476 - Craft What You're Selling & the Perfect “Button” to Sell It

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1:03A Creative Pep Talk.

1:12Hey, you're listening to Creative Pep Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. And this show is just everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice. Let's get into it.

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3:17So my 16-year-old daughter is a huge fan of the band Boy Genius. And don't get me wrong, I love a bunch of their songs, but it's different for her because she sees something in the band that I can't quite see. So the few times I've seen videos pop up with them on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and they're at the Grammys or they're doing interview, I try to save those so that I can watch them with her and we can kind of bond over it. If you don't know Boy Genius, they are considered a kind of super group in the indie music scene and probably even beyond that in the music world in general. They are Grammy award winning and they're made up of three super critically acclaimed singer songwriters, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julian Baker.

4:13Now, in these videos, we've kind of developed a favorite in the interviews and these little moments where they're talking, and it's Julian, Julian Baker, because she is extremely vulnerable and earnest in a way that is equal parts inspiring and just hilarious. And in one video, she laments that maybe she's not actually a musician, but rather a t-shirt commercial. This is because with the state of music and the sales of actual music plummeting over the past two decades plus, merch sales are how most musicians keep the lights on. Even mega pop stars often don't start building wealth until they get into fashion, which let's just face it, that's just really fancy merch.

5:11And I don't know if anyone knows the particulars of how Kanye West went from being$53 million in debt to being valued in the billions before his whole recent public debacles and major issues. But at one point, he was valued in the billions, and it was almost certainly the merch, the fashion, the Yeezys that played a huge part in keeping all of the lights on, if you know what I mean. If this is the case for most musicians, why would it trigger someone like Julian to have this type of imposter syndrome when it comes to how they make a living, how they keep going as a musician? I have a feeling that it's a deeper issue than just the state of the music industry.

6:13When Julian says that she fears she's not a musician, but a t-shirt commercial, what is implied here is that you are defined by how you make money. That how you make money defines what you are as a person. And because you don't make the money on the music directly, then you must not be a musician. and how we define ourselves as artists is something that we all get hung up on from time to time. Like, am I a real artist? Am I a hobbyist? Am I high art or low art? How we define ourselves can be really debilitating and get in our head when it comes to showing up and being creative. Now, this was probably just an offhanded comment.

7:01Like, I don't have any proof that this concern keeps her up at night. I don't know. But regardless, I think it's a shame. Not only because I think defining ourselves by how we make money is maybe not so good for the heart, but because I'm just sick and tired of artists being made to feel guilty about how they have to survive and how they have to get by in the world. People will work in day jobs, spending all of their life energy working for a corporation that is killing the planet and then scrutinize artists for selling a t-shirt or making a brand deal. And it's just really frustrating. And I'm just sick and tired of artists being super generous with their profits and letting everyone and their mothers take a cut of their sales.

7:54And recently, I even heard that some music venues are trying to get in on the merch table action. and I just nearly flipped. Like it just made me sick. Like the merch table is the last ditch effort musicians have at getting a chance to pay their bills doing what they love. And you want a cut of it? You know, they already sell your booze and you take a cut at the door. Like it just feels like the same tale of artists having empathy for everybody but themselves and letting like, well, they deserve it. They work really hard that, well, I couldn't do it without them, whatever. Like, okay, yes, I'm game to pay people what they deserve when they're involved in the process.

8:41But at the same time, I'm just sick and tired of artists having to apologize for needing to eat. Now, in this video, Julian's bandmate, Phoebe Bridgers, doesn't seem as concerned about being a t-shirt commercial as Julian is. So whereas Julian has this like glorious aura of being too precious and angelic for this cruel world, like she's like a sensitive singer-songwriter, Phoebe, on the other hand, comes across much more like a trickster pragmatist and seems damn good at selling merch too. If you know of Phoebe Bridgers and you picture her in your mind, you're probably imagining her in her quintessential look, which is a black top and black pants with a white skeleton print on it.

9:35And she's wearing it on her Spotify profile and on the cover of her album Punisher. She's wearing a fancy version on the red carpet. And even when she played on Saturday Night Live, she's wearing the skeleton look. Now, I'm not claiming that this is all just merch strategy, but this kind of Donnie Darko vibe doesn't just match her aesthetic and her music. It's also incredibly simple in terms of production. So it's one layer of screen printing on black garments. Now, if you make art for a living or if you have ever sold products, you know that's just good profit margin right there. And she currently has a pair of these sweatpants, the skeleton sweatpants in her online shop with bones printed on the front and back.

10:25And they read Phoebe Bridgers across the butt. And of course, they're sold out, baby. You know, like people want these. So I don't know how much of this was leaning into the need to be a t-shirt commercial. But either way, I just have to say, bravo. in a world where beloved musicians have to struggle to get by, she seems to have had some real success in that area. And I just really praise her for that. And I'm really happy for any of my favorite musicians to figure out how to make that work in a world that's made it very difficult for them to do so. And hey, it's also great merch. It's just really cool.

11:08It looks kind of like an x-ray. And I feel like that even captures something about what defines her music or rather what's beyond definition about her music. Because while I don't think how she keeps the lights on define her or her as a musician, how she shines her light with her music into her audience is kind of like an x-ray. It exposes something on the inside of these people that they have no other way of seeing. And that's why my daughter isn't just a casual fan like I am. She needs the merch. This merch is magic. It's like a reverse invisibility cloak that instead of concealing who you are, it makes you more seen.

11:57That's why she loves the music. She sees something in it that I can't. She sees herself in a light that she's never seen before. And this is why it matters that you figure out how to keep the lights on as an artist. And by the way, do you know what the X in x-ray stands for? Because I figured I did. I thought I must know what that stands for. And I just forgot. I started thinking about it. I was like, I can't quite put my finger on it. And if you just pause for a second, just see if you can guess, if you don't know. Is it extraneous rays, extra rays, extemporaneous rays? I couldn't think of what it was, but I was like, I have to know.

12:39It's such a common thing. But I looked into a little bit and I was delighted to find out that the X stands for unknown. The German scientist that discovered x-rays was like, whoa, I don't even know what this crazy light spectrum is. It's wild and it's beyond words. It's indefinable. Let's call it x-rays. And it got me thinking, like maybe part of the problem with getting so caught up with defining ourselves by how we make money isn't just that it's the wrong way to define ourselves, but rather that defining ourselves is kind of missing the whole point of being an artist. Because when an artist really hits us the way that boy genius hits my daughter, when it really cuts you to the core, if you try to define it or you try to put your finger on it, like what about this is doing this thing within me, the best compliment that you can have, the highest praise you have for art is that you can't define it.

13:49It's something undefinable. And it's why we call it the X factor because it's unknown. It goes beyond words. It goes beyond definition. So the next time you're thinking, am I really a fine artist if I have to sell more postcards than paintings? Or am I a real artist if I have to have another job to keep the lights on? Use these thoughts as a reminder that your life is not defined by how you make a living. Remember that you doing what you have to to keep the lights on so that you can keep showing up and keep shining that invisible x-ray light into people's souls isn't something to be ashamed of, but proud of.

14:33And that the next time you feel yourself getting caught up with how you define yourself, remember, I'm not shooting for a definition. The spot I'm after is an undefinable and indescribable thing that is appropriately marked with an X. Okay, so why do I bring all that up about t-shirts and merch and boy genius? It's because we are talking about sales today. We are doing a series on the podcast called The Journey of the True Fan. This is episode two of that series. You can go back and listen to the first episode. It is episode 473, and that's episode one of this. And the whole idea is that there are two significant parts to being a creative person.

15:32There are two distinctive parts in the creative journey. So you have the first journey, which is you discovering what you want to make the work about, developing it, figuring out what it is, and then polishing it into a end result. And then the next journey is really not your journey. It mirrors the first one, but it's the journey of the true fan. It's them discovering that you exist. It's them developing a relationship with the work and then at the end, hopefully turning into them owning a piece of what you do and supporting you financially, buying something, buying a product and making the sale in some way.

16:14And so we're doing this series and we are doing it in collaboration with Squarespace because the way that things have evolved in the online creative space means that it's never been more important to have a hub of creativity that you own, that you can tailor to be as creative as your creative work when social media has made it so difficult to get your stuff in front of people. And I think when it comes to the journey of the true fan, having a website that does all of these things is super essential. And so I pitched this to Squarespace to see if they could sponsor this series because I thought it was a perfect fit.

16:59They said yes. So super grateful for that. But we're talking about the journey of the true fan. And in the last episode, we talked about the three parts of that journey. And there is the discovery where they hear about you for the first time. You're on their radar. And then there is the development of trust, like learning to trust and have a deeper relationship to your work. They don't just know about you, but now they actually like your stuff. They're diving into your work. And then the final piece is the sale, where they support you in some way. That's the full journey of someone becoming, going from a stranger to a true fan of your work.

17:47And understanding that journey and planning for that journey appropriately, building your website around that journey is super effective. So if you go to my website, AnnieJPizza.com, it is built with this in mind to help people go from hearing about me all the way to hiring me or buying one of my books or something of that nature. And so we're talking about that three-part journey. And this episode is actually going to start with the end. We're going to start with the sale and then we're going to reverse engineer a whole journey to get people there. So one thing that I've realized about this show is that a large portion of it actually falls under what I consider to be strategic creativity.

18:39When people think about creativity, I think they think about it like through the definition of creativity is starting without an end in mind, meaning kind of what John Mayer calls Ouija board creativity, where you're just messing around, playing the guitar, saying whatever comes off the top of your head. You start without knowing where it's going to go. You're not directing it. You're channeling it. You're trying to make it up on the spot and just be open to see where it goes. And I think when people think about creativity, they tend to think about it through that lens. However, if we apply that to all the different worlds of creativity, we see that that's really just one part of the equation.

19:27And so if you think about it in the world of comedy, that type of creativity, that type of comedy would be improv. That would be making it up as you go, not knowing, starting without an end in mind, not trying to determine where it was going to go. However, I don't think anybody would disagree that stand-up comedy is the exact opposite of that. And really great that it's not just the opposite of that, but that is deeply creative in a totally different way. So instead of Ouija board, it's more like a puzzle. and a puzzle is starting with the end in mind, knowing what the thing is supposed to look like, seeing it on the box and then making it up as you get there.

20:13And that's a strategic type of creativity. And we've seen this go awry in TV shows that they start with an amazing pilot, an amazing premise, but they're pantsing their way. They're flying by the seat of their pants. They don't know where it's going and they end up writing themselves into a corner and it ends really poorly. And we wouldn't call that extreme creativity. We would say that's lacking in a type of creativity that's necessary. And so for me personally, I'm always trying to strike a balance between the plotting and the pantsing, the improv and the planning. And I'm trying to figure out how to not just be exploratory with my creativity, But how do I actually get strategic where I can, you know, when you're writing like a mystery novel, you start at the end with who done it, how you're going to get there.

21:09And then you work your way back and set all the clues as you go so that you can have that surprising but inevitable ending. And so most of the things we talk about on the show are around creative practice or creative career strategy. and they are trying to work the muscle to get comfortable with this other side of creativity that's super essential when it comes to making your practice work. And so what we're going to do here is instead of going from discovery to trust to sales, we're going to start with sales. We're going to think about what is the end result? What is the end product? What is the thing that we're going to sell?

21:52And then we're going to work our way backwards into trust to say, how can we make that trust phase line up and point to strategically to the thing we're trying to sell? And then we'll go to discovery and make sure that the way that we get discovered by people is relevant to the way that they're going to learn to trust us. And that's relevant to the way that they're going to support us through sales. And so we compared that in the last episode, just to make it clear, there's an example that everyone's familiar with. the music industry has a really developed sense of this journey. And probably part of the reason is because the business world has moved so aggressively into the music sphere that these things are really established there.

22:38And there's good and bad to how that all has played out. But if you think about it through the lens of music, the discovery phase is usually singles, them being, and often those are collaborative singles so that you're getting on other people's radar. Then you have the album is the trust where they dive deep into the deep cuts and they start getting familiar with you on a deeper level, have a deeper relationship with you. They learn to trust like, oh, you are legit. You know what you're doing. You know how to deliver the goods. And then the next layer is the merch or the tour. and that's the sales.

23:21Now, there's a bunch of different examples here. Like the Discovery, every artist has different things at their disposal. We'll get to some of that later in the Discovery episode. But one can be singles, but also could be opening for a band. There's all kinds of different ways to be creative about doing that. A big part of Discovery now is just Spotify and how you play your cards that way. But those are the three pieces. But instead of starting with Discovery, we're gonna start with sales. And then we're going to reverse engineer and lay down the tracks to make sure that the way that we're getting discovered is actually relevant to the sales that we want to make.

23:58Like it doesn't make any sense for us to do an incredible single that gets everybody to listen to us. But then the album sounds nothing like the single and the tour and the show and the merch feels nothing like the album. Like you don't want all of those things disconnected. You want the Phoebe Bridgers thing where you're wearing the merch on the album cover, as long as it's artistically credible the way that she's done it. Sometimes you don't want to go so far where the extreme version of this that kind of is unsavory and ends up ruining the art is where you see like the superhero movies in the 90s where the movies were written around the toys that they were going to sell, like the Batmobile or the Batwing.

24:54like the whole movie's built around getting as much product placement as possible so that kids will go buy the toys. That's the extreme. You can fall off this tightrope on either side. But I think if we start with sales and work our way back, we are likely to be able to plant things in the right way and make sure that it all has some level of cohesion and some level of balance because you could also do the opposite where you plant this single that is so catchy, that's such an earworm that nobody wants to hear it. No one wants to hear anything else from you. You know, they don't want to dive into the album because this thing is just stuck in their head all the time.

25:33It's so catchy that it's lacking artistry, right? Like you want it, you got to balance these things out. But I think the best job we can do is start with sales and then work backwards.

26:00Okay, so sales. Let's talk about how to think about that. What kind of thing you want to sell? And the reason we set it up through the Boy Genius thing was because what you sell, I personally believe, should it be determined by who you are, you know, defining who you are, buy what you sell, but rather where you are in your creative journey. And I'll explain what I mean by that. But locating where you are, what you need to keep the lights on, what you need to keep going, helping determine that can help inform what you need to be selling and how you need to be positioning that. And so we talked a bunch on this show about the thousand true fans.

26:43You probably get sick of hearing about it. It's this concept from Kevin Kelly. And it's this idea that it's just an abstract way to think about how in this day and age, you don't need to sell millions and millions of albums to keep the lights on. and the argument is you only need 1 ,000 true fans. You need 1 ,000 people that are willing to pay you$100 a year to support you between the album sales, the T-shirts, the tour tickets, whatever. And if you get 1 ,000 people to do that, that's$100 ,000. Now, of course, there's taxes. There's other people taking cuts. There's some people can do that because they're a solo person.

27:25Other people have a band and then, you know, you have to do the math. You have to make the math math, right, for your situation. It's just a concept to help you wrap your head around what this can look like beyond just going viral or being famous or whatever it is that is really unattainable or not fully in your control, right? Now, sometimes you could think like, okay, really, could I get by with just 1 ,000 true fans? Now, that doesn't mean 1 ,000 followers. Like only a small subset of your following is willing to be a true fan, is willing to support you at that level of sales. But it's still a much smaller number than what you might imagine, especially if you are able to be strategic and purposeful with how you fund your practice at this stage.

28:16And so sometimes when we talk about the idea of the thousand true fans, it can seem like, is that even really possible? Like for just a thousand people to kind of fund and float your whole thing. But the truth is most people in America get by with just one super true fan because most people, their whole livelihood is make or break on one person that was enough of a fan to hire them for their full-time job. And this idea, this notion that one person or 10 people or 100 people or 1 ,000 people could be completely make or break for your career is very based in reality. And figuring out where you are on that journey can help determine what you need to sell to get by.

29:16And so if you're in a place where you have no true fans, no prospects, that might mean that you're currently in a place where you need one super mega true fan, aka an employer, to make sure that you can keep the lights on. And there's no shame in that. Most people have to start there. I did. Most people do. Some people have to go off and on. There's no shame in how you have to keep the lights on, how you have to keep yourself funded so that you can do those creative things. We all need to eat. We all need to take care of our families and take care of business. What I want you to do with this stage is to think about how many true fans are you at right now and how many true fans are you able to get in the near future, in the next year, with this next creative project.