With the lazy days of summer squarely in the rearview mirror, it’s time to get serious with some back-to-school reading. And while you could pick up Pride & Prejudice or, perish the thought, an arts business book to improve your practice, I’m here with some great recommendations for blogs that specialize on the cultural sector. Pro-tip on an excellent question to ask in your next job interview as a candidate for hiring: What blogs do your company’s employees subscribe to?

by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas Last month our Arts & Technology Policy Fellow, Courtney Duffy, continued her series on copyright challenges within different artistic disciplines by publishing part one of a segment on filmmaking. Below you’ll find part two. Connect with Courtney on Twitter @cduffy90 and join the conversation using #CopyrightwithCourtney.

by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas This post is the second installment of #CopyrightwithCourtney, a series from Courtney Duffy on the copyright challenges faced by artists in various disciplines. Courtney, who is Fractured Atlas’ Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow, focused on authorship in her first post. Today she begins a three-part post for the series on filmmaking. You’ll find her on Twitter @cduffy90.

by Nathan Zebedeo, Program Specialist at Fractured Atlas Educating yourself on fundraising — best practices, groundbreaking innovations, and the like — often involves reading books, blogs, and websites that travel a lot of the same ground. Which, on the one hand, can be somewhat tedious. But on the other, hearing the same things many times, from a variety of voices, can allow the wisdom of the ages to actually penetrate a thick skull like my own. All of this is to say that it’s rare that I pick up a book on fundraising and find something that I’ve never heard before. The Little Book of Gold: Fundraising for Small (and Very Small) Nonprofits by Erik Hanberg actually does shed some new light on old problems for me, and I hope that it can be a useful resource for you too.

Every grant application is different. Depending on the priorities of a given funder, they may ask you a wide variety of questions about the work that you’re making, but there are some questions you can expect to appear (in some way, shape, or form) on all grant applications. While grantmakers usually use pretty clear language for these questions and you should answer them straightforwardly, there are always ways to delve deep in your responses, addressing important aspects of your work and how it’s a good fit for the grantmaker’s funding priorities. I’ve put together 6 questions, below, that you’ll often see in grant applications, and provided some tips for how best to answer them:

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas On the Boards TV was recently named a 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards honoree for their pioneering work in providing high definition video content to the contemporary performance world. On top of that their business model shares half of its profits directly with the artists. Project leads Lane Czaplinski and Monique Courcy sat down with us to talk about how they’re bringing contemporary performance into the Netflix age.

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas Fractured Atlas recently recognized The Laundromat Project as an honoree of the 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards for their pioneering work in connecting communities to their creative potential. We interviewed Executive Director Kemi Ilesanmi to find out just how The Laundromat Project is able to use artists to engage people with art when they least expect it.

This blog post is sure to get a ton of hits because here’s where I’m talking about the world’s sexiest tax document of all time: Form 990!

New Year. New You. New Mission. As the month of January reaches its blizzardy conclusion, let’s check in and see how those New Year’s resolutions are holding up. Well, maybe you haven’t exactly joined a gym or learned Spanish or finished reading Infinite Jest yet, but I’d like to slip in one more resolution for all you arts entrepreneurs out there to consider. Re-visit your mission statement. Or, you know, write one to begin with. Lots of artists and arts organizations seize the New Year as an opportunity to take stock of what’s working for them and what’s not. And so often, one thing that’s not working is their mission statement.

It's easy to get excited about the prospect of grant funding : grants carry with them a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work.