Overwhelmed.
Distracted.
Treading water.
Alone.
Frustrated.
Stuck.

These are terms I hear often from creative professionals trying to gain momentum in their work.

Including me. I have wrestled with these challenges as much as any other creative trying to hone their craft, and make a living around it.

Too often, we ignore the problem.
We let our days be ruled by the needs of others.
Deadlines of others.
Goals of others.
Moods of others.

We say we will address it when we have the time.
Although, managing time part of the problem.

You look around, see everyone busy.
Juggling.
Overwhelmed.
Distracted.
So it seems “normal,” which somehow makes it okay.

I think about the wisdom of those who came before me.
And what their advice was to those who would come after them.
You hear it as a whisper, drowned out by the news of the day, celebrity gossip and status updates.

I read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by Bronnie Ware, often.

The number one regret that she witnessed in caring for those in their final moments was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Her explanation is gutting:

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

In working with creative professionals — those whose writing, creating art, crafts, a business, or supporting a cause is central to their work life — I find them trying to battle these challenges in their own ways.

They read articles and books, download apps, and try dozens of other one-off tactics to try to gain control of their creative time and energy.

I hear about this constantly. And I’m doing something about it.

I am preparing something very special that speaks to all of this — a new course that I couldn’t be more excited about. A way to take practical steps to find more momentum in one’s creative work.

I’m also preparing some free resources in the coming weeks that dig into these topics.

In the meantime, I would love to know — what is your biggest challenge in finding time and energy to do more creative work?

Thanks.
-Dan

Over on Writer Unboxed, I shared a humorous take on a huge problem that affects many creative professionals: distractions. I cover a wide range of distractions, and propose clear tactics to combat them. One example:

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Distraction: Cleaning

• Definition: Dust bunnies. You can hear them calling, can’t you? They say, “Dust us! Collect us and deliver us to the afterworld of the magic dust bin!”
• Defense: For centuries, mankind has lived in filth. Sewers running through the streets, people bathing only monthly. I mean, the vacuum cleaner wasn’t even invented until 1860, meaning that most of human history was spent without them. Some of the greatest written work of all time was written specifically in the absence of the unrivaled suction power of a Dyson. Let’s face it, if A + B = C, there is no argument. A world without vacuum cleaners is a world where great writing thrives.

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Read the full post here.
Thanks!
-Dan

Many writers and creative professionals aren’t prepared for success.

Instead, they spend their time attempting to mitigate the risk of failure. And while I fear failure as much as any normal person, my experience in studying successful people is that focusing on failure is not enough. You need to actively prepare for success.

I believe Tina Roth Eisenberg may have said it best, in one of her tweets this week:

Yes! 22. Overprepare, then go with the flow. http://t.co/QrwyeBAaAj

— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) June 18, 2015

“Overprepare, then go with the flow.”

There are two key parts to this:

1. Doing the research necessary to truly over prepare. Most people feel they are “over prepared” when they aren’t. They have instead come up with a single idea for Plan A. That’s it. They love their idea, they are proud of it, and they really hope it works. But an idea is not a plan. A real Plan A should be multi-faceted, and involve others. It should be a system in and of itself, and there should be a Plan B, and Plan C, in place for when Plan A — in all likelihood — fails. Want proof of this? Search Kickstarter for campaigns that failed to get funded. Seriously, go look at all of the ideas that someone believed in, but failed to truly gain traction. It’s sobering.
2. You will have to constantly iterate from what you THOUGHT would happen. In the past few years, the tech community has framed this with the term “pivot.” To do something different that doesn’t inherently reject the research and preparation you have already done. That is the ‘go with the flow’ portion, that what you thought Plan A would look like may turn out to be very different in reality.

To me, these are key distinctions between merely protecting against failure versus actively planning for success. Let’s take this theory into reality with three examples I have experienced in the past week:

Example 1: The Book Launch

As I mentioned above, I am preparing for the next session of my 4-week online course called Get Read, which helps connect authors to readers. As I review and update the course material, I am essentially meditating on the various aspects of launching a book and establishing a readership.

Oftentimes, the reality of a successful book launch is wildly different from what an author may have envisioned. They expect it to be a busy couple weeks around publication day. In studying authors who have had successful launches, and experiencing them myself, I find they actually begin 12 months before publication day.

All facets of the marketing timeline require clarity of messaging, clarity of audience, and trust with the people who can connect you to that audience. Let’s face it, clarity and trust take time.

What I find empowering about the idea of a 12-month long book launch is that it allows the author to slowly prepare at a reasonable pace, and it gives them time to iterate as needed. This goes directly back to the quote that Tina shared above: “Overprepare, then go with the flow.”

Example 2: Getting People to Back Your Vision

A few weeks back, I shared an inside look into Kickstarter, as my friend and client Sarah Towle runs her campaign for her StoryApp Tour.

Her campaign ends on June 26, and it is amazing to see how she has raised $32,510, which is more than 80% of her goal.

But let’s face it, in so many ways, Sarah has put her neck on the line. When the campaign is successfully funded, it will be easy to gloss over the incredible risk she has navigated in the past year to get to this point. The thousands of hours, the financial investment, the little failures that are masked by the big success.

Each of the 174 people that have backed her Kickstarter so far has a story about how they became aware of Sarah’s project, and felt an affinity for it. Each of those backers holds a key to unlocking Sarah’s vision.

Example 3: Teaching Entrepreneurship

This week I ran a workshop on entrepreneurship for 5th graders at PS 123 in Harlem. Here is a look:

Each student had to come up with an idea for a business they were going to establish, and create a business plan for it. These kids are awesome.

As we went through the workshop, I noticed some things these young students did that I see often when adults try to establish their own businesses or creative projects:

• Fear of judgment in even speaking your idea out loud. Early in the session, after all of the students had written down their business idea, I asked for someone to share theirs with the group. One hand went up. When I called on the student to share, their head immediately went down. They no longer wanted to share. My interpretation: They wanted the pride of being first to show they were a leader, but then thought twice when judgment from the class came.
• It’s easier to critique someone else’s idea than it is to develop your own. There was another student who had loads of charisma, but spent most of her time making clever jokes about her friend’s business idea. After 10 minutes, her own business plan was barely filled out. She had done very little to hone her own idea, because she was too busy poking holes in the ideas of someone around her.

Now, these are fifth graders who just came in from recess, and it’s a mere week before the end of school, so I am not trying to make more of this than I should. Both of the students I describe here are very smart and capable. They did great overall in the workshop, and it was a complete joy to see their approach and help guide them along the way.

But it reminded me of what I often see with adults: that it is easier to say why an idea won’t work than it is to develop the attitude, ideas, and process to ensure that it does.

I have seen people do this with other writers or creative professionals, but I mostly see people do this to themselves. They don’t give their own ideas a fighting chance. They have an idea, begin to consider the risks, and conclude that the idea isn’t worth pursuing.

They feel smart because they protected themselves from failure. The problem? Doing so didn’t really prepare them for success either. Instead, they are just stuck in the middle.

Do you see a distinction in how you prepare for success versus merely protect against failure? What works for you?

Thanks!
-Dan

A writer who had taken one of my courses recently reported something incredible:

“Kathie Lee Gifford just shared my first children’s book as her Favorite Thing on TODAY!”

Here is a photo:

The author is Teri Case, and her book is I’m Going to the Doctor. Teri and I met when she took my online course called Get Read, and when she messaged me about this new development, she was very generous in crediting the course with helping her get to this exciting new place — where Kathie Lee would mention her book on the Today show. In Teri’s words:

“Moral of the story: Taking Dan’s class, preparing my goals, sticking to them, sharing my work made me the LUCKIEST FIRST TIME SELF-PUBLISHER in the world! 🙂 Pure luck founded on Get Read.”

So today, I would like to explore exactly what happened here — how Teri’s book became featured on TODAY. Let’s dig in…

How Kathie Lee Found Teri’s Book

Some authors reading this may be thinking, “What did Teri do that I can replicate to get my book into Kathie Lee’s hands?!”

What if I told you there is a little known trick that Teri used? That it involved targeting big media celebrities via a free online publicity service, and that it greatly increases your chance of getting your book featured on TV?

Well, if I told you that, I would be lying. Sorry.

In truth, Teri’s book landed in Kathie Lee’s hands in the way that much of marketing has always worked, and in the way that I try to make the embodiment of what I teach in my courses. It happened through clarity of messaging, relationships, and gumption.

Here is the real story from Teri:

“We had sold our house, and wanted to thank our wonderful neighbors. They were first-time grandparents. Their grandson had been born a few weeks prior. So I took a signed copy of my book over to my neighbor and sat and chatted with her.”

“She loved the book and was asking me how I came about it — I spilled my guts. She wanted to know what my goals were and I shared how I didn’t expect to make any money as I self-published it, and I was primarily donating copies.”

“She asked who I had chosen to donate to, and if I was interested in suggestions. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. She told me about a few organizations her family was involved in that treated special needs Pre-K thru Kindergarten children — primarily children born with addictions, AIDS, or deformities due to parents’ choices.”

“Now, this totally tugged at my heart, so I said, yes, yes, yes. I went home and looked up the organizations, contacted their development offices, and sent a copy of the book for each classroom.”

“Where does it come together? My neighbor’s sister is Kathie Lee Gifford. I had heard a rumor two years ago when I first moved there, but had dismissed it and forgotten. Anyway, my neighbor had a ceremony for her grandson in May and apparently Kathie Lee was there. She saw the book, asked about it, and her sister told her about our visit, my goals and that I had sent copies to her charities.”

Then one day this happened:

“So there I was, driving from Seattle to Idaho, when I got a text from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a while, “UM…Kathie Lee Gifford just showed your book and said your name on TODAY.”

Teri handled this news as any professional author would — by screaming. She sent me a photo of what she looked like at that exact moment:

The Lessons We Can Take From Teri’s Story

One of my favorite quotes is this one, by Scott Johnson:

“Caring is a powerful business advantage.”

That is a foundation I teach in the Get Read course, and this is how Teri implemented it:

“As part of your class, Dan, I decided part of my goals in writing, or one of my benchmarks of success, would be thanking subscribers and donating or contributing to a charity with each book. So even though a children’s picture book was my first book, I wanted to keep to my overall objectives. I ordered 200 copies for myself as giveaways. First, I sent signed copies to subscribers and to anyone who had something to do with the book being published. Next, I sent over 100 copies to St. Jude Children’s Hospital; book banks in MD, CT, and OR; the New Orleans Library, Washoe County (NV) Library, Children’s Aid Society…”

Pretty cool, right?

Does she want book sales and to earn revenue as an author as well? Sure. Does she expect that every book needs to be purchased in order to be meaningful to others? Nope.

The Results of Being Featured on TODAY

So has this catapulted Teri’s book onto the bestseller lists? Here is another big lesson from Teri’s experience… the short answer is no. She describes the immediate reaction from friends and family:

“I started getting texts and private messages, all from non-writers:”

• Have you sold out?
• How quick did you sell all your books?
• You’re going to be rich!
• How much did you make?
• Have you ordered a reprint yet?

On the business side of it, what was the result? She sold about 20 additional copies.

Twenty.

But of course, she also tells me:

“Now my family thinks I’m filthy rich. HA HA HA HA.”

But it does go deeper than that:

“The response from friends and family was immediate–mostly because I publicized my excitement on Facebook. I was overwhelmed by the supportive and enthusiastic comments and LIKES. I think I received more LIKES on this post, and shares from my website than ever. I felt so honored and blessed any time anyone shared a post.”

“In the end, I was more fascinated by the shares and reviews than I was about books sold.”

For that last piece, she referenced the article I recently shared about Buzzfeed, and their obsession with why and how people share content.

The Step-by-Step Guide

So if you want a step-by-step guide to do exactly what Teri did, here it is:

1. Move to a house next door to the sibling of a celebrity. Ignore them for two years while you create your masterpiece.
2. In the meantime, write books you find deeply meaningful, and be honest about the result you want them to have in the world. For Teri, publishing her book was about donating to charities and helping kids.
3. When you do meet the sibling of the celebrity, be kind and generous and connect with things they care about deeply.
4. Then leave with zero expectations and drive to Idaho.

That, my dear author, is how you get your book featured on the TODAY show.

Seriously though, the main point here is that Teri had established clarity around her goals and messaging, which led her to publish the book. Even that seemingly tiny action of bringing a signed copy of the book to a neighbor’s house can’t be overlooked. This takes forethought, and dare I say a little bit of bravery. And clearly it paid off for her. She put it this way:

“I jumped into the Get Read course where I explored my audience and goals. Your class gave me permission to experiment with ways to network and express myself and reach the goals I established in Get Read. As a bonus to the class, I made new friends and gained a few subscribers from the start.”

If any of this resonates with you, please consider joining me in the next session of Get Read. We cover four key lessons:

1. Develop your voice.
2. Find your ideal audience.
3. Create moments of connection.
4. Construct your marketing plan.

Plus so much more. Deadline for registration is Monday June 22nd.
Congratulations to Teri on finding momentum in her writing!

Thanks!
-Dan

If you are an author or creator hoping to grow and engage your audience — outside of your book itself — I want to introduce you to someone I’m a big fan of: Ze Frank.

Ze (pronounced “zay”) is a “performance artist” who created one of my favorite things ever, and is perhaps best known for his initial “viral” videos How to Dance Properly, circa 2001.

Well now, Ze is president of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures, which means that he is one of the people in charge of all the videos created by BuzzFeed. I recently watched this A-MAZ-ING interview with him (interviewed by Dawn Chmiewlewski) where he discusses how the social web has radically re-shifted what it means to engage an audience.

Why should this be interesting to you? Well, a few reasons which I will outline below. The premise is this: If you are an author or other creative professional who wants to develop an audience, how do you go about it?

Okay, let’s dig in.

Content is a Collaboration

Content is a relationship between the creator and individuals who experience it. Now, before I discuss how content has changed due to the web, it is worth noting that content is ALWAYS a collaboration.

If you write a book, the way an individual interprets those words and infuses it with their own life experience, worldview, mood, needs, and fears changes what you intended. The result is a collaboration, one where you set an intention, but it becomes infused within the life of another who inherently modifies it.

You rarely see this; it exists inside someone’s brain. Even a group of 10 people who all say they loved the same book will have each had a unique experience with it.

Today, due to the way individuals now drive how content is shared, we are getting a glimpse into what had previously been a hidden process.

In the interview with Ze Frank, I got the sense that the interviewer kept trying to get Ze to break down the steps of creating content that will yield success in terms of spreading to an audience. He keeps demurring:

“Content exists inside of a massive ecosystem. Content has a different usage — we use it in different ways. The one that has dominated the story of media has been consumption. We have it, we consume it, it makes us feel good. It overwhelms us, we give ourselves over to it. Think about going into a movie theater, and how transformative that can be.”

“[Nowadays] you have immediate feedback mechanisms. What we [at BuzzFeed] think about a lot is, ‘what assumptions can we make?’ One way is to look at the statements people make when they share a piece of media. When you share a piece of media, you have written something to justify why. That to me is a very interesting piece of data.”

“You start seeing some patterns to emerge, one that is particularly interesting is the notion of identity. The statement would be, ‘OMG, this is totally me.’ Or ‘Wow, I never thought anyone experienced this except me.'”

“You can then literally start mapping out [different types of identity] and start testing them. See if you are right. That is the gift of this age — you can do this very quickly. The best approach is that you use data and gut in a fluid way.”

“The reality of it is that the content itself takes on life and moves without you [the creator].”

“Shares are much more interesting than views. Views you can buy, it’s something you can game. But shares, because it is initiated by a person, and they are putting their own reputation on the line by sharing it — its not an easy thing to game.”

I love how honest Ze is about the idea of “gaming” content reach by purchasing it. This is how media spread for decades… how newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio would expand their reach by gobbling up new markets. They bought the markets, used that growth to justify success, and therefore, more ad dollars. They were “gaming” to dominate markets by spending money.

But today, when the audience gets to choose what it sees and what it shares, the same tactics don’t always work. What Ze describes at BuzzFeed is an organization of creators who are embracing these changes as much as they can. Is it the only way? Of course not — there are many other organizations (and individuals) who create and share content differently.

If you are an author, one thing to consider is, how do you not sell more books, but how do you encourage greater collaboration with others? Because when you talk about ‘word-of-mouth marketing’ or ‘going viral,’ that is exactly what is required.

No One Knows What Will Spread; Finding it is a Process

When Ze describes the process of how his team at BuzzFeed is organized and how they create videos, it is clear that he runs a laboratory where experimenting is encouraged.

I had heard that BuzzFeed will create many headlines for each article or video, and test to see which gets shared the most. The organization is known for the data they gather around how content becomes popular, but as indicated above, Ze is a big proponent of marrying this data with your gut feeling as a creator.

For Ze’s initial viral video, How to Dance Properly, he sent a birthday invitation to 17 people via email in 2001. Within a week, 20 million people saw it, all via email forwards.

As the interviewer tries to break down why that worked, this interaction takes place:

Ze: “I think you asked the question with the intention that the content held the key for why it did well, and I would challenge that. It’s a fool’s errand.”

Interviewer: “You are in the ‘Content is King’ place [the interview is taking place in The Paley Center], where people think that great content drives audience. So, we’re wrong?”

Ze: “Yes. It’s not the full picture. The notion of ‘good content DRIVES audience,’ the notion of ‘drive’ and what that means is the interesting part of that statement. That has been the challenge of the past 10-15 years, coming to terms with the fact that a lot of the assumptions that we had as an industry around what “quality” is and “good” is, has come into opposition with the stark reality of social distribution. The things we thought were great are not performing well, when the audience gets to choose how it spreads.”

He talked about how “6 Fruits You Are Eating Wrong” was a MASSIVE hit — an order of magnitude higher than other stuff. And even now, he has no idea why.

“I don’t think about the form of the content, I think about the process by which it is made.”

For authors and other creative professionals trying to develop an audience for your work, this is a critical point. You may have some creative ideas that you are proud of, which is awesome. TEST them to see if others will be engaged with them or not. Perhaps this does not apply to your books or other works for art that you create for individual creative expression and growth. I am a huge fan of creating art for the sake of art.

But for the 1,000 other things you do to try to develop an audience for your work — articles, events, interviews, blogs, newsletters, social media — don’t assume you know what will work. Experiment and allow others to help you learn what does and doesn’t work to engage them.

Ze puts it this way:

“The idea of someone saying ‘Well this is going to go viral’ doesn’t work. It’s really a process.”

Content Spreads Differently Online Than You Think

BuzzFeed.com has never done banner ads. They like branded content, where a brand partners on content. So a company will commission BuzzFeed to create content, and the end user knows that it is branded. The vision here is to satisfy goals of the brand, and is something that people want to share. An example is the “Dear Kitten” series created with BuzzFeed and Purina. (I refuse to link to it because I know you will not finish this article, getting lost in a series of kitten videos! Google it.)

BuzzFeed is huge — they receive 1 billion views on their videos per month. What will shock many content creators is where those videos get viewed.

Ze shared that only 15-17% of the views come from BuzzFeed.com — the website itself.

Then, only another 15-17% comes from any of BuzzFeed’s owned channels: email, social media, etc.

Which means that 60-65% of people who get their content view it on a non-BuzzFeed channel. Some of these may be syndicated platforms Buzzfeed’s videos are on, including YouTube, Facebook, AOL and Yahoo.

For a media company who has spent millions designing their homepage — this is mind-blowing.

For an individual author, this illustrates how outreach to your audience requires partners. You can’t drive everyone to exactly the place you want them to experience your work. Again, it comes back to the idea of collaboration, which I love.

This is also why endless tweets about your book on your Twitter account won’t really drive more book sales.

Invest in the Craft of Original Creations

Ze described how his organization is run. They focus on investing in individual creators and in developing their skills to grow.

They hire people on a full-time basis, provide them access to studio space, their own dashboard to all audience metrics and insights, and are encouraged to collaborate and try out ideas. Everything they make is in-house, created by full-time employees who are encouraged to develop this as a career. This is not farmed out to freelancers, not aggregated from elsewhere.

This is striking as I consider how many layoffs have occurred elsewhere in media over the past 20 years.

They work in small teams, and are always creating, always publishing, always collecting feedback from their audience and analyzing it. Creators pitch their ideas to their peers. The interviewer asked about having a hierarchy that “green lights” ideas, and Ze responded:

“The idea that those above you have a sense that works — that is a trap.” If I allowed myself to stop projects, I would have missed probably 60% of the interesting threads that we are on. It’s jut too complex. Every single node on the mass network is [a person] who is changing.”

It’s worth noting that his group now produces 50 videos per week, have created more than 3,000 in the past two years, and these videos receive a billion views per month (source).

Ze summarizes:
“I care about the pursuit [of creative ideas and practice],I don’t care about the form that is created.”

There is this perception that “the world has changed” and we are now a “freelance culture.” Services such as 99designs.com encourage you to farm out creative work to a network of people, and have them bid on your short-term work, and then you get to pay the lowest bidder.

What Ze describes is the opposite of this.

What is intriguing is that the model he uses isn’t even old-fashioned. He described how when he was setting up Buzzfeed Motion Pictures he had this vision of “old Hollywood,” and he described this idea of the studio lot, where creators all knew each other and collaborated in a friendly manner.

He went on to describe how this vision of Hollywood was never really reality. That when he researched it, he realized that much of old Hollywood was an assembly line of movies, where individuals had restrictive contracts, where labor was farmed out.

I appreciate how Ze describes investing in the creative process and the people behind it. That, even as it can seem as though the world is drowning in ideas vying for attention, that investing in the basics of people and a creative process, is at the core.

How have you felt challenged in engaging your audience online? How do you invest in the process of collaboration and interaction?

Thanks.
-Dan