“Storytelling can be found in every culture.”
Daniel Milnor
In the wee hours of this morning I caught part of a free rebroadcast on creativeLIVE of a seminar by Daniel Milnor. He began his career as a photojournalist and is now a Photographer at Large for Blurb. In this era of content creators being content distributors, Blurb is a solid option to tell your story to a wider audience. Think of it as an outlet to reach a global audience. It could be a book of photos, a PDF, a magazine, or a digital version that combines text, audio, video and/or still photography.
And the great thing is you can self publish via Blurb for under $10. (As in under ten one dollar bills.) I know everyone in the screenwriting world gets excited when a spec script sells, but according to Scott Myers at Go Into The Story spec script sales peaked in 1995 at 173 sales in a year. And I think it would be safe to say that the majority of those scripts never got made. But they’re seen as the grand slam or lottery winner of Hollywood screenwriting and have launched many careers.
Though for the last decade spec scripts sales have averaged under 100 sales a year.That’s not a huge number considering that it’s estimated that between 30,000-50,000 scripts are written every year. So think of Blurb as a creative option to develop your stories. Watch the below video by Milnor on the American West and see how Blurb could help you tell your story. Especially if you’re writing stories in unusual places or telling smaller stories.
And if you have an indie bone in your body you’ll appreciate that Milnor in 2013 is often going against the technology stream by shooting black and white film using Leica and Hasselblad cameras.
P.S. Anyone out there have a self-publishing success story (small or large)? I could see how filmmakers could self-publish a magazine via Blurb and hand it to prospective investors to get them excited about various projects. I
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Content Creators=Content Distributors (Words of wisdom from Chase Jarvis, one of the founders of creativeLIVE.)
Ira Glass on Storytelling
Screenwriting from Iowa 
Way cool! But how does he pay the rent?
Mary, I think he pays the rent as Photographer at Large for Blurb. Like a lot of ex-newspaper/magazine photojournalist out there he’s had to reinvent himself. Of course, his skill set in enhanced since he’s not just a photographer/storyteller, but he’s an excellent public speaker—and looks like Rob Lowe.