Lift with your knees

Taking my own advice about the heavy lifting in my creative business

Today’s haiku was written in collaboration with my daughter K.

Hello Fancy Pants!

In my decade-long career as a proudly unemployable creative, I’ve accumulated a lot of marketing knowledge and experience.

For most of that time, I worked as a freelance conversion-focused copywriter. That means companies paid me to write words that persuaded people to do something immediately.

I also had a brief stint as a sales funnel consultant. I helped companies design marketing systems that attracted leads and then converted them into paying customers. I quit doing consulting and returned to copywriting because consulting required a lot more client contact than I enjoyed.

What does all of this background have to do with you?

I started this newsletter two years ago with two secret hopes. One, I wanted to help creatives like you build creative practices and businesses that allowed you to put more art into the world. Two, I wanted to build my own creative business so that I could stop copywriting and put more art out into the world.

During these past six months, I feel like I’ve made some solid strides on that first hope. But, my creative business (my non-copywriting efforts) has stagnated. I’ve struggled to grow this newsletter and my book and other merchandise sales.

A big part of the problem is that I’ve failed to follow my own advice.

When I was advising other companies, and when I write for businesses today, I tell them they need a system of content and sales funnels that make it easy for their ideal customers to find them. These systems turn browsers into buyers.

I have never created my own content and sales funnels around my poetry, fiction, and comics. It’s a little like the cobbler whose family has no shoes. I’ve also been slow to produce work because it sucks to make stuff that almost nobody reads. It’s a vicious cycle.

I understand that creating a profitable creative business that generates the kinds of profits I envision is hard. It’s a heavy lift, but it’s not impossible.

The key is to use the right technique. I need to lift with my knees.

In order to make a better newsletter for you and to make my life even more enjoyable, I have to follow my own advice.

That’s why I’m creating a content system for my Weirdo Poetry website. What content am I creating?

I’m writing short, interactive stories (Choose Your Own Adventure Style) on my blog. I’ve experimented with this format before here in the newsletter, and I now have a better grasp of how to create a solid reader experience.

I will be advertising my books, zines, t-shirts, and this newsletter on the stories. I’m also going to be transitioning from primarily using third-party sites to sell my physical and digital wares to opening my own e-commerce store. This gives me more control of the business end of Weirdo Poetry.

TL/DR I’m going to start treating my creative business like a business.

All of this stuff will take some time to build, and I will make a lot of mistakes along the way. But I can’t do all of the creative work I want until I get the business systems to support that work established.

I’ll let you know about all the successes and failures along the way.

Creative Challenge: What skills and knowledge do you have that you’re not fully embracing? What is one thing you can do today to follow your own advice?

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Spooky Season Haiku

It’s Spooky Season! I have two haiku collections that are perfect for this time of the year, available in paperback and ebook. Each book has more than 400 haiku!

You can use this link to find Pirate Haiku at your favorite online retailer.

You can use this link to find Horror Haiku at your favorite online retailer.

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About Today’s Haiku Comic

K and I accidentally wrote this haiku while at the grocery store. She said something, and I told her it sounded poetic. Then we both started counting the syllables in the line she had just uttered. Next thing you know, we had this haiku. She told me I had to give her co-writing credit if I ever did anything with the haiku. (She’ll be 18 next month and already takes her intellectual property seriously!)

The first panel is a sample from one of my favorite self-portraits ever. It’s called Le Désespéré (translated variously as Desperarion or The Desperate Man) by the French painter Gustave Courbet.

The second and third panels are backgrounds I drew with watercolor pens and digitally enhanced.

The fourth panel is a part of the painting Le Goûter (Afternoon Tea) by the french painter Léon Jean Bazille Perrault. I thought the girl in the painting looked like K when she was a little girl.

Panels five through eight contain samples of stuff I’ve published before. The star background I use all the time. It was one of the first collage backgrounds I ever assembled when I started doing collage comics during the pandemic. It’s a bunch of sea stars I cut out from a pre-1920 photograph.

I haven't found the original photographer’s name yet. But it reminds me of the artwork of naturalist Ernst Haeckel Kunstformen, whose work I also sample regularly. The drawing of the Earth was originally published in my graphic novel collection of prose poems/short stories, Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy.

Panel nine contains a sample from Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin. I love Van Gogh’s portrait work. The stoic faces of his subjects always look like they’re about to blurt out a terrible secret. Here’s a link to a fun analysis of the relationship between Van Gogh and this postman.

Panels ten through twelve use samples from antique travel posters I found on Picryl, my favorite public domain image source. Panel ten is from Italy, panel eleven is from Switzerland, and panel twelve is from the Boston and Maine Railroad Company.

Thanks for reading!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason