"I am a musician, and for me it is a constant struggle to try to play/make what I personally like and get paid for it. I'm doing okay, but at this point I believe that unless I have some crazy twist of kismet I'm going to have to forget trying to sell music if I really want to enjoy the explorations that I ACTUALLY want to do."
I have the same issue with writing. Creative endeavors such as writing and making music is a very different type of entrepreneurship than say, opening a retail store.
I'm going to tell the tale of part of the business aspects of my books "Cute Little Store" and "Cute Little Store 2" and hope that sammy and others can make the intuitive leap to if I was discussing a music CD.
First, for as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to write and even make money on my writing. Primarily, I want to write fiction, but I do a lot of journal writing, too. I was journaling many things related to my store and after almost 2 years, I realized that I was starting to have quite a quantity of work. It was enough so that it was worth intentionally continuing to make into a book.
The problem was of publication/production and distribution. I could submit my book (actually it's a book proposal) to traditional publishers and hope one of them was interested. But that didn't seem like what I wanted to do for many reasons:
- Potentially low royalties
- I felt my material was timely - and it can take months to hear back from a publisher and typically you don't submit to more than one at a time
- Unless you're a big name author or other known person, you're still left to market your book on your own
- And lastly, I was concerned about not having the creative control over my work that I wanted
Clearly - I wanted to be the boss of my writing career.
So I looked into self-publication. But the cost seemed to be prohibitive... in order to make it work, it seemed like I would need to produce and sell 5,000 or more copies of my book. The *average* book sells 1,000 copies in it's lifetime! This would be too huge and investment of time and money. It could have been anywhere from $10,000 on up to produce and taken a lot of my time to do things like the layout, find a printer and binder, register for an ISBN number, and get the book listed with various book distribution channels. Ugh.
Luckily, in this new-fangled internet age, I found a happy medium. There are companies out there like my publishing company, Outskirts Press, that are a little in between traditional and self-publishing. Yes, I pay to have it published, but they do all the real work including getting the book available on amazon.com.
The only thing left for me to do is market the book - i.e., sell it. This has not been as overwhelming a chore as it sounds. There are a handful of resources out there on the internet and in books on the best ways to market a creative work. This blog, in fact, has been my Number 1 marketing tool.
Which brings us back to sammy's original problem - spending time marketing/selling vs working on the creative work itself. It is a challenge. The fact that I'm spending time writing this blog today means I'm not working on my other creative writing. I struggle with this all the time - because the more I blog, the more results in sales I see on my existing books, but it takes away from me producing new work. (It's one of the reasons my blog writing is erratic - I struggle a great deal with writing this vs writing other things.)
It is a catch-22, and I think one of the best ways to deal is to block out specific times of specific days to work on one or the other. I do this sometimes - I will block out 1-2 hours of specific evenings that I devote just to marketing my existing books.
In order for this 1-2 hours to be meaningful, I have a list of things I do for marketing and I work off this list. For me, this is very helpful so I'm not just randomly spinning my wheels. A lot of my book marketing is done right here on the internet and involves being active in online communities where I might find other entrepreneurs or people who want to be entrepreneurs. If I was in music, I would definitely be maintaining a site on myspace and other places that attract music lovers.
Another option is to hire people to do some of the work. I'm not talking about hiring a manager or someone who will always take a cut of your royalties, but hire someone to do a specific task. In the case of music, if you have a CD and you want to say, get some stores to carry it at their counter and you would rather spend your Saturday making more music then going around to a bunch of stores... hire someone you know who's good at schmoozing people to spend a few hours going around to stores and canvasing them to sell your CD. I'd offer this person something like $30 flat plus some amount based on what they're able to sell.
Basically, sammy... I'm glad you ended your comment saying "I'm not going to give up yet" because you shouldn't. Earning money off your creative endeavors is possible and doable - it will just take a lot of hard work! Good luck! :)
and I'd be happy to answer specific questions here on the blog about them!) Why? Because I had this silly notion that since I was building a business, I wasn't supposed to make money in my first year, so it was okay if I spent when sales were higher than they should have been. Oh so wrong... so wrong. 
Posts
