Richard Botto's book is written for filmmakers, and it is one of the most useful things an actor can read about building an audience. That is not a stretch. The problem it sets out to solve is the one every actor has: you need people who care what you are doing before you need anything from them.
Botto founded Stage 32, the largest crowdsourced network for film creatives, so the case studies come from somebody describing a thing he actually built. It is published by Focal Press under the American Film Market Presents banner.
Crowdsourcing is not crowdfunding
The book is careful about this early, and it matters. Crowdfunding is one narrow use of a crowd, and the least interesting one. Crowdsourcing is getting a crowd to supply what a production needs: locations, equipment, crew, expertise, and attention. Money is the last and hardest of those, and the argument running through the book is that people who chase it first tend to fail, because they skipped the part where anybody cared.
The chapters an actor should read twice
The ones on shaping a message and finding the people it is for. Botto's process is to work out what you are actually offering, put it in front of a targeted group rather than at everyone, adjust it based on what comes back, and keep going until other people are carrying the message instead of you.
Written down like that it sounds like marketing. In practice it is a description of what a working actor's online presence is supposed to do. Most actor websites and most actor social accounts are broadcast: here is me, here is my reel, please look. The book is about the other thing, which is being useful and specific enough to a defined group of people that they pass you on.
Where it will not help you
It is a filmmaker's book and it does not pretend otherwise. If you are looking for audition technique, representation advice or anything about the craft, this is the wrong book and there are better ones on the shelf. Several sections assume you are the one making something, and an actor who has never produced will read those as background rather than instruction.
It is also a book about a process, not a checklist. If you want ten things to do this week, you will find the pace slow.
Worth reading if
You are making your own work, or you are about to. You have a website and a social account and no clear idea who they are for. Or you have been told to "build your brand" enough times to be sick of the phrase and would like somebody to explain what the work behind it actually consists of.
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