New Year, New Name, New Podcast, And A New Novel Coming!
Much Excitement. Confetti. All the things. Join the party!
🎉We’re back!!🎉
Having the month of December off to focus on planning our new year, spending time visiting our families, and getting ahead on personal projects has made us very excited and energized to be back. We’ve missed you all and have a ton of news to share with you. We’re stoked to grow the OBA Media community and start sharing some of your stories with the world!
Introducing Our New Name
First off, we have to address our name. We left you on a cliffhanger with our last newsletter, sharing we had run into a legal issue that was forcing us to change our company name.
When
first founded OBA, he shared that the name was an ode to Obatala, the West African Yoruba people’s god of creation. He is regarded as the gentle spirit of creativity, justice, honesty, purpose, and peace. We were all attached to the significance behind our name. But then, we found out that someone else had already beat us to the trademark.So, we spent a month brainstorming different options. Eventually, we decided that we couldn’t part with the name OBA, so we turned it into an abbreviation. OBA is now short for our official company name, which is (drumroll please)…
✨ONE BRILLIANT ARC MEDIA✨
The key to every strong story is a brilliant character arc. Often, the endeavor of crafting a story is a catalyst to bring you on your own arc. We can’t wait to guide you along the brilliant arcs you are creating with your stories. Hopefully, we can help spark an arc of positive change in the world with those stories. The spirit of the African patron saint is still here.
Now Launching: OBA’s Podcast!
Starting today, we’re launching the podcast version of our newsletter! Want to listen to a bunch of nerdy, passionate friends who happen to be professional writers, editors, and storytelling gurus dissect storytelling techniques used in films, shows, music, and books we’ve ingested during the week? Want to see us unpack lessons about what works and what doesn’t for building a business that connects authentically with your audience using pop culture media as case studies?
Let’s Talk Stories is the podcast for you! We’ll be releasing an episode on Spotify and YouTube every Friday, but if you are subscribed to our newsletter, we’ll share the newest episode with you on Mondays!
Let’s Talk Stories Ep. 1: Warriors Concept Album by Lin Manuel Miranda
We also invite you to listen to Let’s Talk Stories: After Hours with Jared Moses. These short episodes will be coming out on the off weeks for our main podcast episodes. In them, Jared will answer your questions and share his insights and advice that didn’t make it into the conversation with all of us. To be the first to submit a question for Jared to answer, feel free to reply to this email or drop a comment! Â
Announcing: Opening Up Select Spots in OBA Media’s Writers to Authors Program
How would you also like to get said group of professional writers, editors, and storytelling gurus to be your writing partners and help you tell your story? We have all written stories ourselves. We know what a daunting, emotional, and exhausting endeavor it is. It’s all too common to sit in front of a blank page and feel paralyzed, unable to get a single word down that you feel confident about. We’re here to be your personalized cheerleaders, coaches, and editors who can help you get your words onto the page, then craft them into a powerful story you can be proud of!
Book a free Empowerment Call with a member of our team today, and let us hear about your story and give you pro tips and a step by step action plan to success. We will help you never be afraid of a blank page again.
Coming Soon: My Sister’s Keeper By
Speaking of being writers ourselves…OBA Media is currently working on getting Jared’s debut novel polished and published so you can experience storytelling straight from our hearts!
Do you love urban YA fantasy? Vampires? Heartwarming brother/sister relationships and steamy romances? Edge-of-your-seat action? Ancient guilds of paranormal hunters? Welcome to the world of Jayden Swift!
We’ll be sharing the process of editing, beta reading, publishing, and marketing this novel so you can follow along the adventure and learn with us. Make sure you’re subscribed so that you can get the inside scoop on all the behind-the-scenes and sneak peeks!
I think that’s about all for now. We’ll be back with our regular Monday newsletter next week, unpacking storytelling lessons from pop culture media we’ve been consuming lately.Â
Thank you again, from the bottom of our hearts, for sticking with us while we build this thing. We’re here because of you, and we believe in your stories. Let’s make 2025 the year we change the world together.
CAPTAIN’S LOG
12/28/2024
Legal shenanigans suck, huh? Being a creative trying to start a business, it feels like your creativity rams into roadblock after unforgiving roadblock.
With such a heavily saturated global market nowadays, it almost felt impossible to come up with a name that was unique enough to differentiate us from other companies. We know how important branding is to making your company stand out from countless others, so we let go of the unrealistic hope that our name will be 100% unique. Instead, we want to make the spirit of our company stand out with the genuine passion and heart for YOUR stories that we bring to every project we work on. Our transparency, excellence, partnership perspective, and belief in our clients is what makes us one of a kind.Â
Besides Google, this is a helpful tool we found for checking potential domain names to see if they already have a trademark: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-information