Monetizing a Craft

On the subject of "creativity," and living a life of being creative, I feel there's a discussion I'd like to have in this year of late 2021.  And since it's Thanksgiving in America, there's no one reading my blog anyway ... especially with it being Friday.  This is one reason I was throwing up a caption on Fridays instead of writing a post: (a) it shows people I'm still alive; and (b) I felt an odd need to stretch myself in a different direction creatively.  I recognize that it annoyed some people and amused others ... but that can be said about anything I create, all the time.  Some will like it, some won't.  For that reason, if for no other, there's little percentage in creating things exclusively for other people.

On the subject of "being creative," I'm in the camp that believes the everyone has the potential to be creative.  I don't say they are, because they're not.  But if they sought education, if they trained their minds to think creatively, if they put in the time it takes to do this, I believe that a non-creative person can become creative.

Occasionally I hear some voice on the internet who says, "That's wrong.  You have to be pretty damn smart to be creative.  Otherwise, you're not going to invent anything new."  This is nonsense.  Creativity appears to be full of remarkable leaps and "divergent thinking capabilities," as a psychologist might put it, but from a lifetime of being creative and spending thousands of hours talking about creativity with other creative people, the truth is that these things come from being grossly familiar with something.  And when I say "grossly familiar," I don't mean a kid who works as a restaurant cook and pumps out thousands of club sandwiches while waiting for the next opportunity to go home and smoke weed.  I mean someone who pays attention to the sandwiches as they're made, to the quality of cheese, to the texture of the bread, to the thickness in which the turkey was sliced, to the smell and the colour and the day it was shipped in and cut and packaged.  Paying attention to these things is not "being smart."  These are matters of pure sensory observation coupled with mindfulness, which we can define as caring about your job, paying attention to what you're doing and mentally comparing something from day to day.

People care about their job when they're given reason.  If they speak out loud about an observation they make, and they're attacked or shamed for making it; or if they're surrounded by people who themselves don't care enough to explain the nuance of making food, or any other creative thing we might happen to be doing from day to day, then it sends a message that you shouldn't care either.  Constant abusive apathy and constant abuse for being interested in things will cause people to conclude that it's wrong to be mindful of what you're doing; that it's better to think constantly of escape, instead.  And this makes the person who does care, who cares in spite of others not caring, appear to be strangely weird and remarkable.  Such a person is granted special imagined superpowers, like being fabulously smart and really fantastically divergent ... which really just means different from a general population of drones who have been taught to hate being drones, who believe the only escape from being a drone is the seven hours a day one spends away from drone-land.

I've said it many times, however.  Caring and becoming good at something cannot be done just because one wants to be.  Many of the creative people I've known seemed to possess a "natural" creative ability ... such as being able to pick up a guitar and play it competently within a few hours.  Some of these people have chosen to be creative, but I've met just as many who did nothing of consequence with their guitar-playing ability.  A guitar is just a tool.  The tool's not intrinsically important to creativity.  It is a vessel through which we express something creative, but it's not creative of itself.  Playing guitar instantly doesn't confer mindfulness; it doesn't provide the practice that's needed to observe, investigate, deconstruct, become aware of what the tool can do and then take it to creative places.

We have so many wrong suppositions we make about creativity.  The guitar-thing is just one of them.  I've heard it said hundreds of time that some people just "are" creative and some are not.  And this appears to be so, when some psychologist takes a sampling of the population and asks a hundred questions about what we feel and what we might create and how we might go about creating that thing.  But such samplings are restricted to very brief moments of time.  Becoming creative takes many, many years; and ceasing to be creative can happen after a horrific trauma within a few hours.  Someone who is uncreative today, for whatever reasons, may be that because of the life they've lived up to this time — but this says nothing of the life they could have lived, or might live in the future.  Any creative person we interview can, at any time, decide they've had enough; they can't make it pay, they're tired of the shame and the attacks of their friends, they're tired of the scene and the hatred of outsiders.  And any non-creative person might find themselves attending a class, discovering they like a thing, that they care about it, that they want to go on caring about it and, what do you know, five years from now that non-creative person is "creative."  The whole dog-and-pony show we're sold on who's creative and who isn't is an enormous pile of horse-pucky, limited by terms that were never designed to explain change, but instead to describe what is at the moment when the questioning is done.

Furthermore, we must concede and recognize that most people who set forth to define who can and cannot be creative, or who is and is not, are themselves people who decided to care about something else.  Creative people do not sit about and debate who's creative and who isn't.  They talk about who's going to "make it" and who isn't ... in the sense of, who's going to make something important and valuable, and who's blowing smoke up their own ass.  Because a lot of creative people are.  Pretense is an effective and self-destructive strategy for managing the attacks and shame perpetrated by people who feel we shouldn't care too much about things, that caring "too much" is an unhealthy habit, and that specifically we shouldn't care too much about things that don't include a steady paycheque.

It's generally accepted by those who do earn steady paycheques, who chose to care about non-creative things, like psychologists and doctors and political scientists, that it's not such a great thing to be creative.  It's not something that you, O non-creative person, should wish for.  Life really sucks for creative people.  You work a lot for something that doesn't pan out; you spend a lot of time that you could be spending earning money NOT earning money, pursuing a "risky" vocation that may never, ever pay out in any degree that will satisfy you or anyone else.  As my father said back in 1980, when I told him I wanted to be a writer, "You're never going to make a living at it."  There's the shame, right there.  Out of the gate, at 16, a young creative person is warned, "You've made the wrong choice about the life you haven't lived yet.  Smarten up and make the right choice."

It continues to interest me that half the population argues that being creative is something smart people do, while the other half argues that being creative is something only stupid people try.

It's here that we get to the meat of this post; all that's come forward to now is just setting the tone.  In a lot of ways, when talking about being creative, or "an artist" as it were, we are still wrapped up in sentiments that were — extreme emphasis on "were" — realities about being creative.  For example, and thinking of many situations where the argument was made to me by other artists, and where I made the argument myself until I knew better, creative people used to argue that "If I make an amazing thing, the world will be a path to my door."  There are still many people who believe this.  There are many who believe this is the ONLY way to succeed as an artist ... in part, because most of the visible artists we see are those who became famous for making some amazing thing.

The whole idea, however, isn't based on a "creative" model, but upon a business model.  In business, we're producing a "product."  This product then needs to be manufactured, and distributed, and this requires paying a lot of people to create numerous copies of the thing and then store the thing, and in turn physically sell the thing face-to-face to customers, all of which requires enormous amounts of capital and expenditure ... and if you're an ordinary person, who has no access to these manufacturers, distributors, retailers or money-lenders, then creating an "amazing thing" won't do you much good.

And this might be true, if this was 1995.

But it is not 1995.

Let's take these things in turn.  Once upon a time, when speaking about an artistic venture, we spoke about making something.  I tried to write a book, my friends struggled with making an album, or painting artworks, or arranging space to put on a performance or filming a film.  And these were products that were difficult to achieve or create without money and expensive equipment.  This is because if a book were written, an album or film made, a performance given and so on, these things had to be done in the real world, with real physical objects that had to be physically made.  The number of people we could expect to view these physical objects was minimal ... especially without the money to distribute or the money to knock on the doors of Guardians who were there to make sure that only approved films, albums, books, performances and what not would be allowed mass distribution to the masses.

There are a great many people whose businesses and industries depend upon the general population continuing to believe that it's still 1995.  The entire television industry, for example, in which the best rated-TV show today gets ratings so low that it would be cancelled if this were the early 1980s.  Television sells to a smaller market each year; a market that resists getting a computer; a market that gets older and therefore which is actuarially shrinking; a market that is less and less consciously aware of the real world, and can therefore invent whatever bullshit it wishes to sell as reality because most people in the world are not watching.  Other businesses include the publishing industry, the food industry, the film industry and the trucking industry ... and so on.  There are still billions of dollars associated with these shrinking, crippled behemoths, and so long as there is, there's going to be much effort to convince everyone that they're still strong, they're still making the rules, they still deserve our attention and respect, everything is in fact bigger and better than it ever was before and no, they would never, ever lie to you.  After all, they didn't lie in 1995, right?  So I'm sure they're just as honest about their expectations and future today as they were then.

Thus you will still find many pundits who will tell you, "Marketing is HARD."  It was.  It isn't now.  Marketing is still unpleasant, it's still unforgiving, it's still tedious and unfulfilling, but one thing it isn't is "hard."  Marketing is easy.  Create a space — channel, blog, webpage, whatever — and then create content for that space every day.  Or as many days as possible.  Be genuine.  You must be genuine.  Give a lot of time.  A lot of time.  Talk about anything and everything.  Be generous.  Be thankful.  Care.  That's it.  That's the formula.

This has always been the formula.  But while in 1995, the "formula" had to be pushed through grubbing executives and justified with market research and submitted with humility in front of sacred poobahs before it's being discussed by non-creative persons whose interest was money and not creativity, all that shit is gone now.  The channel is free.  The blog is free.  Webpages are not, but they're really soooo 2001.  Choose a free page on social media.  Discuss your creative agenda with no one.  Explain your creative agenda to no one except your audience.

In today's market, if you're manufacturing something, you're creating the wrong product.  I say this as someone who's just manufactured something; who has manufactured a few books.  There's a means to making things, and some cachet in having tactile products, but these are not the 2021 product you need to make.

I can do these things because I'm the design department; I'm the sales department; the internet is the customer support department.  I'm not making a gadget that can break.  Or cause serious harm to people.  I make books.  People have rarely been accidentally killed by a book.  If I were making knives, that would be a whole other thing — but if I were making knives, macrame flower-holders, metal armour or car parts, selling these things through the internet would be a bad, 1995-based marketing plan.  And as I said, it's not 1995 any more.

If I write a book and rely on how things were in 1995, then I'd have to get the book approved by an agent, who would have to get the book approved by a publisher, who would insist on my rewriting the book so it would conceivably be approved by the publisher journalism, who are necessary for selling the book to people who have never heard of the book and can't know for sure they'd ever want to read it without being first told by "experts" that they want to read it.  Of course, there might be someone who pays no attention to experts, but we have to print thousands of these things physically and then move them out to stores and draw attention to them and that's an outlay of money and blah blah blah, that's how things went.  I'd be put in a car and driven around to talk about the book everywhere, because there's no internet and television only talks to bookwriters who write specific kinds of books, so face-to-face meetings were important.  On these face-to-face junkets, I have to prove I'm really enthusiastic about going to them as long as it's expected, however much I might miss my family or children or former life, because now I'm a slave in a car pretending to care about my 55th junket three days before Christmas I won't be allowed to go home for, because the book's not selling as well as the publisher expected and that's my fault or at least my responsibility to fix.

But it's 2021, and almost 2022, and there is no publisher but me.  There is no outlay and immense stock of books because on-demand marketing blew the hell out of the publishing industry like Uber destroyed the taxi business.  I can print a bunch and get a table at a game con, which is enormous fun because I'm working for myself and I get to talk directly to my people — and not the people the publisher thinks should be my people.   My people are the only ones I'm answerable to ... and they're my people because I care, I write a lot, about anything and everything, I'm thankful, I'm genuine — even if that means being a genuine bastard — and I've built this space over a lot of time.  I've followed the formula.  And though I have a few products, what matters more is what I write here, not what products I make.

Once you have a space, and work at it, and earn the respect that people in fact want to give to those who work hard, you can make terrific imaginative creative things out of whole cloth.  You don't have to go through a tremendous guantlet to explain what this new thing is.  A traditional marketer will ask, "If people don't know what a thing is, how can they search for it on Google?  How are they going to find something they don't know exists?"

Traditional marketing presupposes that "finding" is the key to selling.  And that used to be true.  But when all the rest of the marketing, distributing, manufacturing and so on departments are dispensed with, there is much less overhead.  It takes much, much less for the creative person to, how did my father put it?  "Make a living of it."  The internet doesn't need to find me, or my product.  I don't need the whole internet.  I only need to be sure that those who have already found me have reason to keep doing so.  I need only be honest and authentic and to care enough to convince them to help me continue to keep whatever I'm doing going.

It's become spectacularly easy to create a product and then monetise it ... so long as you're making the right kind of product.  Most who get started, thinking they're going to do well, choose the wrong product.  They think they have to make a "thing" ... but let's hope that's dispensed with.  Next, they think they need a lot of equipment and glitz, and of course money to pay for it all.  I won't argue that money and glitz are nice.  People argued that my Kickstarter should be flashier, that it needed to get more attention, that the product wasn't highlighted strongly enough; and of course all those people are convinced that my kickstarter would have done better if I'd done those things, even though it succeeded at raising the money asked for.

Equipment and glitz are not, however, "content."  They're tools.  They won't make something creative more creative.  They won't give substance to something that hasn't any substance.  Something really expensive and really flashy might get attention for a while ... but it won't last and the creator won't learn anything about creating.  And to be clear on the subject, doing something successful for six years, that afterwards crashes and burns, won't sustain the creator's creative impetus for the rest of his or her life.  No matter how great one is when one's riding the crest, the shame of not being on the crest any more feels like being crucified over and over.  Creative success is about being creative, not being famous.

Feel free to disagree.  Eventually, you'll see where I'm coming from.

So what do we sell?

Not an idea.  Ideas are fleeting.  J.D. Salinger had a great idea for a book that he wrote in his 20s and had published when he was 31.  Catcher in the Rye has been considered one of the greatest works of literature ever produced since its first publication in 1951.  Salinger spent the rest of his life wrestling with his inability to repeat his success, escaping public exposure, struggling with his spiritual beliefs and, on the whole, remained an apparently unhappy person for most of his life.  Who knows what the truth is about that, but we know he was hounded relentlessly by a publishing industry that held him to a standard to which he didn't want to be held.

A more common story follows virtually any artist who created a series of works for a decade or so, did well, became famous ... and then simply ran out of ideas.  After a string of successful albums, books or films, one fails, then another, then another.  And as the specific industry turns its back on the artist, the artist grows increasingly obscure, until several generations of children are asking the question, "Who's Paul McCartney?"

Not saying it isn't great having a good idea, or that we can't seriously enjoy that idea when it comes or even build on it for the future.  But we shouldn't count on one great idea to sustain us and it's not necessary in any case.

Where once the goal was to become creative and effective with a given tool that channels that creativity, there's something more important that we can sell today.  As a product it's highly in demand and it's inexhaustible.

Teach.

You can do it; now, teach someone else to do it.  You can renovate a bathroom?  Great!  Film yourself doing it, explain what you're doing, be detailed, take your time, admit your mistakes, have fun ... and then do it again.  Each time you renovate a bathroom, there will be different problems, different things to explain, different gadgets and pieces to buy and install, different jokes to make, different things that YOU will learn and then TEACH, in the same breath.

Where once you created a piece of music and then sold it to someone so they could buy your music and listen to it ... today you can film yourself creating music, explain the process of creating music, teach others how to do it, help them along, communicate with them directly through numerous channels and help them create their own music and enjoy making it.

I write about D&D.  Yes, it's interesting that I have this huge, phenomenal world, but that's not because I'm smarter or more creative or because I possess divergent whateverisms.  It's because I cared, I loved it, I did it constantly, I was mindful of what I was doing, I listened to my players and I trusted my motives to just keep going, to create the next thing, to try something different, to explore possibilities and to ignore people who told me to stop creating and start buying someone else's product.

We're moving into some interesting times.  For two decades we've been told that the internet offers an information revolution.  What manufacturers and marketers don't want us to realize is that the revolution is learning to do things ourselves, teaching others and recognizing that a truly individual thing is not something we buy, but something we learn to make while enjoying the process of making.  Part of that process is teaching others ... and building a new economy through teaching and small-scale personal, authentic-based exchanges.  The 1995ers are worried; they don't know what they're going to do with a worker/owner based economy of five billion self-driven labourers who don't need a job.  They don't need a minimum wage.  They don't need marketing.  And they don't need venture capitalists, marketing agents, retailers, angel investors, brick-and-mortar stores or, well, anybody.

These people are scared.  And they will do their best to obfuscate our choices, to shame our desire to be creative and individual, to push us to believe that we need them, that there's no future without them, and that if we don't kowtow to them, our future, our hopes and dreams, our freedoms and everything that matters will be put at a tremendous personal risk.

Without a doubt, count on them to lie.  As much as they have to.