195: Traversing the Dark Forests of Creativity and Business with Jessica Abel

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At first, what's happening is that you do have tons of ideas. You have tons of pieces that need to go together, but you haven't yet made the connections between those things that are going to turn this into something that's really, truly great. And the way out of it is to not think about the end result, but just think about the next tiny step you can take. What's one connection you can make between two elements of your project and then move it ahead and ahead and head. And at some point you kind of look around yourself and you realize like, oh, this is kind of coming together. This is kind of okay and you're out of the forest without really knowing how you did it.

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Welcome back Free Timers Jenny here. I am so excited to bring Jessica Abel to the show today. She's an author and indie cartoonist turned creative business strategist, founder of Autonomous Creative who has published a number of comics and prose books including Growing Gills, how to find creative focus when you're drowning in your daily life and one of my all time favorites for doing what I do every day on the mic out on the the storytelling secrets of the new Masters of radio. Jessica also hosts out on the Wire and the Autonomous Creative Podcasts. She is working on courses. She's writing great pieces around helping mid career creatives build businesses designed from the ground up to meet their financial needs without burning themselves out or sacrificing their creative integrity. Jessica, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I am super excited to be here.

You've had such a long arc in your creative career. I want to dive into this fundamental inception moment of creating anything in Growing Gills. You say that the essential problem with making Creative work is that you have to make it for yourself. You have to want to. You have to decide. It's worth your time and energy and the narrative that so many of us have. You write. Who am I to declare that this creation needs creating? Who needs this thing? Really? No one's asking me to make it that this is that moment that hurdles. I'm wondering if we can just dive straight into that moment that any of us would feel creating anything at all, which is, does the world really need this? Should I really pursue this?

Yeah, I think that is an existential dilemma moment that every creator of everything has to go through at some point in the process. Maybe multiple times. I don't know. It's the inception. Because I think at the very inception, you do want to do the thing. You're excited by it. It seems amazing. The possibilities are endless. It's after you get started and you're on that path to the Dark Forest that you start questioning, is it really worth it? Why does anybody want this thing? I'm incompetent. I can't pull this thing off. All that kind of stuff. It's unfortunately just part of the process. It is what it is to make creative work. You have to go through that. I mean, in a sense, it's sort of testing and questioning. Is this really a project that I'm committed to and that's a legit thing to do? I don't think that we need to skip that. It's important to question it, but it's also important to question why you are questioning it and make sure it's not simply out of comparisonitis or thinking, looking at what's out there and saying, I can't work at that level yet and so I shouldn't do anything. All those kinds of perfectionism, instincts that kick in, those are things that we need to work, to resolve. I won't say overcome, but to come to peace with in order to move forward. It is legit to actually look at the work and say, is this the work that I want to put my time into?

Yeah, that's a great point. It seems like sometimes, and I appreciate you clarifying, you're right, it's not necessarily the inception moment. Maybe it feels more like a pivotal moment in the process where there's so much excitement when an idea is new and resonant and it's like, yes, this is it. This is my idea. And you mentioned the Dark Forest. I'd be curious if you could just tell us what you mean when you say the Dark Forest. And do you think that there are several dark forests in the arc of any creative project? I know some of your books you worked on for 10 years, you know, so there must have been many dark forests. Yeah.

Yes, I have. And that's not only because of dark forest, that's also because of trying to do too many things at the same time. But the dark forest is an idea that, I mean, had experienced many times and had been dealing with, but got some terminology for it from Jad Abumrad of Radiolab when I was working on out on the Wire, and he did a talk ages ago now where he talked about the German forest. And the reason he said German forest is because he was working on a piece about Wagner. German forest doesn't make sense to anybody outside of that context. So I just use dark forest. But just the image of the dark forest, I think, resonates with almost any creative person. The time when you're in the middle of a project and it really isn't at the beginning when you're questioning what this should be and should I really focus on this? It's in the middle when you're really stuck in and you've got tons of stuff that you've made and it doesn't feel like it's coming together into anything, and it feels totally overwhelming, and you're just simply not capable of seeing it through to the other side. That's the dark forest. And does that happen multiple times? It certainly can. I think it depends on the scope of what you're trying to pull off. But I also think it's a long phase you kind of go in and out of, rather than not a literal one. Forest you walk through, obviously, but there's a whole arc that goes around that in creating work that's, I think, absolutely crucial when you're trying to do anything that's new in the world, anything that's truly challenging your own creativity, your limits. In some ways, you're trying to make something that's going to make a dent. In some sense, if you're not going through the dark forest, you should be worried that you're not trying hard enough, that it's not challenging enough, but the way it tends to play out. And this is something that I first heard from a really funny tweet from Kazu Kibuishi, this cartoonist who I interviewed out on the Wire, the podcast where. And I'm not going to get the actual wording wrong, but essentially you start off and the project is really exciting, say, this is great, and then the next stage Is, wow, this is hard. And that's when you start having those perfectionist feelings and doubting whether this is the project for you and are you the person to do it? And so on. You continue down this sort of into the dark forest, the darkest part of the dark forest, where you think, this is terrible. And then I am terrible. And then as things start to coalesce and come together, you think, well, this is okay. And then you come out the other side and you say, this is great. And I'm doing things with my hands that you can't see, but, you know, sloping down and then coming back up the other side. And what I've come to understand about that is that frequently when you're in that dark forest period, and it is a period that takes time at first, what's happening is that you do have tons of ideas, you have tons of pieces that need to go together, but you haven't yet made the connections between those things that are going to turn this into something that's really, truly great. And the way out of it is to not think about the end result, but just think about the next tiny step you can take. What's one connection you can make between two elements of your project and put things together. What's one work session you can do? And just execute on this three square inches of whatever the piece is that you're doing, and then move it ahead and ahead and head. And at some point, and that's the thing that Kazi was talking about, you kind of look around yourself and you realize, like, oh, this is kind of coming together. This is kind of okay. And you're out of the forest without really knowing how you did it.

I was thinking about that when I was rereading out on the Wire, because I got my copy probably in 2017, a couple years after it came out, hard copy. And then I've been rereading on Kindle, which is another delightful experience to go through each. I don't even know if it's a panel, but each little square and see it close up and flick through them that way has been really special. And I'm just thinking about what a tremendous amount of work it was that you must have put into this, of interviewing all these luminaries in the space, collecting what they're saying, creating the arc of the book, and how you want to teach these principles, not to mention the illustrating, creating each page. So I wonder if you can just take us into the process, using out on the Wire as an example, just because that one is not even from your own mind, you're having to pull together all these other pieces and keep going and probably navigate so many ups and downs with a project of that scope.

Oh, you have no idea.

I know, like, how many years start to finish? People probably ask that all the time, ironically.

Probably my shortest project, it was like three years start to finish, basically. And it was that short because it's pretty much all I was doing. I was on a residency in France for that period of time. I was working on my other book, Trish Trash, but not as much. And I wasn't teaching, and I was parenting and living in a small town and had very few distractions. And so I got through it relatively quickly. But it was a brutal dark forest on that book, for sure, because it's a book about storytelling. And I was trying to create a story at the same time. I was, like, living at two or three levels all the time, where every time I would open my notes, somebody would be talking to me about what I was going through right now, which was very odd.

Yes. And then you're even illustrating yourself into the book, right?

Well, that actually came later because the drawing part, especially with this book, I finished the entire manuscript in panel format with all the dialogue and all of the descriptions and everything. And that's what I went back and forth with my editor on and tightened it up and changed things. And then we went into the drafting phase of making the artwork. I did have some stuff planned out, but basically I was creating written descriptions of what was gonna happen in those panels. I don't do that for every single book, and it's not necessarily standard, but that's what I did here. For example, there's this whole thing with Robert Smith and Zoe Chase where they're talking about how they're in the dark forest. When I was interviewing them about a piece that they were working on something about it was for Planet Money, and they were working on something about that was going on in China. And they're like, oh, I don't know what to do, and you want to throw things out and whatever. They're describing what it's like to be in the dark forest. And Robert says, you should send a postcard to your. Because I'm going to be in the dark forest. I'm in the dark forest. And I said, I know I'm going to be in the dark forest soon. And he said, you should send a postcard to yourself now, telling yourself how great your ideas are so it'll show up at the right time. And I felt like I was very much in the dark forest of 200,000 words of logs of interviews, trying to sort through what they meant and what the through line of the book was going to be. You know, was it going to be a narrative book? Was it going to be a book that was, as it turns out, as a sort of thematically organized book, more of an essay? And found that interview and listened to that interview when I was just absolutely in the depths of it, and it was like I had sent myself a postcard.

That's so cool. And it's no pressure, right? Because you're only interviewing these people who are so detail oriented about storytelling and editing and have such specific and sort of high taste around the art form itself. So I don't know, did you feel pressure when you were working on it to.

Oh, not at all, no. I wasn't worried at all about standing up to this American Life and Radio Lab and Planet Money and all the other shows. The snap judgment. I mean, yes, like with snap judgment, I wasn't telling the kind of story they tell. But the structure of the book is similar to the way this, a narrative podcast is structured. There's a lot of visual analogs in the book to audio, so that there are depictions of myself and other me talking to Ira Glass, and we're drawn in this kind of flat black and white cartoony style that's essentially. That's equivalent to the narrative part or the sort of voiceover part of a narrative podcast. And then there are kind of man on the street type interview clips. And that's the equivalent of the tape that you are incorporating into a narrative podcast when you're cutting those things together. You know, music is the visual style. There's all different ways that I was thinking about what I was doing visually as related to what happens at the audio level. But that required a whole process of figuring out what are my visual metaphors. How can I create visual metaphors that will really evoke the audio and evoke the, you know, pattern myself on the story structure of the way this American Life story would be put together.

I want to loom ahead a little bit because the book itself was smashingly successful. Right. I mean, just by the people receiving it, you can put it in your own words, but it did really well. It got a lot of word of mouth. I hope that the people you featured in it were thrilled. What I appreciate about you is that when you were recently writing on your website about cyclical burnout and hustle culture, you're saying, yes, by all objective measures, the Book was a success from the outside, but let me take you behind the scenes and tell you what. What was really going on or how I was really feeling. And you've been said that you had been in a similar situation many times of feeling trapped, victimized by the very work I'd spent so many years mastering. That just creating the thing and even having the thing do really well doesn't necessarily mean that it translates to this, I don't know, windfall of abundance in the business, that there's still a business backend to all this creative effort that is often really tough to piece together and figure out. It's just not always what people would assume from the outside.

Yeah, very much so. I do think the book was and is very successful. There are many, you know, people who are in the book, were really happy about it. Ira Glass does talk about it from the stage when people ask, you know, what should I do? He's like, read out on the wire.

That's awesome.

So, like, that's awesome. You know, that's just such a boost. And all the reviews were great and all of those things. But the fact is that the business model of being an author, which is spend a lot of years and put huge amounts of effort into a really awesome creative project, and then earn like a dollar per sale for the future and hope that you can sell to enough people that that will continue to pay your bills in the future. It will pay you back for the time that you spent on it and also in the future. I'm saying this in a very sort of crude way, and there are other ways that obviously authors make money, but in terms of making money from the actual book itself, that's what it is. Although I had made what for me was a big advance, wasn't a big advance, but for me it was. It hadn't covered my expenses for the period of time, not even close for the period of time of making the book. And now I'm still in a position eight years later of paying back that advance. Like, I still have not earned out the book and won't probably in the foreseeable future, which is very, very normal. I don't feel like I'm particularly victimized or something by this system more than anybody else. But when I published the book, I knew that it would have, you know, be received well and that it had a good chance of reaching lots of people and having lots of influence. And I hoped what would go along with that is that I would be paid for it. And I just hadn't done the math. I just hadn't figured out what exactly that would mean. That it would mean something like making 100,000 sales in a year and at least 50 to 100 for many years after that. It has never cracked 25,000 yet. And it's still a very successful book. So the scale of difference there, there just no one had ever kind of laid that out for me. I had never gone and said, well, what does that literally mean? And I, like many authors, I think we go through life with the kind of dual awareness one is this project is amazing. I love this project. I'm so excited about it. This needs to exist in the world. I really, really want to be doing this thing. And there's a part of your brain, though, which says, and it's a really good idea commercially, this is going to work. This is going to make money. My life is going to come together around this totally. I'm finally going to not have to work so damn hard all the time. I'll get royalties coming in and I'll be able to relax into my next book and really give it the space and the time, the abundance of my attention that it needs. And that's just basically never true. That's not how it works.

We'll be right back just after this.

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You and I have almost identical situations with my second book, Pivot. You were so generous to share your stats in this article and I'll link to the article in the show Notes. And very similar to you. It came out seven years ago. It has yet to earn out the advance. And yet both of our books have probably performed in the top 2 to 1% of book sales. And yet to earn out means you need to be within the 1%. And these numbers, it's like I don't Know, with every book I write, I have the hopeful delusion, like, this is it. Exactly what you just said. Like, this is it. This one's really going to hit. This one's going to hit a tipping point and it will start to sell itself. And I think you and I both have had books out on the wire in a way. Does do that. People do tell. Ira Glass tells it from the stage. People read it, they love it, they share it. And it's still not. I don't know if anyone thinks it sounds easy to sell 100,000 books or whatever the number might be to earn out the advance, but it's wild how slow that it goes. And I got really pissed recently when I saw I was earning a dollar a book. I felt like I've been trying to sell, pivot and earn out the advance for seven or eight years. And it just made me angry, realizing I feel like publishers, there should be some cliff where, like, when they've earned out, the author starts getting $2 a book or $3 a book. Because we're the ones selling it. The long tail. Yeah. We're the ones that five years later, when they've long since forgotten about it, are still out there doing the work of selling it. So it does make me a little angry.

Oh, it makes me so angry. Like, people who work in publishers are desperately underpaid. Okay. They are our editors. They need more money. I think that's true. However, they are paid enough to live in New York City and have health insurance. And who's making the books? Who can't pay their bills and can't get health insurance and, you know, all those other things, and of course, racking up profits at the corporate level, all of those things are completely out of whack and make me crazy. And, I mean, you are, I think, a great demonstration of how the book itself isn't how you make your money. I mean, you made an advance, which is fabulous, but it's not really how you make your money. You have a business that teaches the principles that you've written about in various different ways. And that's how authors do it. Authors do it by using their book as a platform. If you're a fiction author, you're using your book as a platform to be a teacher, probably. If you're a nonfiction author, you may be a teacher. You may have business programs, you may do coaching, depending on what it is you do. Speaking. There's various ways to leverage the intellectual property of a book into something else. But if what you want to do is Sit around and write books. That's not helping you.

Right. Or host podcasts.

It's the same delusion, same thing. Yeah. And the other thing is, like, the one thing you said is a hundred thousand doesn't sound like that much in our world. Right. A hundred thousand sales. But I found a statistic, and I'm not going to get this right, but it's something like maybe 10 books a year hit 100,000.

It's like this, wow.

Ridiculously tiny number or percentage wise, it's like 0.01% or tiny number of books. And so if anybody's like a hundred thousand, you know.

Right. I could do that.

Whoever sells a hundred thousand of whatever. Yeah. It's not that easy. It's just not that easy.

And there's something happening now. I never try to be pessimistic at all, saying it's hard, it's impossible. I hated when people told me that about my dating life. Like, oh, dating in New York City, it's impossible. Okay, If I believed that, I'll just give up now and be alone for the rest of my life. Like, I had to hold some hope. And I did meet my husband walking down the street in New York City. So I felt very redeemed by this delusional optimism. Now, with that caveat said, people are buying fewer books in some ways. Like our attention span is so much lower and the people who love books still buy them. And I know that books selling had a surge in the pandemic, but it's not as easy as you think.

Well, and there are thousands and thousands of books coming out every year too. So the long tail is very divided among many, many people. But, you know, the vast majority of books don't sell more than like 250 copies.

I know, it's so interesting. I read some wild stat too, that is like, even a majority don't even sell 10 books. And it's like, that's really bonkers. Cause you think you could at least cajole your family members to buy 10 books.

So I want to talk about the three big business models that you've landed on that you've really seen creatives take as viable paths. Before we get there, I mentioned this article that you wrote about cyclical burnout. And I think your perspective on cyclical burnout is very interesting because it's like, oh, wait, I keep doing this to myself, even with good intentions. I'll speak for myself. I've been there. I think so many of us have been there, even when we're self Employed even when we're working on stuff that we love so.

Even more so.

Yeah. Can you explain what you mean by cyclical burnout?

I mean, just to be clear, like, I was literally in cyclical burnout as I was writing the cyclical burnout article. So it is a very relatable concept. This is something I formulated recently where I realized that this is so related to everything we've been talking about so far. That that dark forest arc of creation where you are so excited about something and then you go through the dark forest and you come out the other side with something better, stronger, and have this creation. That cycle is very related to flow. It's related to all of our creative dreams and what we really, really want out of our lives. Creating these whatever medium it is, doing something really new in the world, and it's just really exciting and pushes your edges. That's sort of our human imperative as creative beings and that's pushing forward all the time. But then you have this dual awareness as a person living in a capitalist society where you can't unfortunately just, you know, go outside and graze, you know, to care for yourself, you have to have money coming in. That wanting to spend time on this creative work or feeling like this creative work, it's a form of communication. It needs an audience. It needs people. On the other side. There's this part of you that's thinking, this is a great idea and it's got legs and it's actually going to break through. It's going to make money for me, it's going to be the thing. But then you go through this intense creation period, and as you're doing that, the drumbeat of and I need to make money because I'm running out of time is getting louder and louder. You get to the other side of that, you finish the thing, you kind of go, oh, here it is. Hello, world. And you kind of put it out there. And for most people, you just put it out there and you're so exhausted, number one. And number two, you're so broke that you immediately have to start something new. You don't have time to really see the project through and make sure it actually lands the way it needs to land. That's actually something I've really admired about your work, Jenny, is that you spend a lot of time and attention making sure your work lands, which I love about what you're doing.

Thank you. I appreciate that so much. It feels like way too much effort. Like I'm too spent to even think about something new.

Well, because you actually put effort, you actually make that part of the project. And most people don't, the vast majority of people just don't. They just hope that it's going to land somewhere at some point by magic and they're onto the next thing. And the next thing is often at that point you're pretty burnt out from that project and you've got an income gap at that point that you have to fill. So that's when gig work comes up. Adjuncting, you know, adjunct teaching, getting a day job, really anything you can do to keep yourself going financially. And then you're totally overloaded. You've got too much stuff going on. But as a creative person, eventually you come up with more ideas and you want to do a new thing, you get excited again and the cycle starts over. And yet the older things that you've been doing, that first project, second project, third project, they're still there. They're still wanting you to complete them somehow. And so you have the snowball effect and it just repeats and repeats and repeats because there's no point at which you figure out how to kind of do what you're doing, Jenny, and like spread out, make time, make space for seeing a project all the way through.

And I have to say, even what looks like from the outside of me doing that, there's so many dark forests on the other side. I mean, I've definitely hit it. I shared a little bit about this in the one year post, the one year bookiversary for free time. But I'll hit months where I'm like, I don't have anything in me to push it out into the world anymore. And I definitely get back on the hopium of like, I just hope that the serendipity comes in or somebody mentions it or I get some sign from the universe that it's not all on me. And I'm always willing to meet a project halfway and I have to navigate these own periods, especially in the marketing and trying to get a project to really take off in the world. It's not that nobody talks about it on the other side, but I feel like there's less conversation about keeping going.

When it's the marketing. And I say marketing because it's the part of the process that's less aligned to my innate personality. Let's say that I'm not saying marketing is bad. I'm sure some people love it. But I love being a hermit, creating the thing going from 0 to 1, a figment of my imagination, making it real and then keeping it Alive. It's like a whole different skill set.

It definitely is. And I think that again, as creatives, we make things and put them into the world because we want people to receive them. We want to have a full loop of communication, we want to have an impact. We want people to really take what we've done, this amazing effort we put into a work, and have it change them somehow. And that's marketing. That's where marketing happens. We want it to happen magically, that people will somehow wake up one morning and think, I need to go to the store and buy out on the Wire. That doesn't happen. So. So somehow we have to let them know that this is a thing they might want to check out. It's wonderful when other people talk about it and we don't have to do the work. But as you pointed out earlier, no one cares about this as much as you do. No one can. It's not possible for anybody else to care about it as much as you do. That's why it keeps coming back to you. For creatives, if we're able to reframe it as building a bridge to your work, making it easy for people to understand why they want to spend time and attention, nevermind money, on what you do, then I think that can really help.

I love that way of thinking about it, building a bridge and making it easy for people to find out about it. With out on the Wire, you had so many notable industry people who were involved. Did you feel that that one took on a natural momentum of its own, bolstered by all these people, or were you doing a lot to get it to the point where it really did take off within this world of storytelling, podcasting, radio, et cetera.

I mean, a little bit of both. I think there's certainly an initial momentum of, you know, very briefly had the services of the marketing and sales and PR departments of Random House, so they were helping me get the word out in various places. And there's definitely natural word of mouth that goes with this book, but it's never going to be enough that years ago, and I mean like two, three years ago, I would still frequently open up social media when I open it, I would frequently see people mentioning out on the Wire, showing pictures of it, talking about it way less now, way less often. And I think it's just as relevant, just as useful, just as important as it was when it came out. But that long arc has just diminished.

It's so tricky having the desire to keep getting it out, but being seven or eight years into A project and just wondering, what now? What next?

It's interesting rereading it this book. It is so rich that when I first read it in 2017, it came out in 15. I was so early in podcasting, there was no way I could have even absorbed 10% of what I read. And so now when I'm rereading it, having worked with Jay Acunzo, who's a previous guest on the show, working with the One Stone creative team, like there are things now that I can understand in a reread that, as you said, are just as relevant as they were before. And so it is so helpful for readers to discover it, rediscover it. Hopefully we're giving it a little new life sharing it here today.

I also really think of it as something. I mean, I'm a cartoonist, although I have some podcasts. I don't think of myself as an audio person particularly. But the principles that are in the book apply to prose, they apply to comics, they apply to film, anyone who's trying to tell a story. It's a relevant book, but that's something that we've never been able to get people to understand at scale.

Yes, there's a little extra work I'm finding that, for example, with free time and corporate, I've given a few talks in corporate. I knew I didn't write it for them. I wrote it as a love letter to business owners and specifically heart based business owners. And it's like, oof. That's when you really have to get your bridge building grafting boots on, as the Brits would say. It's like, oh, I have a bigger bridge to build because it's not obvious that it's for them. And yet I know when I'm in person people resonate and there's a lot that clicks. I talked to one of my friend whores, mbs about this on the show. It can be hard sometimes working on a next creative project or launching the next thing when a previous one was actually very successful. Do you ever have feelings of that, that you have the success of out on the wire and even though it hasn't earned out the advance, so many great things happened around it. Do you ever find that it's hard not to measure the next things you do against even your own success, let alone anyone else's?

For sure, definitely. I think there's an element of that. But one of the commercial failings of my career is that I've done so many things in so many different areas that it's rare to have an apples to apples comparison. My book, Growing Gills, which you referenced earlier, that's a prose book that's aligned with my coaching for creative focus. Getting the big projects that have no deadlines, getting those things done, that's what that's about. I have a book called Trish Trash, Roller Girl of Mars, which, guess what it's about Roller Derby on Mars, you know, so fun. I have a graphic novel called La Perdita that's fiction, but sort of realistic fiction that takes place in Mexico City. I'm just all over the place. So the process of creating out on the Wire taught me so much about being a storyteller. I miss the big storytelling project that I haven't really had the bandwidth to get into in the last few years in terms of the commercial success of the project. I mean, I haven't done another book that's sort of like that. Again, where I would have that question.

Yeah, in a way it's good you're giving yourself permission to follow your interests, which is the message of the book, your creativity. You're not getting stuck in a format even though that one worked. I love growing gills. I love what you're talking about there and the work you're doing now. Even with fellow creatives saying it doesn't have to be this hard.

Yeah, well, I mean, I will never say creativity isn't hard. It is hard. It's really hard. But I think we can layer on all kinds of things that make it harder. And in particular stuff, there's just so much perfectionism that people get into that sort of relates back to what you asked about in the beginning. People just get really, really stuck. And I think the number one thing that I've figured out over seven plus years of doing, coaching and creative focus, is that the key to getting the big creative work done, the really big projects, is actually self compassion and taking the level of pressure down. It's not projectizing the hell out of everything and deadlines. So many people come to me wanting to improve their discipline and I'm like, you don't know. You don't want to improve your discipline. Rather turn it the other way around and figure out why are you still trying to do things in a way that just never worked? Like that's never worked. So let's do something differently. Let's do it differently.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I know we teased the business model piece a little bit. You've also figured out some real structure around that piece. Can you share with us those three main types of business models that you see creatives being able to lean on to support their creative work?

Sure. You know, it all ties together. There's three main I would hesitate to say business models that seems too fluffy or gooseier than that, but the three paths, three directions that creatives tend to take or can take to attain sustainability with their creative work. And one of them is a little bit what we've been alluding to of just mass marketing. You know, when you're an author and you're Depending on those $1 sales, you've got to make a lot of sales. That means you got to do a lot of marketing and really, really devote yourself to that. And I know people who are successful at that kind of business. It's just not for me, and generally speaking, not for most of the people I meet who are creatives. They're just sort of like that's not the part I'm interested in. And that's what happens when you have a really low cost offer and really low cost meaning up to several hundred dollars, maybe even close to $1,000. If you have to make a lot of sales, you have to do a lot of marketing. And the second path is to take the pressure off your creative projects and not try to make money from them. Which doesn't mean you don't focus on them. It doesn't mean you don't look for an audience for them. But that's not how you care for yourself and your family. You're not trying to do that. And for a lot of people, that is the best choice. And that means fixing a lot of things in the rest of your life. So if you're trying to make lot of low cost things, make money, that's probably why you don't have time for your creative work. Because you're too busy trying to make ends meet. And so looking for a different way to make ends meet that's going to pay you better for less time is the way to make time for your creative work. I think I said that in a kind of a complicated way, but basically it's like get a better day job that is fewer hours and pays you more. Move someplace cheaper and reduce your expenses so that you can pay your bills more easily. This isn't the dream that a little kid who dreams of being an artist thinks of. Like I'm going to live really cheaply and have a day job. Like that's not on the list. But that's actually some of the happiest people I know who are explosively creative and make all kinds of things have an audience, have an impact, that's what they're really doing. Because they just don't have to worry so much about making creative work, pay the bills which can really distort the work. And then the third path is to have a higher ticket business of some kind where you make fewer sales at a higher price point. Usually that means a service business for creatives. But I do have clients who have commission based businesses. Like I have a client I work with who is a portrait artist, for example, another client who makes bass guitars. You know that there is an element of creating objects, but what it's not is being a fine artist in the gallery system and creating works of art of your own and then trying to sell those which that can also work. But it's a whole other ball game trying to think about how do you build a collector base for self generated work. It's really tricky.

Yeah. Being married to a fine artist, a contemporary artist, I've learned so much about the scene. And there's this genius guy, Brad Tramiel, who really tears the capital a art world apart of the pyramid scheme that it is. Starting with getting your mfa. And you realize that first of all, the vast majority of artists have a patron or a spouse who pays the bills, like straight up, if they want to have pure artistic job, expression or a job.

Yes.

I guess I'm saying short of having a full time job, anyone that you know, that's full time, an artist, let's put it that way, usually has a patron or a spouse that can fund that. If not a full time job, that definitely is a third and even Then the few, the very percentage. Just like we were talking about the book industry who have a gallery or have gallery representation, they're now torn between creating what's commercial, what the gallery wants from them, what those end clients want from them. That might make it into a big fancy art fair, but has nothing to do with what their heart or their artistic impulse is pulling them to do. So even when they make it into that top 1% of artists trying to earn a living purely from their art, there is still that conflict of creating what's commercial versus creating from the pure inspiration.

Yeah, and there's tons of problems in the grant world and the museum world and it's really complicated. So yes, when I talk to people who are, you know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who are committed mid career creatives, do amazing work, this is kind of what I lay out for them. I say we're not going for the strike of lightning that luck could bring. Sure, that could happen, but let's plan for success. These are the three options. Do you want to go down this path of low cost products mass marketing, which also can really distort your work because you're trying to make things that will sell. Do you want to try to design your life around making time for creative work within the structure of other stuff you need to do to take care of your life, including caring for your family members? You know, if you have various kinds of neurodiversity or chronic illness, like all of those things come into that picture. And then the third thing is, do you want to design a high end or high ticket business of some kind that's designed around what you do, what you really are great at, and matching that up with something clients need and will pay for.

Thanks for laying those out so clearly. And on that third one, playing with your pricing, like you even say in the article that you might need to raise your prices because there is just some math that is not gonna pencil if you don't. That's a common theme here on Free time is give yourself a raise.

And actually, I mean there's so much pushback in the creative world around that, like, oh, you know, I don't deserve it, my people can't pay that or it feels really greedy or whatever. I start with the math. I start with what do you actually need to live a life free of daily anxiety about paying bills and taking care of your current and future needs? So paying off debt, saving for retirement, making sure that if you go out to the movies and dinner, God forbid you don't blow up your mortgage payment, you need to have margin. But I call this the enough number. Because people can identify with the idea of enough. And if I say be abundant, they're just like, what are you talking about? So really figuring out a super, super honest number, and then look at what your capacity is in terms of how many clients could you handle or how many products could you create? Then it's simple math. Divide one by the other and you know what your pricing needs to be. And often people do that and their heads blow up. They're just like, I cannot believe. What are you telling me that's not possible? I just had a pricing conversation with a client the other day where he kept coming back to me and saying, okay, well, you know, it's going to be this price, but that'll be for custom jobs. But then my standard, and I'm like, no, that's your base price. That's like the standard, and you only go up from there. And this is why we went back to the math. And when you do that math, which is a little painful, but when you do it, it can really give you the strength to figure out that problem and to solve that problem. How am I going to design something that will work at that price point? How can I find the people who can pay that kind of money? All those kinds of things, you will figure them out if you know that this is just non negotiable. This is how I can live.

Yes. And this is how I can get out of that cyclical burnout of giving, giving, giving, giving so much because you care so much, and yet then paying the price, doing it over and over again.

Yes, exactly.

So, Jessica, if you could leave fellow business owners and creatives with a permission slip to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Going off what we just talked about, it would be to actually do your math and figure out what makes sense for you. But I would actually give two permission slips, which the other one is, you do not have to make your living from your creative work in order to be the real thing. You can be the most legit, real, true to the core, artist, creative writer, anything, without that being the way that you make your money, any of your money, all of your money doesn't matter. Money does not have to come into the picture at all in terms of your legitimacy. And this is a question people have all the time, because every time they do something cool, people around them are like, oh, you could make money with that. Or every time they talk about being an artist, their relatives are like, well, you can't make money at that. Like, none of those things are relevant when it comes to making work that has an impact. That is the real thing that expresses something that you need to express, starting from that point and then going, okay, do I want to make money with this, or is this the work that I want to be making? Is this the work that is worth rearranging my life around? Those are the questions you need to ask.

So good. And I'm even at a point where I'm just experimenting. It's like, can I make a living from the things I would consider my art? I don't know. I'm going to try, but it's. It might not work. Like, if it doesn't work, I'm gonna have to reconfigure things again. So maybe there's also some permission around dropping the money issue about it altogether and then also to do some experiments. Just one more quick thing we can have. Like, the one next step for people to take is also doing the math. Is there a permission slip that you want to give or could give that would help people do the math? Because, I mean, of course, any business owner or creative on some level knows that they got to do the math to make it all work. But what's getting in the way? What permission do we need to give for people to, like, really face the numbers in a new or different way?

I don't know if it's permission so much. Like, we're so underprepared, generally speaking, to deal with numbers and money, especially as creative people. We get no training about that in school. I'm doing a professional practices class right now with my students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. And I asked them all, we were doing a budgeting unit, and I was like, who's ever learned about this at home anywhere? No one had learned it. I think the permission is really to feel okay about not knowing anything about it. Like, that's fine. You don't need to know. You don't have to have the answers to this upfront. And it will take some work to figure it out. I'm a huge fan of the app Ynab. You need a budget. I don't know if anybody's talked about that here, but that's like, life changer. Love it. And that will help you understand what your enough number really looks like. I have a calculator thing I can share that might help people. It's not permission. It's just, like, a tool. But, yeah, I'd be happy to share that with Your listeners.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I'll put that in the show Notes. Is there anywhere else you want to point people? I'll link to this great article on cyclical burnout that's like multiple pages. It's really done well. Anything else that you want to point people to to learn more or keep in touch or even work with you?

Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear from anybody who is interested in making sure that the work that's truly important to them gets done in their Life. I'm@jessicaable.com and I have lots of resources there of various kinds, so please check it out. I'd love to hear from you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica. Thank you for being you and creating all the brilliant work that you have in the world. It really is a gift that keeps on giving to me, to so many people and not just out on the wire. Everything you create and the way that you're putting your unique creative spark out into the world and even on a coffee mug, as I saw before we hit record. So awesome. Thank you. And I know how much work goes into everything you create. So truly, truly, it's made such an impact on me and I'm so delighted to be in touch. And we have to give a shout out to Jeffrey Davis, who made the connection. So thank you, Jeffrey.

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, it's a labor of love sometimes. It's a labor of deep frustration. But I'm so happy when I get to have a conversation like this and really dig into all these issues. It's just really a pleasure for me. So thank you.

Likewise. Thank you. Big thanks everybody for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day. And you got this through all those dark forests. I'll be thinking of you. Thanks again, Jessica.

Yeah, thank you.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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