Varela’s visit to Australia was sponsored by the Screen Writers’ Association and the Australian Society of Authors nabbed him for a talk about transmedia.
He studied poetry at Oxford University, but there aren’t many full-time jobs in that area, so he ended up in interactive/digital storytelling.
A big project, Perplex City, involved working with three other writers. One was in NY. They used a lot of Skype text chat and google docs to work on projects in real time. A private Wikipedia kept track of the complex storyline. Actors blended in with crowds when the story spilled into the real world. It was sponsored by a venture capitalist that went on to make squillions out of its next project.
Examples of a great self-marketer: J.C Hutchins. Couldn’t get his book published, so he started with podcasts.
Also, Varela showed us how to get crowd-sourced funding, such as by Pozible in Australia.
Get on LinkedIn and into the chat rooms.
Cotton Ward 