E2: 5 steps to getting architecture published

A step by step process for getting architecture published

Transcript

00:07
Hello BowerBirders. Welcome to the BowerBird podcast. This is episode two of a 17 part series on how to get your architecture published. Today’s topic is the five steps to getting your architecture published. Your name is, my name is [inaudible]. So yeah, basically we’re just gonna run through this. There’s going to be lots of mistakes, but bear with us. My name is Ben Morgan. I am an architecture and design journalist and my name is Nic Granleese. I am a former architect architectural photographer and one of the cofounders of bowerbird. So bowerbird is an online platform that takes all the knowledge of this little podcast and rolls it into a splendid web app that makes it easy for architects to get published. You can find bowerbird@bowerbird.io okay, let’s jump into this. Now we can jump into this. So in this episode, we’re basically working through the process that you take with every project to get it published.

01:02
This is pretty straightforward podcast. So we’re really just going to go over some top level things and a lot of it we’ll delve into in more detail later on. But yeah, these are the, the basic five steps. So I guess step number one is you need to have a project that is finished. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, but what we often talk about is how it’s really useful for architects to build in this concept of media into their actual workflow. So it’s normal for architects to be thinking about design documentation and construction. But this last phase, which is telling your story is critical and how you think about getting out to the world. Yeah. I think a lot of architects shy away from this step because they’re not natural storytellers. They’re not natural marketers. So once they finished a project you know, they, they don’t really just add it to, as you say, add it to their workflow.

01:56
It should just be the final step after you’ve finished a project. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s really important. Yeah. And so what you do is you choose your best projects, the projects that you want more of, but you could even use a step for all projects because part of it is capturing the story of that project before you have things like staff leaving to work somewhere else and you can create this record of of your portfolio. Yup. So finish the project. The next step is you got to get it photographed. And in 2018 is pretty much the architects who are commissioning the photography. Yup. It’s very rare that a magazine commissions something to be photograph nowadays there some. But, but again, they, they, most of those magazines won’t even consider a project unless they’ve seen the professional photographs. So it’s sort of, even if they are commissioning photography, it’s going to be after you’ve already provided them with professional shots.

02:46
So you’ll be thinking about when that project is ready to be photographed. So you know, the builds complete, you probably want to get there in there slightly before the clients move in with all their ugly furniture. But at the same time, balancing up with having the landscape growing up and looking beautiful. Yeah. And I suppose, you know, our top tip is don’t photograph an empty house. So if you have to beg, borrow, and steal to get some furniture in there before the clients move in definitely do it. Absolutely. So once you’ve had it professionally photographed, then you’ve actually got some real content to take to journalists, but you’ll need to flesh that out a little bit with the actual story of what you designed and you know, the clients and the struggles and everything that goes into telling a good story. Yeah. And that, that’s what’s commonly called a media kit.

03:34
But really, you know, you don’t have to overthink this. It’s just a, as assist, a group of content, photographs and information around the project, and you have it in a, in a format that the journalists are going to be able to quickly consume. Yeah. And in a later episode, we’ll walk you through exactly what’s in a media kit. Really, you’re trying to preempt the questions that a journalist will have. Once you know those questions, they’re pretty much the same questions for every single project. The WHO, what, why, when aspects around what you’ve done. But we’ll go into that in more detail. Yeah, absolutely. And then what’s step number four then? Step four is, you know, the crucial part is to actually send it to journalists. And again, this can be something that scares some people sharing your work out there, but you’ve got to be proactive.

04:19
You can’t wait for journalists to come knocking on your door because it could just never happen. So you really have to be proactive. You have to share that content that you’ve created. So your finished project with the journalists and tell them what’s interesting about it. Yeah. And that’s why having things like a media kit pre-prepared is good because now you can actually go to a journalist and say, Hey, I’ve got all this valuable stuff that you can use in your publication. Yeah. And that’s really what journalists are looking for. So I’ve worked in house for a publisher before working on a digital platform. And when someone came to me with all the content, they’re ready to go. I could publish a story within hours. Really. So journalists want everything straight away. They don’t want to have to sort of have it drip, drip fed or to come back to you and ask for lots things.

05:01
So yeah, you want to send a completed media kit to them. Yeah. And the other thing is nowadays there’s just so many architectural publications. You’re not dealing with one magazine where you’ve got one person to contact. It’s really about how do you contact a range of people from around the world, different formats, different places, and we’ll teach you how to do that efficiently and effectively. Now, now step five is, is an interesting one. So once you’ve been published, hopefully by several publications the, the process doesn’t really just end there. What you really need to do is share what’s been published. So you may see other architects doing this already. A, it’s really just once you get published in a magazine or on a blog, make sure that you share that again. So through your social networks on your website, you want to be talking about the fact that you’ve been published.

05:48
So it’s this secondary benefit and it’s something that a lot of people forget to do, or maybe they do with the first print magazine that they’re in, but don’t think about it every time. The more you talk about the fact that other people are talking about you actually reinforces the work that you’re doing. And there’s just so many people involved in a project who now have social media accounts. So it’s not just you sharing it on social media, it’s your builder sharing it, your clients sharing it, or you consultants, even your staff have their own Instagram accounts and people get excited when something gets published because it’s not simply something that goes out to get you new work. It actually validates what you’ve been working on yourself. Like it gives everybody within your team this moment to reflect and go, hey, look at this. You know, other people were seeing that we’ve, you know, designed this amazing project, which otherwise could be hidden away from the world.

06:36
Yeah. And even just sending an email around to all those people who’ve been involved in the project, once something’s been published, sending them an email saying, hey we’ve just been featured here. You’ll be surprised by how many of them share it with their own networks and the power of that. Just before we finished off, it’s interesting like when we look at this process again, coming back to what we sit in the beginning was thinking of this as part of a process you do for every project. So once you know that you’ve got these five steps, you know, it doesn’t take all that long to get something photographed, to put together a media kit and then send it out to the media. But actually blocking off time let’s say one or two weeks where you go, okay, I’ve got a book in the photographer, I’ve got to spend a day on site.

07:13
Now I put together the media kit and then that task is done. And that’s a good way of thinking about how to do your media efficiently. If there’s one thing that architects are good at doing, it’s following steps. In all seriousness. Yeah. This is just one thing. You tack onto the end of all of those other processes you’ve gone through and it’s nothing to be afraid of and it’s actually really straightforward. Okay, well thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this information valuable, jump over to iTunes and leave us a five star review. This helps us rank higher and allows other architects to find this podcast. And if you want to try it, bowerbird jump over to bowerbird dot I o a way to get a take some questions eventually we think, but this is a fixed series. You know, we’re not gonna, we’re not going to commit to doing one of these a week. But we are excited by the idea of adding extra episodes. If there’s something that we haven’t covered that people want us to talk about we’ll get, just answer it in a, in a solo episode. So please send us an email hello@bowerbird.io and yeah, we’ll think about that for inclusion in a future podcast. Fantastic. Thank you for listening. Everyone.