Category: WorkCategory: Work

From a recent Email Guidance exchange, helping someone clarify what their paid offering actually is. What’s the thing they want to put into the world and invite people to support?

The big thing I feel with a lot of us creative people is we think we have this OFFER than people will want, and if we just word it the right way, or promote it enough, people will flock to it and pay us for it. Even if we’re good at it! We can do this stuff, hire me!

What I’ve found is instead leaning into the thing that’s ridiculously easy for us that could be the beacon that shines for the right sort of people that need what we offer.

Rather than turn ourselves into round pegs to fit into square holes, what if we doubled down on what comes natural?

I believe when we work from a space of almost supernatural flow we’re bound to attract the right sort of clients, co-conspirators, and allies.

This from Matthew Ferrara:

Imagine if you produced direct content as frequently as you produce social media content. But rather than 1% or 10% of people seeing it, it gets received by 100% of your audience. Got your attention?

Do you keep making Reels that 95% of your audience won’t see?

Or just email 10 people and reach all 10 of them?

Emailing 10 people means your might get rejected 10 times. That means making Reels is safer, because we know they’ll largely go unnoticed, but we still did “the right thing” according to mass marketing gurus.

You can come back to this post later, but for now put down the phone, or close the laptop, get up from the computer, and do the work.

You know what needs to be done. You know the next step.

That email you have to send, the print you need to finish, the form you need to fill out. They’re all small tasks and I know they can feel super big, but I promise putting off the tiny things will only compound.

Sari Azout of Sublime talks about a post with a million views doing very little in terms of revenue, but a video with far fewer views being more valuable.

“Attention is cheap and volatile. Trust is slow, expensive and durable, and I think if something reaches a lot of people but creates no relationship, that’s not distribution. That’s just noise.”

We don’t want to build for “eyeballs,” we want to build for the right audience, the right reader, the right fan. To make our work in our own weird, magical way that sends the right signal to the people who appreciate our weird, magical work.

“There’s a way to show up and promote your product where you feel authentically you, and your job is to figure out what that format is.”

There are jobs out there that are one of one, and that’s the job you’re hiring yourself for.

Got this bit from ‘Discoverability for illustrators’ by Tasha Goddard via Robyn Hepburn:

“While emailing is more about outreach than discoverability, I have heard that art directors and art commissioners will actually use the search facility in their email app (e.g. Outlook or Gmail) as a first point of call after any in-house databases – so they might type ‘room illustration, colourful’ or ‘collage illustrator, newspaper’ etc. into the search bar to see if they have been sent any work by a relevant illustrator.”

Keep this in mind when reaching out to art directors and venues and other people you’re pitching for potential opportunities.