LOSE THE MAP

As Seth Godin says in his book Linchpin:

“The reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”

If you want a guarantee, buy a hammer.

Stop looking for tricks. There is no shortcut. There’s no “one size fits all.”

Make a painting, a photograph, a sad song, teach a course, call an old friend, dance like no one’s watching, cuz no one cares more than you do, so you might as well get to it.

START OVER

Photo by Seth Werkheiser

If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.

There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.

Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕

There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.

Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.

I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:

“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”

NO GOING BACK

Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):

“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”

Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.

Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).

There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.

Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist. 

That’s from Defector (above).

When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.

A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.

Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”

CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.

“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”

Cory Doctorow

BE KIND

In this post Dan Blank describes how we can now take a video and upload it in seconds for the world to see.

I take it for granted how easy it is to do with just WORDS on a screen! We’re all typing, and hitting post, or send, and whoosh it goes out there and people can read it on their computers, or their phones while in line at the drug store, or on the bus!

Then those words can take us on a journey, much like the post I’m talking about today!

They lead us on sharp turns and twists, and then we sit with them, and laugh, or cry, or leave comments, or share them with a friend.

HEAVY METAL EMAIL HITS 500 SUBSCRIBERS

I started my HEAVY METAL EMAIL newsletter in late 2021, writing all about email marketing in the magical music world, in a very niche sort of way. It’s not for everybody, and that’s just fine.

But it’s for 500 people right now, apparently.

This happened mostly without social media. I deleted Twitter, stopped posting on Instagram, and Facebook? My goodness, I never log in, really.

All that time saved creating “assets” for social media platforms, and “engaging,” now I just spend that time on writing. Hell, I moved to a summer schedule, posting just once a week, down from three times per week.

Most of the subscribers come from Substack, and recommendations from other people who also have Substack newsletters. And I picked up two new clients from writing the newsletter.

Maybe this “not being on social media” thing will work out fine.

CHATGPT IS YOUR ONE PERSON WRITING ROOM

Throw it a prompt, get a result, and tweak it. Edit it. Ask it to reword a sentence, or a concept. Have it summarize the last two lines, reword the intro.

Since you’re leading the writer room, you now hack it together with tape and glue.

You’re not just copy and pasting the results into an email to your client, or a pitch to your boss – you’re using your years of experience and wisdom to pull out the best parts, get your mind moving, and hopefully get to a few “light bulb” moments during the whole process.

I’ve been writing online since 2001, and chatGPT is a great automated computerized writing partner, and I’ve used it for my newsletters, small bits of client work, and some emails here and there.

For me, my biggest obstacle in starting any written project is the EMPTY PAGE.

So even if you just use chatGPT to start a written project, it can be huge.

– Write five social media captions about my new music video
– Write how this new video “hit me in the face like a ton of bricks”
– List some keywords I can use on YouTube for my project
– What big technology thing happened in 2007 (see attached image)?

Now, for anything factual (like big technological things in 2007), make sure you fact check! It’s not perfect, BUT, it’s a starting point.

Just like when things get thrown out in a writer room, you’re not going to put everything on paper and publish it the next day.

So yeah… try it out, at least to just get past the “staring at a blank page” problem. Edit. Rework things. Have fun!

ARTISTS ARE ALWAYS WORKING

From ‘The life and the work are equally important

“Let’s face it—artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.”

André Gregory

My goodness, I believe this to be true.

I feel like my creative life has had so many stops and starts, as if it must be one continuous flow to be valid, but this quote above reassures me I’m wrong.

(via Austin Kleon)