Share Your Sites -- and Insights
Travis Seitler
Art Director, Gemstone Publishing Inc.
Timonium, Maryland
Squidoo: What brought you to Squidoo?
Travis Seitler: Seth Godin's Flipping the Funnel e-book. I'm the type of person who will occasionally just stumble from blog to blog until I find something interesting. If my memory serves me, I was thinking over ways to better market small-press comic books over the Internet. As I read Seth's e-book, I started wondering what this Squidoo thing was all about and decided to check it out. I'm sure glad I did!
S: How did you decide what to make your lenses about?
T: I work for Gemstone Publishing as the Art Director for their Disney comic books, so it seemed like a no brainer to start building lenses related to our comics. After Seth got me so excited about Squidoo, I came here to find there were very few lenses about comic books, period! It's odd (considering the industry worldwide) that comic books in America are so saturated with superheroes, and this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to give "funny animal" books a decent foothold.
I also have a lens which I'm using as I research Alport Syndrome, a hereditary kidney disorder in my wife's family. The disease tends to affect men more than women, so when we learned my wife was pregnant with a boy, I decided it was about time to start learning and preparing for what could be a long, hard road ahead.
S: Do you maintain a web site or blog otherwise?
T: I started my blog, the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese, in March 2005 as an excuse to play around with Blogger, but I've since moved to WordPress. Before that, I was a LiveJournal junkie for a few years. I know many bloggers like writing dissertation-length material, but I'm more of a link spreader. I'm always finding something I think is neat that I want to share, and I think that's why I found Squidoo so attractive. It's not about creating so much as it's about aggregating and promoting.
S: What have you done with your lenses that you can't do elsewhere?
T: I'd say that technically speaking, I'm enough of a code monkey that I could do the exact same stuff on my own. The key difference is that with Squidoo, it's a whole lot faster and easier to piece everything together! It would be quite a pain to build the equivalent of an Amazon module every time I recommended a book on my blog. Something I would definitely miss by solely blogging is the community. Blogging is very much an entrepreneurial activity. Here at Squidoo, there's a lot more teamwork and a core group you can count on for feedback.
I've duplicated some lens content in my blog, but to be honest, there's an audience at Squidoo that I wouldn't have exposure to in my li'l' old corner of the blogosphere. In some ways I see my Squidoo lenses as extensions of my blog, and in some ways my blog serves as an extension of the lenses. It's symbiotic in a way, and I think that sort of cross-pollination is going to happen whenever you're passionate about anything -- it has to. C.S. Lewis once wrote, "just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: 'Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious?'" We can't help praising what we truly enjoy, and the more passionate you are about something, the more you'll want to spread that passion in every way possible!
S: Have you taken any cues from other lenses so far?
T: Harmjan Heeling's Lensmasters United! lens was the first I had seen which incorporated additional images in the Introduction. I had never thought of that! Right away I started playing around with the concept, and so now the Introduction to Disney Comics: This Month shows thumbnail images for each featured book in the lens.
S: Once you've published a lens, what do you do with it?
T: Right after publishing I'll usually catch half a dozen errors, fix them, and re-publish. After that, I'll email a few folks who I think might be interested in the lens. I might write about it in my blog, I'll definitely add it to del.icio.us, and then I'll sit back and monitor the LensRank over the next 3-7 days. I'm also working with some longtime fans of our comics to get them started with lenses on their favorite creators, so add lens transfers to the list!
S: What advice or ideas would you offer other lensmasters?
T: Think outside the box! Take advantage of the Squidoo team's "hey, that's a cool idea" approach to innovation, and risk using a text field for something other than its obvious intended usage. For example, I've found you can do some pretty crazy stuff with the Amazon module's description box! Just play around, and don't worry about getting reprimanded. (Unless you do get reprimanded, and then maybe tone it down a bit.)
Team up with other lensmasters on a subject! Five experts in agreement on a topic are far more persuasive than one. That's one reason why I'm inviting fans of our books to build lenses: if I'm the only one talking about them, I might not be very convincing; if dozens of lensmasters are raving about our books, they're probably worth checking out!
S: What one lens do you wish existed?
T: I've been dropping hints with some friends that they ought to set up lenses on Christian comics. (Talk about a micro-niche that doesn't get much exposure!) So far, nobody's taking the bait. I wish they would, though; I certainly don't know enough about the subject to feel confident helming a lens on it!
