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You’ve heard the adage: "Good engineers code. Great engineers ship." Most techie adages don’t really fit fuzzies, but this one does. Good writers write. Great writers publish. The difference between creating and shipping seems almost trivial, but it's really the difference between a dreamer and a professional.
Creatives can’t sell, right? They don’t have the personality for it. Salespeople are gregarious, boastful. Creators are shy and studious. A great creator puts his heart into his production, then either hands it over to a sales professional or stews in impecuniousness until poverty makes him get a job at an insurance agency. At least, that’s how Kafka did it.
The reality is that if you want to create for a living, you need to learn to sell. Selling doesn’t necessarily mean cold calling and taking prospective clients out for a three martini lunch, though some of that still goes on. These days, selling means pushing your work out to let it speak for itself. With so many outlets, though, how do you determine the best way to get your work out there? Should you tweet it? Put it on Facebook? Post a video on YouTube? Start a blog? And when you do all of these and more, how do you promote it? How does your creative tree make a sound when it falls in the forest of commerce?
Think of selling as addition plus multiplication. You start out by letting friends and associates know about your work–one at a time. Addition. Then, as your work becomes known by enough associates, you’re ready for multiplication–to use of the force of mass media to spread the word to people you don’t even know. Each step is deliberate. Each step takes time and effort. There are no shortcuts. So while you’re excerpting a chapter on Facebook, you should also be sending it out to publishers and agents. Or, if you’re promoting a movie idea on Twitter, you should be posting a trailer on YouTube.
Don’t forget the professional storytelling media. After all, it's their job to write stories. And most of them need to write those stories several times a week, or even every day. That’s a lot of stories. Your job is to make sure you have a relevant, interesting story to tell. So, if you’re just out of college with a novel about your experiences, find a way to connect your work to an ongoing media narrative. Just the fact that a recent graduate has done something is unusual enough that you’re already going to pique some interest. Guess what? You're no longer an unemployed college student. You're now the newest voice of your generation!
Start hokey. Get mentioned in the local community blog. Then send a link from the blog to the city paper. Collect mentions, likes, press blurbs, testimonials. No one wants to be the first to write a story, but everyone wants to be second. Take advantage of the competitive nature of a 24-hour media cycle to play one media outlet off the other. You never know where your story might end up.
Momentum is your friend. Give yourself a few months to complete and push a particular creative project. After that, put the project on the back burner and start your next one. Creativity needs to be fresh and exciting. You have to stay enthusiastic if you expect someone else to be.
Remind yourself that the world always needs a new creative project and a new voice. Stake your claim in the conversation. But don’t just live in your own creative world. Get your project out. Don't just dream. Ship!
