Category: Creator Confidential
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Permission marketing, consistent distribution
“My passengers surprised me,” Gavin says, remembering his early days. “I thought they would be silent or on the phone. But most people wanted to talk. When I mentioned my jewelry, they asked for business cards, but I didn’t have any.” That’s when a light bulb went off in his mind: Why stop at business…
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Philip Glass, on independence
I had an ensemble at the time. I would go out and play for three weeks. We would come back from the tour, and we usually had lost money so I had to make money immediately. I put an ad in the paper. My cousin and I ran the company, and I moved furniture for…
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Future fables
Aesop partnered with Literary Hub to release the second season of a podcast entitled Future Fables, where each episode is a bedtime story for adults in the form of the fable. There’s a lot to like about this, from the creative premise (“What sort of fables might its namesake—Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist—write [today]?”), to…
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“Work on your terms, at your own pace”
Max Alper received a DM from a student who has burned out making a living as a working musician in Brooklyn. For the sake of his mental health, the student told Max he was giving up on music altogether and applying to trade school. Max responds in an excellent letter, which I’m excerpting from: Not…
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Cash for longevity, not capital
If Nintendo was a person, a week ago it would have celebrated its 134th birthday. This type of longevity is rare; as my friend Hamza observes, the vast majority of companies that make it to a public listing stage don’t make it through half that time. In his book Nintendo Magic, Osamu Inoue takes a…
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Kirby and the power of polish
In 1991, Japanese game company HAL Laboratory Inc. was 1.5 billion yen in debt and had to bet its future on one game. It was called Tinkle Popo, featuring a rotund protagonist named Popopo. HAL Laboratory had planned to publish Tinkle Popo independently, and sold 26,000 pre-ordered copies. Nintendo—a HAL Laboratory client and investor—intervened; game…
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Anna Wintour on audiences
The relationship between creator and audience is one of leading and following. If you’re a creator, you may find that you’re best off making things that you wanted to see yourself; that your audience will follow you because they want the same thing. For me, I’m glad I caved into my instinct and found the…
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Write the book you want to live
On either fence of, “Write what you know,” I tend to lean towards writing about what I don’t know; “Write What Obsesses You,” as Meg Wolitzer describes it. A year after publishing Creative Doing, and a few years after the initial manuscript, I still pick it up and enjoy flipping through it. Although there are…
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Cut it in half
A constraint is the best way to start making creative decisions. One prompt I’d recently come across, from observing feedback on various drafts, is simply to cut the word count in half. How can I summarize? Would there be a good rephrasing that can keep the original intent? If not, what elements will I keep?…
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A little flame of talent
At Granta, Kent Haruf writes: When I finished that novel I wrote John Irving to ask if he would connect me with his agent, and he said he would. He said he had sent fifty writers to his agent and he hadn’t taken any of them, but maybe he’d take me. And he did: I…