Since our work is some of the best of it's type on the internet which very few have heard of, we are in constant struggle with self marketing. For Shamans of the Global Village both Rak and I hate doing it, suck at it, and have been very fortunate to have two young gentlemen who just want to help us and thus are willing to take it on themselves. One of which, Jarad Blowatt runs our Twitter, and the other, Evan Freimouth, runs our Facebook. Both of which spend equally as much time, if not more so, than we do making the show itself.
I personally have learned to only put energy into things I actually get energy from. Both Facebook and Instagram for example I find to be disgusting and not even work very well. Hardly ever looking at other's Instagrams, not even having the app on my phone, and being mind boggled that human beings are actually watching other human beings tweets when there's so much better ways to spend time in life. Thus zeroing out of Facebook many years ago so it's now just a blank page with no one else able to take our rare and unusual name. Instagram I've started and zero'd out twice because the most bottom barrel celebrities and dark sorcery “influencers” on Earth have the most popular accounts on there. Yet the film industry seems to have this strange mindset that if you’re a director and you’re not on Instagram, you don’t exist. Thus I’m now on my third attempt at posting on it, and after having done so for the last few months has only resulted in a net loss of two followers. I actually somewhat respect Twitter, and would say it's the best social network for more sophisticated minds, but got so tired of spending 15 to 20 minutes per Tweet trying to think of something clever to say and instead have just been using it to post links to our various websites with corresponding images. So Instagram and Twitter are currently bare minimum and dangling on a thread of being re-re-re-zeroed out. Whenever we use those two platforms and just get dust bowls of responses, we feel worse. Surely due to it being some level of work with basically zero reward. Whenever we zero out either of any of those accounts, then knowing we don't have to waist any time on these stupid things, we feel better, because we then know we now have more time to create content itself. Rather than just promoting it.
Vimeo is the go to place for filmmakers to try and get their work seen on. Which we occasionally look at but don’t respect disliking it’s clunky ness and how unless you’re sanction by their gatekeepers for a “Staff Pick” you get dust bowls. Every other video platform on the entire internet outside of YouTube is ultra low quality and mostly full of political regressives who are only there as sloppy seconds after being kicked off YouTube for not fitting into the Google narrative. YouTube we do actually use to watch stuff, listen to things through, and find value in case we need a quick tech review of something, or my daughter wants to watch a weird Russian woman’s hands playing with toys, or we want to listen to a Rudolf Steiner lecture on accessing the supersensable realms, or need to know a perfect recipe for Japanese Ramen. Boom! All can be found in one place. So having finally caved to spending the last couple years uploading our back archive of documentary, podcast, and essay incredibly quality content to, which is still ongoing and not yet up to date, with little to no discoverability on because it's so novel and unique, it's one of the best channels on the platform that also, very few have ever seen and all our content is demonstrably under audienced there.
A recent comment on YouTube came down saying they loved the essays but are the type of persona who prefers to soak up information via reading the page. So having had no where inside the internet where our essays exist in written form, we've decided to start a Substack page. Yet another tech platform.
Substack sells itself as "a place for writers, bloggers, thinkers, and creatives of every background to be able to pursue their curiosity, generating income directly from their own audiences and on their own terms" Which sure sounds good. I caught a note of it when both Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald used it as their places to post their writings. So I am going to try it out, likely as a free account for now without pay or if I do make it a paywall, will find a way to include you folks in what is posted there or else mirror the written posts of essays as the spoken word versions continue coming down.
Niles' platform rigamarole, which seems way too spread thin and is trying to be streamlined:
Spotify (this stays) - https://open.spotify.com/show/2QPFYIovlRr3lOxG8yDqHK
iTunes (this stays) - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-infinite-path/id825076464?mt=2
YouTube Channel (this stays) - https://www.youtube.com/c/NilesHeckman/videos
Photography Youtube Channel (which is empty right now with no followers but I'd love to keep posting on) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM6nCikstQRC3uovqBcPMTQ/videos
Vimeo (this stays) - https://vimeo.com/nilesheckman
Substack - https://nilesheckman.substack.com
Twitter - (likely to get re-zero'd out) - https://twitter.com/nilesheckman
Instagram - (likely to get re-zero'd out) - https://www.instagram.com/nilesheckman/
Filmsupply - (Where we sell footage as one of our income streams) - https://www.filmsupply.com/filmmakers/niles-heckman/25
Patreon - (mirrored at this membership section of our website) - https://www.patreon.com/nilesheckman