Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

How to live as an artist: 1000 fans, 10000 readers, but it all starts with ten

How do people make a living through writing? Find 1,000 true fans. There are a few milestones along the way.

1,000 true fans?

Kevin Kelly wrote about the importance of finding 1,000 people who will pay for what you make.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version.

Paul Jarvis calls them his rat people:

Not literally “rat people”, unless rats really are your thing. I’m talking about the people that get what you do, appreciate it, and love you for it.

How do you get to 1,000 true fans? They’re going to be a subset of your wider audience. So you’ll need more normal fans. How many? Let’s take a look.

10,000 people who will read your work

You need people who check out your work regularly. They probably won’t pay for it, but they’ll give you some of their time. You can have a money-back guarantee, but you can never give readers their time back.

Let’s say they’re your mailing list subscribers. That’s a clear metric with a higher barrier than a Twitter follow or a YouTube subscribe.

Shawn Coyne says 10,000:

How hard is it to find 10,000 people who when handed a free copy by a friend would actually read it? If you can’t give ‘em away for free, chances are you won’t sell very many

Okay, so how do you get there? Let’s go back to the other end. Not 1,000. Or even 100. Find an audience that could fit in your living room.

First, ten

Seth Godin says you should focus on finding ten people who trust, respect, need, and listen to you.

And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If the first ten share with another ten, you’ll get to 100 and if they share with another 10, you’ll get to 10,000.

The great thing about the first ten is that they’re also true fans. They’ve into your empty restaurant and enjoyed it. They took a risk and you didn’t waste their time.

07: When did you realize wrestling is fake?

0:00:00 • Welcome! Wally talks slow motion
0:06:42 • Ces stumbles through explaining what keto is
0:19:04 • Wally recommends something manly
0:26:52 • When did you realize wrestling was fake?

Is that… Jason’s music?!

0:30:44 • Jason dials in before the biggest weekend of his life
0:39:15 • Which wrestler does Jason feel like?

We’re re-thinking the book-a-week format because we can’t read fast enough. Instead, we each recommend a couple of podcasts. Ces recaps the Iron Man Match between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels.

Video: Book notes for “Barking up the Wrong Tree” by Eric Barker

Check out the full notes for Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I want to keep things consistent and I want to prioritize consistency over quality right now. I’m going to look that story of the pottery teacher whatever it was. Right now I am making those first few dozen garbage ceramic cereal bowls.

Hopefully by episode say 20 things will start looking less like they’re full of trash plain Cheerios and more like bowls worthy of a Honey Bunches of Oats. I’m focusing on making things easy for myself right now so that I can get the reps in.

I made this with Notability. I used a storyboard template then I copied and pasted the images to a blank page to hide the storyboard lines. I then recorded while panning around the screen.

I would rather get really good at process than get really good at, say, After Effects. Quick math: I think After Effects would mean the video would take 5X as long but it wouldn’t be more than 2X better.

The outline, structure, and words are more important to how good the video is, so I’m going to focus my time toward improving there. I’ll write a little bit more before doing the actual recording. That means that I’ll know what I’m going to say and I can keep it more concise.

I don’t want to start editing the “umms” and “likes” and things like that out. That’s tedious. I’ll practice not saying them in the first place.

One day I hope I will look back at this and the embarrassed by it. Actually I’m already a little embarrassed by it right now so I can put the check that one off immediately.

Sketchbook: Working on a publishing schedule

I’ve been thinking about how to create a publication schedule. A lot of days I just don’t know what I’m going to work on in the morning. I’ll wake up and have a block of time in the morning.

I know that I want to do the morning creativity routine. After that though I know that I need to have a better idea of what I’ll work on.

I’ve read that it can be a good idea to separate writing and editing. I was doing some brainstorming for a schedule. This is a first draft and I can already see that it probably isn’t a good idea to work on four posts in a day. It should probably be more like working on two posts on any given day.

I’ll revise this to reflect. You can bet that I’ll share as I go along.

Sketchbook: Planning different time scales and appropriate books

I listened to Pat Flynn with the creators of the 5-Minute Journal. A few years ago they were thinking about all the things they’ve learned from reading about gratitude and wanted to make it easier to apply the principles. What came out of it was the five-minute journal.

I’ve been thinking about that this year quite a bit. I read a lot but a lot of the time reading would be better spent applying what I read. It reminds me of Eric Barker’s post where he says you should probably spend 30% reading and 70% applying what you learn.

I started outlining different timescales of planning and mapping them to books I’ve read that would be helpful while doing that phase of planning.

It goes from planning your year all the way down to the planning your day and time blocking.

At the extremes it goes beyond a year to where you are evaluating what you value. What are you planning to achieve in the first place and is that worth it? It goes down to kind of a minute level meaning being present for the most part. You can build an awareness and control over your mind and your attitude.

That’s the outline. I would love to expand on this in a proper post.

Sketchbook: Will Ferrell*

It took me three tries to remember his name has two Rs. I drew this while listening to Will Farrell’s appearance on the BS Report with Bill Simmons. I really liked this and it’s just another example of someone working very hard for many years before becoming an overnight success. From what I’ve read, I don’t think you end up on SNL without a ton of work. In Smartcuts, Shane Snow writes about how Jimmy Fallon became a cast member young relative to most cast members. Even he had to go through rejection and work very hard at it.