The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
I decided to go to Australia to write the first draft of this book all in one breathless, two-month marathon. Neil was planning to come for the first three weeks, but the book deadline was barrelling towards me, and he saw the terror in my eyes. I had no idea how I was going to juggle being with Neil for three weeks while simultaneously turning mys
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it couldn’t hurt if you would actually talk to your fans from stage. They’re there. They’re crowdsurfing. They’re screaming and yelling. But most of the time you acted like the audience wasn’t even in the room. You barely talked to them.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
Dignity, collaboration, exchange, vulnerability, reciprocity, mutual respect, comfort, love. The top-voted comment on the blog, from a reader named Marko
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
Each night onstage, I would introduce them all towards the end of the show and announce that these performers had come on tour with me for no fixed salary and were relying on the audience. The five of them would rove through the crowd during the next song, holding their boots to collect donations. Some nights, they made less than a few hundred doll
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some paid a dollar, some paid a hundred dollars in a gesture of symbolic congratulations. It worked.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
His Kickstarter didn’t get funded. It more than didn’t get funded: it only raised $132 of a $7,000 goal, from three backers. I was one of them. Hundreds of thousands of people had enjoyed Walt’s work on YouTube, but he hadn’t cultivated a long-term relationship with them, he hadn’t yet built a bridge of exchange between himself and his potential su
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We wanted the people who came to the shows to feel like they were part of our weird little family, that they would never be turned away at the door for not being cool enough.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
Signing fixed that, because we got to meet a pretty decent percentage of the audience every night.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
From the start, The Dresden Dolls functioned in an artistic community that depended on messy exchanges of goodwill and the swapping of favors.