E1: Welcome to the BowerBird podcast!
How to get your architecture published.
17 part series Presented by the co-founders of BowerBird.io, architectural photographer Nic Granleese, and design journalist Ben Morgan. Topics covered include getting published in magazines, newspapers, websites, books, TV shows and in social media. How to create a media kit, engaging a professional photographer and much more.
Transcript
00:06
Hello everyone. Welcome to the BowerBird podcast. This is episode one of a 17 part series on how to get your architecture published. In this first episode, we’re going to do a introduction to the series just running through what we’ll be talking about, who we are and why we’re talking about this. My name is Nick [inaudible]. I’m an architect and photographer and one of the cofounders of bowerbird. And My name is Ben Morgan. I am a journalist and the other co founder of valid. So this series is brought to you by Bowerbird, which is an online platform that takes all the knowledge of this podcast and rolls it into a splendid web app that makes it easy for architects to get published. You can find bowerbird at [inaudible] dot. Io Hello, this is, this is our first one. So just, just a heads up that we will be rolling through any awkwardness or mistakes.
01:04
We’ll do our best to sort of make fun of each other along the way. But yeah, heads up and I not be as smooth as a regular podcast one recording only. So in this first episode, what we wanted to do is run through the series and give you a heads up of what you’ll learn and just so you can figure out whether or not you want to listen along to this or not. So we’re going to be covering several topics things like the steps involved in getting published and common mistakes that architects make with the media. We also covered the purpose of getting architecture published and how and why to create a media kit for architecture. We’re also going to go over who is involved in architectural publishing and the different types of actoral publications that are out there.
01:51
Other topics how to create amazing content and how to engage a professional architectural photographer. You’re also gonna get the inside word on some storytelling tips for architects and things like how to name your architecture. Then later down the line we’ll have had a submit your projects to journalists, architectural exclusives. And the last one will be on ROI on architectural media where we sort of assess the money it costs to get things photographed and published and the value you get back from being published. But before we start we want to give you a bit of a background of who we are and what’s brought us to create this podcast. So, nick, what’s your story? Okay. So my background is I studied architecture and then worked as an architect for several years. And then around 2011, I jumped over to architectural photography.
02:49
So I was taking photos of projects and needed to get them published, which started off this next stage, which was being part of bowerbird and creating this app to try and figure out how to submit to different publications and find journalists around the world. Now, the bit that nick sort of skims over there is he also taught himself how to code. So going from being an architect to being a photographer and then ultimately to program this whole app I, I struggled to focus on any one thing. Not True, not true. It’s all happened. It’s all happened naturally and organically. So I am a journalist by trade, so when I graduated my journalism degree, I headed straight out and went into design and architecture publishing for a publisher in Sydney. And I guess the rest is history, but yeah, I’ve, I’ve been freelancing as a journalist ever since as well.
03:43
And sort of consulting to various organizations around content creation and writing stories. And yeah, I sort of met nick in 2013, I think somewhere around there and we hit it off yeah. Where we actually recorded a podcast which never got published, which is a complete segue to this, but that joined us up and we started to work on Bowerbird, which is just worth mentioning here is a run through of what we work on, on a day to day basis now. What do you, how do you describe Bowel Bourbon? My, my standard line is that it’s a, it’s a platform that connects architects and designers with journalists around the world to get their work published. Yeah. So architects upload their projects with content like images and texts and descriptions and so forth, and then it connects with this network of these journalists.
04:39
But we just want to point out that in this series you’re going to learn how to get published with or without bowerbird. We’ve tried to make it agnostic in that sense, but of course we’d love you to come and join our community. Albert is definitely the easiest way to do it, but if you’re one of those people who likes to hack the system, you could always do it a different way. Okay. So who is this series for? This series is for anyone who’s interested in how architectural publishing works how to get your work published. But ideally, primarily it’s for architects who are wanting to get their projects published for the first time as well as media staff that worked for large architects. So you might not be an architect yourself, but you might be working with a lot of architects and trying to get stuff published.
05:20
And of course the photographers and journalists who are involved in the whole process would be quite interested in hearing all of this as well. And of course our bell burners. So there’s several thousand people now who use the bowerbird platform. And so we go through a lot of these talking points over and over on the phone. So we wanted to put this series together so that people can listen to this and learn how to get published while they’re walking to work or they’re driving in their car or so forth. And in a roundabout way, this is also for us. You know, the more that we talk about this the clearer the whole thing becomes. So, you know, the, the best way to learn is to teach. So I’m part of this process is actually internally for us to better understand and communicate what it is that we do.
06:02
And the episodes are going to be relatively short. So this first episode looks like we’ll be tapping out at about seven or eight minutes and we’re going to try and keep most of them short so they’re easy, digestible, and we’re trying to split the topics up so that if you ever want to go back to one specific topic, you will be able to just quickly go back to it and refresh yourself. Anything else that we need to mention, Ben? I’m not at this stage. I think we can jump into the next topic, which is pretty exciting. In episode two we’ll be talking about the five steps to getting your architecture published. So yeah, so thanks for listening to this podcast. If you do find this information valuable, please jump onto iTunes and give us a five star review that just helps people find it. And if you do wanna try bowerbird out, jump over to bowerbird dot I o a and just one last thing. If you do have any questions, please email them in to us. We’re not. We’re trying not to make these podcast series ongoing and on a weekly basis, but we do get questions and we may add bonus podcasts in the future. So you can email. Hello@Bowerbird.Io. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks.
