitch, the live streaming service that evolved out of Justin.tv and is predominantly used by gamers.

Twitch has a young demographic, roughly 80% male, and most of the live streams are of video games and eSports. But it’s also increasingly being used by creatives, like Tiny.

March 5, 2019

Jason Kottke, OG blogger

Jason Kottke launched his blog kottke.org in 1998. That’s right, back in the twentieth century. Seven years later, he went full-time as a blogger and it’s been his professional identity ever since.

What I find most remarkable about Kottke’s story is that he’s never stopped blogging. The blog as an online publishing format is deeply unfashionable now. It was usurped firstly by social media and more recently by email newsletters. Yet Kottke the blogger persists.

February 26, 2019

The Internet History Podcast story, with Brian McCullough

Brian McCullough’s Internet History Podcast was initially launched to supplement his book on the same topic. But the podcast became a force in its own right. Now McCullough is a professional podcaster and making a mint as host of the Techmeme Ride Home.

February 19, 2019

Drawing inspiration from Sweeney Boo

This week’s creator interview is with a young comic artist and illustrator from Canada, who has 174,000 followers on Instagram and is making a good living to boot. She also has a crowdfunded graphic novel coming out soon, her first foray into the book world.

Her real name is Cécilia Dupuy, but in her career she goes by the screen name Sweeney Boo.

February 18, 2019

New name: Creator Interviews

A quick note that I’ve decided to rebrand, from Indie Digital Media to Creator Interviews.

This site is just a month and a half old, and the new name better describes the articles I’ve written so far. Also I’d like the type of creator I profile here to be broad, and the term ‘digital media’ has been too restrictive. For example, it isn’t a great descriptor for what illustrators or authors produce.

How does this affect you, the reader? You don’t need to do a thing, as the site’s URL and feed has automatically updated.

February 12, 2019 2 comments

What an indie creator is

So far on Creator Interviews, I’ve interviewed six different creators. Each was a different type: a blogger, a podcaster, a musician, an Instagrammer, a YouTuber, and an author.

Each one I would define as an “indie,” but you may be wondering: what does that even mean nowadays?

In this post I list the five key characteristics of an indie creator.

February 5, 2019

Breakthrough: interview with indie author Eliot Peper

Eliot Peper’s breakout book was Cumulus, a novel that got great reviews and went viral on Reddit. In the following interview we discuss more about how he promoted Cumulus and what the secret of its success was. We also discuss how he markets his work online, and how his recent experience with an agent and publisher has worked out.

January 31, 2019

Tools & distribution strategies for YouTubers

We examine how YouTuber Tal Oran creates his videos – including the equipment he uses, and how he directs and edits each episode. We also go into more detail about the distribution side of his video blog. In particular, is he worried about his reliance on YouTube and Facebook?

January 29, 2019

Going viral: interview with YouTuber Tal Oran

Tal Oran is a popular video blogger, who has nearly 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and 160,000 on Facebook. In the following interview, Oran tells me more about how he runs his vlogging business. We discuss how he grew his audience over the past five years, to the point where he now makes a full-time income from it. He tells the story of when and how his first video ‘went viral’ in 2017, the trigger for a strong period of growth that continues to this day.