Tech PR consultant by day, cartoonist by night. Brendan Boughen (AKA Cartoons by Jim) has been living a double life – and he wants to share its awesome results with you.
Brendan has been working for a wide range of technology brands for the last 10 years, and drawing cartoons about the world of tech the entire time. And now, he’s selected around 100 of his favourite of those to share with you! Cartoons of everything from fibre-networks to space travel will be collected in one volume, alongside his written thoughts of his experiences in the tech industry, as it has changed dramatically over the last decade. But in order to make this awesome book become a reality, he needs your help.
To find out more about how he hopes to get there, we caught up with Brendan and asked all about his campaign:
How are you finding the campaign so far?
It’s been fun! I was totally stoked to get 10% funded already in the first week. I’m well aware that with these sort of campaigns there’s usually a burst of support at the beginning and then again at the end, but I’m really hoping to be able to keep up the momentum throughout. Mostly though, I’m just glad to have the project off the ground at last. This book was 10 years in the making as I drew cartoons alongside my daily work as a PR consultant for tech brands, and then another year putting together the various written parts to introduce the book and each of the chapters – which totalled about 4,000 words – all while I was also working a full time job.
What people may not know is that I was originally aiming to have the book completed and run this crowd-funding campaign about a year ago, but due to two bereavements in my family over the past 18 months, it was necessary to put it on hold. (FYI … The family members were my wife’s mother and father, who were both lovely people and great supporters of my cartooning over the years. They died within a year of each other; she from cancer and he of a stroke. A bit of reflection about my mother-in-law’s death can be read here)
Even the video about the campaign (which was filmed and produced by the immensely talented Geraldine Clermont!) was originally recorded and edited about six months ago when I aiming to get the book together before Christmas 2015. However, life intervened – as it has so often over the last couple years – and we had to put it on ice until all the book content was ready. Thankfully it still makes sense half a year later! J
(I wanted to note here too how impressed I’ve been with how easy it’s been to get the whole funding campaign up and running through PledgeMe. It’s a fantastic site, and the support that has been provided by the team is amazing. My sincere thanks to you all for helping bring this dream to life!)
What do you have planned for the rest of the campaign – anything for us to look forward to?
Having worked in PR for the last decade, I have a few good media contacts out there, so I’m aiming to get a bit of wider coverage for the book with a media release in the coming weeks. As noted above, the book is not just cartoons; it also contains a lot of written reflection on the human journey of technology over the last decade, and especially the human tendency to obsess over tech. There’s also a focus on some of the more ‘niche’ aspects of the IT industry (eg. big data, IT infrastructure, cyber security) so I’m hoping that will be of interest to the thousands of people who work in the New Zealand tech sector.
This content is also going to form the basis of the ‘TED-talk’ style presentation I’m making available as part of the ‘Ultimate’ rewards pack that is part of my campaign. (ie. the $500+ pack.) I’m only making five of these available as it will involve me doing a live presentation of the 10-year journey of technology documented in the book in cartoon form, with an accompanying dazzling PowerPoint slideshow. It should be a fun and entertaining event for businesses or other groups, so I’m hoping to connect with some that will pledge for those packs.
Of course, if you don’t want the presentation, supporters could go for the $250 Premium pledge pack where in addition to the book, I will draw a brand new cartoon for you on the topic of your choosing! It could be a gift for someone special, or to illustrate something that you could use in your own work. I’ve drawn plenty of these in the past for friends and family, and I love to have the opportunity to turn my cartoonist’s brain to areas where it wouldn’t usually venture.
Anything you’d like to shout out to your crowd?
Just a huge thank you to all those people out there who seem to really enjoy my cartoons and have expressed their support so far. It continues to surprise and delight me to hear the reaction to cartoons I put out there. Anytime I see someone look at a cartoon I’ve done and have a good laugh is the best feeling in the world. I’ve made sure that all the cartoons that are going into ‘Sounds Like a Game Changer’ are my funniest ones on technology, so I’m looking forward to getting that positive energy out to as many people as I can. I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has pledged so far, and to all those who have shared the details of the campaign on Facebook or Twitter, I hope they and their followers will also feel moved enough to pledge before the campaign is done!
