Did you ever want to play the guitar or sing? Maybe you wanted the fast-track to fame. Well, you have the star stuff locked inside your brain. All students do. It’s called knowledge.
So, package and sell your knowledge! By doing so, you get the reputation of an expert. And your pocketbook gets puffier. For instance, I bought a student thesis for over $50 through Amazon’s CreateSpace—well worth the price. Why not sell your knowledge as a book, an audio, or a video? This article will give you clues on how to do just that.
Randy Chertkow and Jason Feehan wrote a book called The Indie Band Survival Guide: Remixed & Remastered. They show you (in bold below) how to get your musical band in the limelight. I follow with tips on how to make, perform, and sell your intellectual stuff.
Plus, I end with a bonus on how to create a song, say a mnemonic song for anatomy. I’m geeky enough to consider doing just that?at least, once AUSU puts Voice Radio on the table.
Make and Sell Your Research
You now can record, distribute, and sell your music for low cost and no inventory. Similarly, you can market, record, and sell your research audio or video with ease.
You can run your own TV station through ustream.tv, livestream.com, or youtube.com. Get known as an expert in your academic field. Start making YouTube clips of the knowledge you’ve gained?and create a YouTube channel. You’ll need something like Camtasia Studio for screen capture and PowerPoint?plus a good microphone and free audio recording software, such as ?
GarageBand (for Apple) or Audacity (for Windows) are great recording tools for making music. Audacity offers free audio recording with lots of online tutorials. I prefer to use Adobe’s Audition, as Lynda.com provides tons of videos on how to use the software?and once you learn one Adobe platform, the others seem simpler.
Sites like Live365.com (for the U.S.) allow you to create a radio station. Universities throughout the states could host their own radio station with services like Live365.com. The fees to start a radio station are reasonable (less than $100 US a month for the premium service). But, there you have it, a university radio station. But, as a radio producer, you wonder how you’ll fit in all the content you’d need? Well, the service offers auto DJs during your downtime.
Sell your video or audio on Amazon. Make on-demand CDs or DVDs (with CreateSpace). With Amazon, you can upload your research audios or videos for sale?at no extra cost to you. You can sell digital files or CDs or DVDs. You just upload your files, and Amazon sells and ships them and takes a cut of your profits. No down payments. No inventory costs. No money up front.
You can even set up an Amazon author profile, kind of like a mini-Amazon-store, where you display all of your research books, audios, or DVDs.
And while You’re getting your audio files ready, why not publish your thesis for sale on Amazon Kindle or Amazon Createspace? I purchased a motion parallax thesis sold on Amazon’s Createspace—and I loved it. (Ed. Note: Be sure to check with your advisor before doing this to prevent any problems. If some other student uses your material to cheat in an assignment, you may get charged with Academic Misconduct by aiding cheating)
Even better, Amazon is now introducing a service to sell courses online. Why not capitalize on your academic knowledge? (You could easily make courses using Camtasia screen recorder combined with PowerPoint.) While this Amazon service is still in its infancy, I suspect sales will soon explode.
Offer live versions plus recorded versions plus “making of” versions. Similarly, have someone record you during your conference presentations. If you get a chance to present at a creative conference, record that, too. Even if you don’t attend a conference, record insights on the “making of” your research?namely, how you approached your research along with the results?and include snippets of your research diary.
Go to freesound.org for background music for narration. If your goal includes making an audio recording of your research, then go to freesound.org. You’ll find documentary filmlike background music that will make you sound like Spock. Make your narration go pro.
Write A Memory Song
Jam live with other online musicians at ejamming.com. Most academics won’t need to jam live with other musicians. But, if you’ve longed to shine in the musical spotlight, why not write and perform, say, an anatomy mnemonic song? If it helps anatomy students memorize bones, I bet it goes viral.
Get music loops for your intros or exits from drumsondemand.com. If you want to make your own music for, say, your anatomy mnemonic song, then get these low-cost drum tracks. With audacity, Adobe Audition, or GarageBand, you can use these drumsondemand.com drum tracks as the foundation for your song. Once you lay down your drum track, hire online professional musicians ?
Hire online professional musicians to record your music through Sessionplayers.com. Get an online professional musician to lay guitar or synth tracks to your synth beat?or even to sing your song. You wrote the songs. Ensure you keep the rights.
Play your music on blogs, radio, podcasts, YouTube. Submit your music onto Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Last.fm.
Now you’ve got the secrets to academic indie stardom. So, let your brain play a smart ditty by turning your IQ into a cash cow jam-session. A paradox? I call it a creative spark!
