The creativity of business

The business of creativity

Dear Doers of Courageous Deeds,

This past week I felt that kind of molten hot anger that you can only feel when someone you love deeply has been mistreated.

I can still feel the magma roiling in my chest and belly.

My oldest daughter K is a 17-year-old junior in high school. The internship counselor at her school arranged an informational interview with K and a music professor at a local junior college.

The best way to sum up that meeting disaster is to quote the counselor who went with K and who had never met this professor before. “I’m sorry I set that up. You’re the last student I’ll ever take to meet him. What he said was about him, not about you.”

I’m incredibly proud of the way K handled herself. She refused to let the interview upset her. Instead, she’s using it to fuel her drive to create a career on her own terms.

The music professor is typical of self-appointed gatekeepers. The professor didn’t even listen to what K wanted to accomplish. Instead, he told a student he had never met and whom he knew nothing about that she would never cut it on a path she wasn’t interested in taking.

K and other musicians, writers, and artists like you and me are incredibly lucky. There have never been more tools and opportunities to create. There’s never been a better time to build a microbusiness to either sell your art or to financially support you so that you have time and energy to make your art.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be self-employed my entire life. I ran my own law firm for almost a decade before burning out and leaving the law. I’ve run a successful copywriting business for ten years and am currently transitioning to a third career as a full-time professional brainstormer. (I’ll share more details about this new phase in the coming weeks.)

K is a talented and accomplished musician. She plays the piano, clarinet, guitar, ukulele, and the tenor ukulele. She is one of those people who can pick up an instrument and teach herself to play it in a few days.

The piano is her best instrument. You can put any music in front of her, and she can not only play it fluidly, but she can improvise and make you feel the emotional power of the piece.

K has also written more than 80 songs in the past year. She is a disciplined musician who is always honing her songwriting craft, and she plays and creates with a contagious joy.  

Now the two of us are working together to find ways for her to build her own business so she can enjoy the creative life she was born for.

I’m wearing this shirt from my Monster Motivation series as I write this post.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve worked with artists over the years is that so many of us believe the lies that art and commerce cannot coexist and that business is boring. I’ve found that building a sustainable business takes as much creativity as anything else I’ve ever done.

Business is more than just marketing. However, I find that creating a marketing strategy feels like writing a poem. The success of both hinges not on the precision of language or the rhythm of the piece, though both are important, but on the raw emotions you’re able to evoke in a stranger.

For today’s creative exercise, I’m challenging you to create a list of all the ways someone could build a business around art. You can choose any kind of art you want.

Try and list at least 5 different types of businesses. It might be easier to create a list that is outside of the kind of art that you currently practice. It’s often easier to see opportunities for others.

Once you get going, you will be surprised at all of the ideas you come up with.

Below is a part of my list of ways to build a business around fiction. I’m considering turning it into a longer, more detailed blog post. But, all creations have to start somewhere, and most of my best work starts as a list.

Fiction Business Ideas

• Traditional publishing—find an agent—sell a manuscript

• Indie publishing—hire your own editor, cover designer, and publish your books yourself

• Fiction podcasts—create stories that you share on a podcast. Each week could be a different story, or you might write an ongoing tale, like the old-time radio dramas.

• Fiction newsletters—there are already several Substacks dedicated to fiction. Similar to podcasts, you can tell different stories with each issue, or you can tell an ongoing story.

• Apps—Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? They belong to a genre called game books. While you could write a game book, you could also create your own app that replicates this style of reading. A few of these apps already exist. You could create plain text stories or make illustrated or even animated ones.

• TikTok—stories come in all kinds of lengths. Why not write scripts and shoot one-person shows to bring your stories to life? Or you could film yourself reading your stories in different interesting locations.

• Cards—create a Tarot card set with tiny stories on them. Create a deck of cards with story parts that players can shuffle to write their own stories.

• RPGs—write campaigns for role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Make your own RPG.

• B2B fiction—pitch the idea of creating fiction publications for businesses to use as internal tools to motivate or entertain their employees. I’m a huge fan of the B2B art business model because companies have the money to pay artists well.

• Private collectors—write bespoke stories for discerning customers. Instead of stories that will be read by the masses, these stories will be collected (perhaps using blockchain technology) by a few. The rarity of your work will increase its perceived value.

• Zines—instead of publishing books, publish short monthly zines. The production costs can be kept low, and you can sell them on a variety of marketplaces. People who love experimentation are drawn to zines.

• Subscription box—instead of meals or clothes, you could send out a story each month. This could be done digitally or physically.

• Hybrid—create a business that uses two or more different ideas together in a unique way. Perhaps you publish zine versions of your Substack fiction every few months.

These are just a few of the ideas that came to me as I did this exercise. The best thing about building a creative business is that it doesn’t matter if someone else has a similar idea. In fact, if there are several other businesses in the same space, it’s a sign of high market demand! And nobody else will ever create quite like you. If any of the ideas I’ve listed excite you, please start that business today!

The world needs more art. We desperately need to see the world in new ways. Creating a business that allows us to create more art is one of the greatest services we can render right now.

I’d love to hear your creative business ideas!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason

P.S. Please pass this post on to any artist you think would enjoy it. If someone forwarded this post to you, consider subscribing so that you never miss a letter! I send a free letter out each Tuesday and paying subscribers receive a bonus letter each Friday.