(Listen to the soundtrack of this post.)

Five years ago, today, I made my first post to this blog.

Oddly enough, I’ve been a blogger longer than I’ve been a lot of things, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about blogging and what’s valuable about it, and why anybody should do it. This interview I did does a good job of covering that ground.

The most important point: I didn’t start a blog because I had something to say. I started a blog because I wanted to find something to say.

Bob Pollard, one of my favorite songwriters, his career started by making up album covers for bands that didn’t exist yet:

Back in high school, maybe 4 or 5 people wanted to be in a band, but nobody knew how to play an instrument. So in art class, we’d sit there and make album covers, and the credits, and I’d have the lyrics, and we’d have everything but music. We even made t-shirts for our band. Walked around, and people’d say, “You guys have a band?” “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got a band!” And no one could play anything. So it started out as kind of a fantasy.

Lynda Barry says, “when you were a kid, you’d never write a book unless you had the book to write it in.”

The idea is that having a container can inspire you to fill it with art.

Whenever I’ve been creatively lost over the past five years, I’ve always come back to the blog, and asked myself, “What can I fill this with?” It’s kept me going, kept me making work.

Best of all, I’ve made really good friends, which, in the end, is the only reason to be here. So thanks, y’all.

For a long time I’ve wanted to start a site dedicated solely to the making of Newspaper Blackout Poems, a place where people can go read how-to tips, ask me questions, and then try out their own and share the results.

It didn’t seem right to set up such a thing on my main site. I’m thrilled to have folks making blackout poems, but my site is for my work, and I want to keep it that way.

A man’s domain name is his domain, you know?

Enter the new site. It’s hosted on Tumblr, which not only means that it’s incredibly easy for me to make quick posts and for followers to reblog them, but it also has built-in functionality where people can ask questions and best of all, submit their own poems.

I’ll still be keeping all of my original poems right here, and I’ll still be posting new ones every week, so no need to re-subscribe or anything. But if you’re interested, give it a follow on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I might post old poems from the archives on the new site. I’m not quite sure yet. Still making it up as I go along.

I’d love to hear what y’all think about it. Feel free to leave me a comment or suggest the types of posts you’d like to see over there.

Let’s see what we can make together…

A few folks seemed to enjoy my Tweet earlier this month:

I have several friends who feel the same way: they’re more than ready for 2010.

For me, the year was colored by a setback at the end of January, when I learned my book release would be pushed back seven months to April 2010. At that point, I’d worked on the book seven months, it was eight months til the original release date of September. Another year and four months seemed like an eternity. In hindsight, it worked out fine: I did a big round of edits to the final manuscript in April, the fall book release schedule was incredibly loaded with heavy-hitters, and now I’m more prepared for the release. But it was tough.

The rest of the year felt like I was stuck in a holding pattern. Where to go next?

Still, there were some highlights.

The best thing I can say about February is that it bought me my first pair of cowboy boots. A perfect ending to the month that I’ve always joked is “a good month to die”, I spent the 28th in College Station.

20 days out of March we had out-of-town guests in our house, but despite the exhaustion, I met some great folks at my first SXSW, and had my first TV appearance. (Any month that ends with seeing Neko Case on the 31st can’t be all bad.)

April brought the biggest life change of the year: our dog, Milo!

Late May, my wife got her master’s, and the Vizthink Visual Note-Taking webinar was a smash hit, which later led to our accepted 2010 panel at SXSW.

In June, the official 2010 Texas Summer of Heat and Death began. The coolest thing I did was silkscreen Newspaper Blackout prints with my buddy, Curt Miller. I also saw a terrific taping of Austin City Limits with St. Vincent. My wife and I came up with an idea for a book, which we’re working on now, but I can’t say anything about…

July and August boiled my memory.

September I had my first religious experience with Texas BBQ in Lockhart. At the end of the month we released our 20×200 prints.

October, the weather broke.

November I taught my first college class, and had a terrific Thanksgiving with our friends.

The 1st of December brought galleys of the book, as if to answer January.

So here we are.

What I learned this year is that even the most modest success  comes with a lot of paperwork. A book isn’t done when you turn in the manuscript. There’s a lot of logistical crap you have to deal with, and if you don’t keep doing your job–read, investigate, dream, make up cool shit–you will be brought down. There were a few side projects that kept me exploring (I’m thinking most of my tea drawings and de-signs), but overall, I kept too busy. I didn’t read enough, I didn’t relax enough, I didn’t allow enough space for myself to grow.

But then, that’s why we tick time off in years: we can say goodbye to all that, and start over.

Thanks to everyone for reading, sharing links, buying prints…y’all are awesome.

2010, here we come.

In addition to staying up til 1AM getting these 20×200 prints going, I’m guest-blogging this week for one of my favorite blogs: Joe Sullivan’s The Book Design Review (@theBDR). I‘ve made two posts so far I made three posts:

• David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp and the need for 3-D views of book cover design
• How publishers and authors can use Flickr to set up a Blogger Kit for their books
• King-Cat Comics by John Porcellino

All of the posts got me thinking about how to best present books online and make it easy to spread them around the internet. It was really fun: Joe has some really smart readers, so be sure to check the comments.

I’ll update this post with links as I go along. Next up is the design of John Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics and its successful transition to the book collections.

PS. This is how my second post on the Blogger’s Kit began (with doodles, of course):

see it bigger

The content of this interview I did with Nate Burgos over at Design Feaster might be familiar to anyone who’s read my posts about blogging before, but you might want to take a look anyways.

On why I started a blog:

When you’re a writer in college, you have the ultimate luxury: a captive audience. Your teachers get paid to read your writing and your classmates pay to read your writing. And then, suddenly, you get out of college, and nobody gives a crap anymore. So you start a blog!

On my hatred of computers:

This might be blasphemous for a blogger to say, but I don’t like spending more time in front of a computer screen than I have to. The good stuff comes from your hands and your head. (The cartoonist Lynda Barry says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” A blog is just a delivery system—a way to get eyeballs looking at your stuff (and minds thinking about it).

Read more here

UPDATE 9/09/2010: (Archiving the interview here:)

Why did you create a web site of regular entries?
When you’re a writer in college, you have the ultimate luxury: a captive audience. Your teachers get paid to read your writing and your classmates pay to read your writing. And then, suddenly, you get out of college, and nobody gives a crap anymore. So you start a blog!

What web-based solution did you select and why?
I use WordPress for my blog because it’s free and endlessly hackable. I use Tumblr for an online scrapbook because it’s effortless to use, and hackable enough that you can make it look like the rest of your site.

What is your definition of a good blog and what are three good blogs that you frequently visit?
David Foster Wallace said that his non-fiction pieces were “occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright, but also reasonably average, pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lifes.”

The same could be said for good blogging: someone reasonably bright, spending a lot of time thinking and posting a lot about their obsessions.

I had a teacher once who passed out our mid-term papers to the class, walked up to the blackboard, and wrote in big chalk letters on the board, SO WHAT?

Then she said, “Ask yourself that next time you write something.” Good blogging passes the So What? test!

Three amazing bloggers:

1. Roger Ebert—The man writes as though he doesn’t have a lot of time left, which means he writes about the important stuff that he can’t cover in a movie column. His post on Death (who else blogs about death?) was one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen, period.
2. Steve Brodner—A cartoonist of the highest caliber: you can see his thought process alive in his drawing.
3. Hugh Macleod—A no-B.S. cartoonist. His blog is a perfect mix of words and images. He has helped me figure out how to go about life as an artist more than any other blogger (Hint: keep your day job).

How do you create content for your blog?
Almost all the content on my blog comes from a non-digital source:

• I’ll make one of my newspaper blackout poems and scan it into the computer
• I’ll draw in a sketchbook or on an index card and scan it into the computer
• I’ll be reading a book or a magazine and I’ll illustrate it with a mind map, or it will spark an idea about something I want to write about

This might be blasphemous for a blogger to say, but I don’t like spending more time in front of a computer screen than I have to. The good stuff comes from your hands and your head. (The cartoonist Lynda Barry says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” A blog is just a delivery system—a way to get eyeballs looking at your stuff (and minds thinking about it).

How do you stay organized and motivated to contribute
to your blog?
I recently hacked my WordPress template to show a Visual Archive of my posts throughout the year. After a number of posts, your output can get kind of abstract, so I like being able to look at my output visually as a little kick-in-the-pants to make something new.

For those aspiring to make a web site composed of regular thoughts and/or images, what is your advice?
I drew a cartoon once called How To Blog:

• Step one: wonder at something
• Step two: invite others to wonder with you

You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s blogging about apples, go blog about oranges.

Aspire to be the blogger who is linked-to, rather than the linker.

And for crying out loud, don’t do it just to make a buck. Do it because you love something and you want to share it with the world.

What is your quest in blogging?
To win friends and influence people. ;-)

In my life, the two women I’ve spent the most time around are my mom and my wife.

They both love to cook. They both own sewing machines.

They both love Martha Stewart.

They love Martha Stewart because they’ve learned from her. They trust her. They buy her books and her products because they feel loyal to her.

They love Martha Stewart kind of like I love Lynda Barry.

* * *

A year ago I was sitting in a craft store here in Austin. I sat and doodled and ate cupcakes and watched my wife and all these women crafting, teaching each other, helping each other. There was such a sense of inclusiveness. It was as if everyone was saying to each other, “Yes! You can do this! We can do this! Join the club!”

Not long after that, I was watching a profile of Rachel Ray on TV. The folks who knew Rachel seemed to suggest that her success was not necessarily attributed to her abilities as a cook, but rather to her attitude and energy she projected to her viewers. The number one thing she was giving them was encouragement. She wasn’t just teaching them, she was saying, “You can do this!”

I started surfing some of the craft blogs my wife loves to read. It was a total revelation: by sharing and teaching, these women gained readers and loyal fans, and then sold their wares on Etsy and in books to those loyal fans.

And I realized: if artists want to learn a good business model, they should look to the craft community.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. Jason Fried, the founder of the software company 37 Signals (they have a terrific blog), when he gives a talk, he often claims that chefs are the best business entrepreneurs, because they know that sharing leads to more sales. He suggests that businesses emulate famous chefs. My friend Tim Walker summarized this bit in his notes on Fried’s 2008 SXSW session:

Fried notes that the famous big-name chefs (Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, et al.) SHARE a lot. Here are these big experts who are authorities in their field, and yet they’re sharing everything they know. Along the way they collect money from willing customers/users who buy their cookbooks, eat at their restaurants, buy their sauces at the grocery store, etc. Fried says you should figure out what it is YOU do that you can share with everybody else.

(I saw the same idea pop up in my friend Mike Rohde‘s sketchnotes of a Fried talk.)

What Fried said in a recent talk was: Figure out your what’s cooking show. Figure out what’s your cookbook.

Figure out how to be your own Martha Stewart!

My name is Austin Kleon and I am a writer and a cartoonist and a web designer. I make these things called newspaper blackout poems, which some call poetry.

I grew up in a small town in southern Ohio, and still have family there. I think you are where you were, and so place, worldbuilding and maps are obsessions of mine.

Writing, storytelling, songwriting, cartooning, and drawing are all ways that I play so I can feel alive and happy.

I’m fascinated by how we see and process the world around us, which involves vision, memory, and neuroscience.

I believe that visual thinking is one of the best tools we humans have to solve problems and that we should, like the cavemen, practice drawing on the walls. Sometimes a picture is better than words, and so we have Isotype and wordless stories. Most of the time a picture is better with words, and so we have comics, information design and infographics.

I love pure black and white, but I’m trying to learn color.

For artists, I think that sometimes you don’t have to go to college, you should keep your day job, and write the book you want to read. I also wonder, what if we give it away?

Like most people, I like music and movies. Sometimes I talk politics and religion.

These are just a few of the folks who blow my mind: Lynda Barry, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Schulz, Edward Tufte, Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga, Tom Gauld, Saul Steinberg, Otto Soglow, Bill Callahan, and Joann Sfar.

I believe life is a story and often that story is just a collage or remix of who/what came before us.

I’m married to a wonderful woman and I live in Austin, Texas.

Forgive me if this is really f***ing cheesy.

What a nutty year. The pages of my paper 2008 diary are full—right up until the end of June, when things got crazy, and I lost six months of my life to writing a book, buying a house, and watching Obama get elected. Phew! About the same happened with this blog: July came around…and poof! I blogged about half as much for the second half of the year. (Check out the infographic above and the 2008 Visual Archive.)

So what now, 2009? The only thing I have planned is the book release in September. I’m going to take a break in January and February, curl up on my office couch, and read some really big books. Hopefully start blogging some more. Around March, I’m going to try to start on another book. Maybe a graphic novel. I’ll be posting whatever I come up with here, along with a bunch of blackout poems that didn’t make the book.

Thanks for reading. It was a great year for me, and everybody who visited the site, left comments, linked to the poems…y’all made it so.

My very best to you. Warm wishes for a great 2009!

How to blog teach, write, make art:

1. Wonder at something.
2. Invite others to wonder with you.

Yes or no?

For those of you reading via RSS, pop over to my homepage real quick and check out the new front page and updated portfolio.

Why the change? I’m hoping that the front page will now be a more friendly portal to newcomers.

For those long-time readers, if you want to skip the frontpage and go straight to the blog, update your bookmarks:

http://www.austinkleon.com/blog/

I should also point out that there’s a new subscription options page. If the blog feed isn’t enough for you, you could always upgrade to the Blog + Tumblelog Superfeed!

And for those of you with eagle eyes, you’ll have noticed a (gasp!) shopping cart. Yeah, it’s just a teaser for now, but one of our projects this summer is trying to get some merchandise up for sale. We want to start small with maybe just some mini-poster prints, and then move on to bigger and better things.

A couple questions:

• What’s the most successful way to sell products online? Paypal? Etsy? Ebay?
• What would you like to see sold in my store? Prints of poems? Mini-comics? T-shirts?

If anybody has any advice or comments, please let me hear them!