Why 'Making Creativity Pay'?
What's in a name?
Those of you reading this that are of a certain age may remember a BBC kids show called ‘Why Don’t You’ which was short for ‘Why don't you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?’
In a similar vein, ‘Making Creativity Pay’ is short for ‘Making Creativity Pay enough to be able to keep making the things you love even though economic conditions make it almost impossible and the internet has conditioned everyone into getting everything for free’.
In the almost 50 episodes of the ‘Making Creativity Pay’ podcast, I don’t think I’ve spoken to anyone who is creating their work primarily for financial gain, but the obvious point is unless you are independently wealthy, there often has to be at least some financial return as without it the ability to create is greatly reduced due to lack of spare time and money pressures.
There was a recent episode of the ‘Here Comes The Guillotine’ Podcast which I thought took a really interesting look at this where a listener asked how they could ‘turn their creative hobby into something professional’ and the three pretty much said don’t, just enjoy it for the sake of doing the art itself and that (my paraphrasing) any financial success should be seen more as a side-effect rather than the reason for doing the art.
‘Monetising your Art’ sounds like one of the grossest things possible, but that’s in part how so many others in the related areas of creative industries manage to make money while the artist themselves often sees little in return and should often just be ‘grateful for the exposure’.
As an outside observer I’m interested in how my guests balance the need to be creative, the confidence in their own ability and the harsh realities of a sector where money is scarce. You probably won’t get anywhere being half-arsed but there can’t be many more things dispiriting than taking something that you love and ruining it by forcing a business mindset upon it.
The other thing I discuss on the podcast is that it’s not as simple as the cream always rising to the top, the competition for attention is huge and so many of my guests have to be video editor, social media manager, email marketer and more to try and get noticed.
Some have been able to outsource some of this while others know they should play the game and do more of these kinds of things but it doesn't come naturally and find things harder as a result. Nobody’s going to come to your show if nobody knows it exists but you didn’t create your art with thoughts of Shorts, Reels, Tweets and Posts and having a High Performance grindset.
It’s at some level insulting to equate the podcast with my guests' own creative struggles but there are some parallels. At the moment it’s a reasonably inexpensive hobby and I get to chat to really interesting people when I want to. I do think the concept for the podcast is a good one and insights from the guests are great (and they’ve been kind enough to give their time for free) so obviously I want to get as big an audience as possible.
So then you’re on the same treadmill as everyone else of knowing that producing an episode weekly builds an audience, clips are important for discovery, maybe recording in a studio for better quality sound and visuals for the socials, possibly a bit of PR and Social Media advertising and before you know it you’ve turned a fun little project in to something far more time consuming but you have to realistic that listeners/followers don’t just appear out of thin air and you need to put the effort in.
Why a Newsletter as well? Sometimes there’s things that work better written down (I’ll be looking at Marketing around comedy festivals and also the huge range of free online comedy specials in future issues for example) and also I appreciate the huge competition for people’s time and maybe a 5 minute read of a heavily edited interview is something that may be of interest when a 40 minute podcast is not what you’re looking for.