Category: WorkCategory: Work

Carly Valancy was our guest on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call, talking with our community about the art of reaching out.

This isn’t about cold emailing, or bulk mail, but gentle, direct, thoughtful messages to people for the various desires you seek (“would you write a blurb for my upcoming book?”, or the blessings want to share (“I love your work”).

Some take aways from the 75 minute Zoom call:

Your subject line can be direct: You don’t need to beat around the bush or be fancy. Your email is competing with 1,000 other emails in someone’s inbox, so stand out by being 100% you, which can include asking for the thing you want. Managing our inboxes takes time and energy – make it easy:

“Go for it. Just say what it is that you want, because it’s okay to want something. When you’re asking for something in an email, you’ll often try to make the subject line dance around the thing you actually want. What if you just said it?” Carly Valancy

Be honest. Someone on the call admitted that they hold back from reaching out because they’re not on social media, so they’re worried they might not appear to be “legit.” Carly’s advice is to just just say that. Write something like, “I almost didn’t reach out because I’m not on social media,” and then show your work.

I was asked “What does online presence look like for a producer who has a busy schedule?” on Substack Notes, and I figured I’d share the answer with the world wide web, in hopes it may be helpful to someone.

I think the online presence for any creative professional is trust building. Day in, day out, how do you put on display the things you know, the ideas you connect, the people you work with? And do that in a sustainable way?

Because if you start making 30 second polished vertical clips to get shared on platforms for people that just love scrolling 30 second clips, that might get eyeballs, but does it earn trust?

Or does having an archive of work, a body of things you produced, arranged in a refined manner in your corner of the internet, work better? Something that maybe doesn’t “get eyeballs,” but is hand delivered as a link to people who matter. Something passed around from people who know, with a “you gotta check out the work this person is doing” nod.

So I’m hinting hard at the “have a good website” angle, of course, but I think that more aligns with where artists can land, and soak in what you’re doing, and how you operate. Fill it with the occasional nice video talking about your work, a collection of albums you worked on, ideas you’ve discussed with people in and around your creative orbit… make it as cozy as the studio space you’d like to share with an artist, rather than frantically handing out flyers on a busy intersection.

“We have a problem,” I was told by the manager of the Platinum selling band we had in our studio.

The artist wasn’t comfortable with the writer I assigned for this interview.

This drops in my lap after a morning of pre-production by the studio team.

I didn’t know the back story, but something was stewing over an article from years before. In that moment, I laid it out; my writer is a professional, we’re all here to do a job, and we can either proceed as planned or cancel the whole thing.

Making a living (or at least paying the rent) with a small, engaged email list is possible, even as people with massive social followings struggle to pay their phone bill.

As someone shared in our recent “BREAK UP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” Zoom call, a big social media following might look good (as in, vanity metrics), but “getting more followers” isn’t the answer, but rather making sure the thing you’re offering is something people actually want to pay for.

Jazmin Jenay started HATTIE MAGAZINE, a “Black TV & Film PRINT magazine because I want generations after us to know who we are, and what we created beyond the digital timeline.”

“After working as a social media manager for the past few years I became extremely digitally fatigued but I couldn’t force myself to log out. The next casting, next connection, next opportunity most likely rested in me scrolling my thumb on social media. That left me wondering — what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow? We need something that can be held, a physical record of our brilliance.”

Wow, this line: “what will they know of us if the apps shut down tomorrow?”

This is why we build websites, start magazines, and build creative communities. Yes, setting up a website is hard, but so is starting a magazine! We do these hard things because they are worth doing.

As Casey Barber said in a recent Escape Pod call, having a website is, “an investment in your sovereignty, and your autonomy, and your you-ness, honestly.”