Case Study: Success with Imagekind.com (Book)

As with all of the case studies involving projects that I attempted prior to 2010, what you’re about to read is the product of my memory, some notes that I’ve dug up, and some old website files that I kept in an archive. I hadn’t intended, at the time, to do a public case study on these projects, so please bear with me. Projects from 2010 onward are far more detailed.

Success with Imagekind.com (Book)
( 2007 )

Coming off of my Success with CafePress.com book, it was suggested by a friend that I do a book for Imagekind.com. Debbie had just been hired on as the company’s affiliate program manager, and she knew that my CafePress book had done moderately well, all things considered. She convinced me (and I’m not saying she was wrong) that a second book would be much better because I’d be building on what I had learned with the first one. The only thing I knew about Imagekind is that we weren’t allowed to talk about them in the CafePress forums because they were considered competition (yeah, seriously. They censored us – more on that in my case study about CafePress). I knew they did art the way that CafePress did t-shirts, which is to say: fast, relatively cheap, and on-demand.

I set up an account with Imagekind and looked around for a couple of days. Everything seemed to be pretty normal. The software was okay, the site looked nice… the forums were running on software that was terrible, but that was a pretty minor thing. I knew that I could write a book that explained the site, offered some marketing and promotion tips, and would generally help new artists get up to speed with the company. I decided, far too quickly, to take on the project. I wrote a letter of intent to the owners of the company that explained who I was, what I had done previously with CafePress, and what I would like to do with Imagekind. They accepted.

Unfortunately.

What worked

Nothing. Nothing at all. The whole thing was a disaster from the day I started.

What didn’t

Mistakes were made all around, and while it is impossible not to put some of the blame on myself for mishandling certain aspects of the project (which I’ll get to in a moment) a far, far greater portion of the blame falls on Imagekind.

For my part, I should have gotten to know the community before deciding to write the book, nevermind approaching the company with the offer. Had I spent a week or three among the artists that made up their base, I never, ever would have chosen to do the book. Never have I met a group of people more narcissistic, more holier-than-thou, more… asshole-ish than the group of artists that made up the Imagekind community in 2007. There was a real sense of entitlement among those people, and a complete and utter unwillingness to learn the first thing about online business. All they knew is that they are ARTISTS! and that ART IS LIFE! and that NOTHING ELSE MATTERS! Business is for soulless corporate tools! (Nevermind that they were supposed to be selling their art online). You’ve seen the stereotypes about artists – the self-righteousness, the “nobody understands but me” attitude – these people embodied that, with a few exceptions.

I will not name names because I do not want to forget to name someone and have him or her think that I thought badly of him. Or her. Suffice to say, the vast majority of the artists there fit the description that I gave. If you were a part of that period of my life, recall our relationship. Did we hate each other? If not, I’m not talking about you. Because trust me, as much as I loathe the very memory of these people, they didn’t like me, either. You’d know if I was talking about you.

Anyway. One of them, who shall likewise remain nameless, threatened me. You see, she was the Alpha in the community – or thought she was, anyway. When I introduced myself and said that I was planning a book about Imagekind, she attacked immediately both publicly and privately. She saw me as competition to her status. She called me a fraud. She called me a snake oil salesman, she said that I had tricked the company into letting me write a book about them (figure that one out). She had people on her blog trampling all over my name. Fortunately, they were all nobodies, just like she turned out to be, in the big picture of my life.

All the while, while this woman was trashing me on her blog, and in their forums, Imagekind did nothing. My contact at the company tried to back me up, to no avail. She ran their community and when the wrong person kept complaining about her (see the previous paragraph), Imagekind fired her (or “unrelated” reasons. Right.) After that, it was an easy decision to say “fuck you” and drop the project. I wrote another letter to the owners explaining that I would not be writing the book. I took the easy way out, telling them that the “timing wasn’t optimal” because of changes they were making to the service. I didn’t want to burn any bridges, you see (unlike now, apparently. Well, I did say I would be honest in these case studies).

The sad fact of the matter is that if I couldn’t get the support of the community and the company, I was never going to sell books. True, it was artists new to the company that were my target audience, but if I had established members of the community trashing me from the very beginning, I would never sell a copy.

Never have I worked with such an unprofessional, poorly run company. The owners sold out to CafePress shortly afterward. As it turns out, they had no interest in the company from the beginning – they created it with the intention of selling it off. Typical, in the internet age.

Verdict

The project never really got started, so there’s no verdict to render beyond the advice that you run the hell away from Imagekind if you value your sanity. Or maybe its changed since then, I don’t know. I hope so. I’d hate to think that decent people are still getting sucked into that kind of hell.