Category: podcast

“I don’t want my art to be good or bad, I want it to be me.” My interview with Rebecca Green

In this remarkably honest interview for The Creative Shift Podcast, author and illustrator Rebecca Green gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how she continues to find her creative direction, and navigate growth in her career as a full-time author/illustrator.

Some topics we dig into:

  • How she finds the clarity to grow with her creative work, instead of feeling controlled by the market.
  • How she is preparing for a growth spurt in her career
  • Her love/hate relationship with social media.
  • How she uses collaboration to help her strategically reach her creative and business goals.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking ‘play’ below, or in the following places:

Some highlights of our conversation:

  • How even someone as successful as her feels frustrated, and that she is still searching for her style: “I’m constantly frustrated. I was telling my husband, ‘I feel like I’m on the cusp of something great, I’m about to arrive and make the work I want to make.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but haven’t you been saying that for 10 years?’
  • The process she is using to shift from one style to the next: “It’s very difficult to change and grow within the confines of having client work. I feel like this past year was a huge transition for me, a transformative year. I came out of it on the other side feeling that something new is coming. It’s been a struggle to work [for my clients] in my old style. They hired me for something I had done before. They wanted, not this new work, but something they have been expecting. That has been a struggle for me. I’m finishing these projects, and clearing the next couple of months so I can completely transform my portfolio and present something new to get jobs in the future based on that new work.”
  • How she is trying to infuse her creative process with joy: “Making art is fun, but it’s not. One thing I’m trying to do is to not make struggle feel like a necessity in art, so that when I do have fun, I’m okay with that too. I think for a long time, I held onto the idea that it has to be hard, otherwise I’m not doing it right. I’m trying to let that go.”
  • How she is judging if her creative direction feels right: “I don’t want my art to be good or bad, I want it to be me. I want it to say something, I want it to have emotion.”
  • She is using collaboration with a close friend to help her create a strategy for her work moving forward. She has weekly calls with Meera Lee Patel (whom I’ve interviewed twice on this podcast here and here). This is how Rebecca is approaching it: “I have a plan. I’ve been working with a friend, Meera, Skyping on a weekly basis. We have spreadsheets with our three main goals for the year. I have been putting down what is my vision, resources, incentives to follow through on a goal, and what is my timeline. As a freelancer, as an entrepreneur, as an artist, often we can wait for the opportunities to come our way. But they will never be quite what we want. I’ve been very strategic: a portfolio reset, and a website reset is one part of that. I’m trying to be better at business.”
  • Why she feels collaboration is important: “You have a sense of accountability, you are not just floating on your own.”
  • How she stays focused on her own growth as an artist: “Every project or growth spurt or time I saw a positive shift, it is because I came back and asked, ‘what do I have to offer?”
  • How social media can stir up some complex emotions: “On Instagram I see other people’s successes, what is trending, and what is booming for other people. Sometimes that is really inspiring, but at other times, it feels really defeating to see all these other people really being successful while I’m not sure what I want to do. So there are times I feel I should be more business minded, and do things that I see other people succeeding at. But I never actually go for it. I have such a love/hate relationship with Instagram. I want it to feel true to me.”
  • I asked her if she knew how she went from 225,000 Instagram followers a year ago, to 258,000 now. Her reply was so honest with regards to how metrics like these can be confusing: “It’s funny, it seems like a jump from 225,000 – 258,000, but every day I look at it and think, ‘Well, I’m not at 300,000. I’m not at 550,000. I’m not at a million.’ That never stops. I remember when I was like, ‘I got 100 likes, OMG! I rule the world!’ Now, I’m like, OMG, I only got this many people… I try not to let it effect me emotionally. But I would not have a career without Instagram. The way that I grew it was meeting people face to face, moving to new places, and being in a lot of diff industries [such as magazines, books, retail, all sorts of collaborations.]”
  • How success on Instagram can leads to it’s own uncertainty and fear: ““I get nervous sometimes that IG is just going to disappear and I will be in this cave and not have the access to the outside world.”
  • How she manages the expectations that other people have on her art: “I remember the first time, it was probably 10 years ago, working for a client. I gave them what I thought they wanted, and they came back and said, “This isn’t your style. It’s not actually your work.” It was the first time I remember saying, “Wait, I define what my work is.” I have always been conscious about fitting myself into client projects. Sometimes it is amazing. Sometimes it is difficult. So far, following what it is I truly want to be making, that has always led me in the right direction.”
  • How she managed her time and expectations when she was first starting out: “When I first started, I would send out emails, I applied for agents, and I heard nothing for months. I would send out three emails, and I was like, ‘Nobody wants to work with me.’ So I was always went back to the studio and said, ‘I will focus on what I can control, which is the artwork.’”
  • How she kept creating and doing client work, even as she moved from Nashville to Japan. She described it this way, “Japan is so different from my life in the US, that it feels like a break from reality.”
  • How, amidst one of the biggest periods of growth in her career, she has adapted her creative process to her lack of space in her apartment in Japan. “I’m keeping it simple, but I dream of having a big studio, more than I’d like to admit.”
  • How living abroad is effecting her art: “Living in Japan has changed the way I think about art.”
  • Her advice about the value of the creative process: “There should be more of an emphasis on process and not the end goal. I don’t think you ever arrive. I don’t think you ever get to the place where you think, ‘Well, now I’m done.’ I will think to myself, ‘Why am I not where I want to be 10 years in, why do I still feel like a novice? How do I still feel like an amateur, like I don’t know how to draw?’ I think there needs to be more of an appreciation for the shift the change the process and figuring it out.”

Last year I shared my first interview with Rebecca, where we discussed navigating creative burnout.

You can find Rebecca in the following places:
http://myblankpaper.com
https://www.instagram.com/rebeccagreenillustration/

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The Hopelessness and Hopefulness of the Writing Life. My conversation with Author Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

On Instagram this morning I saw a series of videos from author Miranda Beverly-Whittemore where she talked about how she keeps writing, even when she has some bad days with it. I asked if she would hop on the phone to talk about this topic, and she was up for it! In this conversation, we dig into: life after becoming a New York Times bestselling author; the importance of creative collaboration; how she works through feelings of despair, exhaustion, and doubt; and  how becoming a parent made her MORE productive.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking ‘play’ below, or in the following places:

You can find Miranda in the following places:

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A Masterclass in Human-Centered Book Publicity. My interview with Seale Ballenger.

Today’s episode of The Creative Shift podcast is a masterclass in human-centered publicity. I speak with Seale Ballenger, who is the Publicity Director at Disney Publishing Worldwide. He has worked with legendary writers, and shares his experience of what publicity looks like within the publishing industry. He has worked within Random House, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins and many other publishers. What Seale shares isn’t just useful, but truly inspiring. 

You can listen to the podcast by clicking ‘play’ below, or in the following places:

You can find Seale in the following places:
LinkedIn
Twitter

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“I was allowing people to talk instead of me.” Inside the Creative Shift of Comedian and Author Nina G

In this week’s episode of The Creative Shift podcast, I talk to comedian, author, and speaker Nina G. She walks us through the moment when she made a profound creative shift in her life:

“I was allowing people to talk instead of me. I cleaned house and started a new life.”

She was working in academia for more than 15 years, teaching at colleges. But in her mid-30s she was reminded of her childhood dream:

“I wanted to be a stand-up comic since I was 11 years old. It was my dream. For other girls in middle and high school, they were into New Kids on the Block, and I was into stand up comics.”

“As a kid, this is the one thing I had over everybody else. I wasn’t very good in school, the teachers had very low expectations of me, but I had a sophisticated palette for comedy. So I was able to accelerate there and be into something that no one else was.”

In this interview, we talk about the details of how she made that shift, how she pursued comedy, wrote her upcoming memoir, and we dig into her creative process.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking ‘play’ below, or in the following places:

You can find Nina in the following places:

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Why Marketing (Your Writing or Art) Matters. My Interview with Author and Professor Tim Calkins

In this episode of The Creative Shift with Dan Blank, I speak to Tim Calkins, Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. We discuss the cornerstones of marketing and his experience in launching his latest book: “How to Wash a Chicken – Mastering the Business Presentation.” We dig into his book launch strategy, what worked, what didn’t, and what he will do differently next time. 

You can listen to the podcast by clicking ‘play’ below, or in the following places:

You can find Tim in the following places:

Some highlights from our conversation:

  • Why he changed his title from “The Art of Business Presenting” to “How to Wash a Chicken.”
  • “To have any hope of standing out, you have to be different, unique, interesting.”
  • “Marketing is important because everything we do revolves around other people, and hoping other people respond in certain ways.”
  • He talks about whether you are marketing a new salad dressing or a book, there are similarities: you are concerned with asking how to get it out there, how to illustrate the benefit, and how to get people to pay attention.
  • “Marketing is about the response, and getting people to care.”
  • The difference between marketing years ago and modern marketing: In the past, the goal was a purchase. Now, it is very focused on word of mouth and sharing. “It’s one thing to get someone to pick up a copy of a book. It’s anther to get them to share it.”
  • He suggests you start marketing on a small scale, one person at a time. “If you think you will publish a book and thousands of people will find it, that isn’t going to happen for the average person. You have to go person to person, and hope it builds over time.”
  • He talked through how he planned his own book marketing strategy. “When putting together a marketing plan, you have to think about the big initiatives you are going after.”
  • He focused his initial efforts on those he had close connections to: his students, then his personal network, then Kellogg alumni, and then finally, reviewers. He asked himself, “Who do I know, and how do I get those folks engaged? Then I focus on the next circle out from there, and then the next.”
  • “The most effective [book marketing] thing I’ve done to date is to email 200-250 people that I had a personal connection with and talk to them about the book. The reality is, most of those people are happy to hear from you, and they would only be offended if you didn’t tell them about the book. It’s a reason to touch base with people.”
  • “Your book is worth talking about, and it’s okay to talk about it.”
  • He takes us through the specific ways he reached out to people throughout his book launch, and what he hopes to improve for next time.
  • The toughest part of his book launch.

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