I decided to reissue an old album. I had approximately 800 copies of the CD in my basement with no packaging. I was making a lazy decision. I thought it would be easy to put it all together and make something happen. It seemed like such a good idea.
Getting new artwork was the easy part. My friend Tara has been creating most of my artwork for a while. To be honest, on this project she over-delivered. She gave me several amazing options and the most difficult part was narrowing it down to the best choice.
Getting the packaging printed was also easier than I anticipated. I like to use a great local printer. We made enough to get me started. I can print more when my current inventory sells out. It would be awesome, if that was necessary very soon. Manufacturing on an “as-needed” basis is a great option. Technology makes this possible and it is far more cost efficient than the old way. This means I should never end up with hundreds of CD’s in my basement, ever again.
I wanted to put together some behind the scenes material that we could release exclusively as part of our launch experience. Anybody that joins our mailing list via the Princess and the Hero landing page, gets sent the exclusive content. It’s not too late. You can still check out the album launch experience, right here. Coming up with behind the scenes material for a project that we did 16 years ago was really hard. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that this would be a challenge.
I recorded some videos talking about the writing process, the artwork, and how we put it all together. I told some stories and did some alternative versions of some songs. This album is a very integral part of the story of my relationship with Mrs Brother Jack. I wrote the album for her and used it to propose. It is an essential part of the story that we tell about us. However, the specific details were really hard to remember. I am glad that we got it all down before more time passes. We aren’t getting younger.
All of this content had to be stored somewhere and I needed it to be exclusive. YouTube seemed like the most obvious choice. I still have lots to learn on that platform.
The most time consuming part has been figuring out delivery for the content. I had multiple nights with very little sleep, spent learning how to automate emails. I still have much to learn but it feels like an awesome new trick. It’s almost like cheating. The content has been created and all of the emails are set up. With no more work from me, it will deliver to anyone that wants to know more about the Princess and the Hero album, until I turn it off. Once again, you can check it out, here.
This reissue ended up being more work than I expected, by a very large margin. However, I learned how to do several new things that will make my job easier in the future. I guess it was a good idea.