"The Art of Asking" by Amanda Palmer (Patreon)

A couple weeks back I took out the audio book of what is essentially the massively extended version of  Amanda's Ted Talk  "The Art of Asking." I thought it might assist me in re-thinking the way I conduct Patreon. Here's my quick review/update:

The Ugly

I am listening to this book in my car. The reader is Amanda herself. She has a (relatively) deep voice, but is also fond of tapering sentences off into soft whispery trails. If you've any familiarity with slam poetry or "spoken word" then you know what this sounds like. The downside is that you can barely hear her over the rumble of traffic/engines. I imagine someone listening to this book while also taking a subway would encounter the same problems. I turn the volume up very high just to understand what she's saying - but even then sometimes I miss out on entire sentences. But that's okay because... 

...most of Amanda's book is autobiography. For my purposes - most of these personal anecdotes are irrelevant filler wedged between the occasional pearls of wisdom. Stories about breakups, concerts, illnesses, friends, road trips, Neil Gaiman, clothing, shopping, instruments etc etc etc. Don't get me wrong, it's not poorly written, but it's tedious. It's also privileged. 

Knowing anything about privilege politics - Amanda's stories of being amazed at the kindness of strangers come at the edge of a knife that might be otherwise thrust into the heart of say: a Black man, a trans woman, an undocumented Mexican woman, a disabled Jewish lesbian, a gay Taiwanese man, a Lakota teenager etc etc etc.  I'm not saying Amanda didn't go through hurdles, anxiety, doubt. But her privilege silently helped her through that.

The Bad

As an artist I wanted specific tips/strategies on how to best shape the way I ask people/internets for help. This book doesn't really supply that. It's not a "how to."

The reality is Amanda's crowdfunding success was due to the fact that she had a massive following prior to the advent of kickstarter/patreon. She was a household name for thousands of people - something she owed to years of obsessive hard work.  So of course she had success!

She had 25,000 fans already - and they made her a millionaire in under a month.

Really that's the lesson all poor artists should learn first - you can't enjoy any level of success without putting in years of work.  Amanda never really spells this lesson out because she's too busy telling her life story in her own words. I had to extrapolate.

The Good

I haven't finished listening to the book, but I'm going to. Despite my annoyance, it has helped me overcome some of the reservations I had toward asking for help. It also revealed my struggle of feeling guilty as more or less pointless.

Amanda speaks fluently on artist guilt and "Impostor Syndrome." It all clicked, I was able to relate to pretty much all of her anxiety and fears. It was liberating, and it

has helped me and I will be launching a kickstarter campaign to fund the eventual creation of Orcs vs Feminism . com

I'm excited to tackle crowdsourcing from a different perspective. And in spite of the frustration I continue to slog through this audio book, ravenously scarfing up relevant ideas when they poke their heads up.