The Complete Creative

Hello Wannabes and Creators. Today on the show we have Ben Lee, president of Big Head Productions.

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Ben is an old friend. He went into business for himself almost a year ago, and I wanted to show you how somebody that is just getting started operates their business. Here is the intro letter from Ben’s site.

Greetings Interwebber,

First, thanks for visiting our site! We’re still a very young company, so while we’re still building, I thought a letter to you would be a nice way to introduce you to Big Head Productions.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering what Big Head Productions is? Well, at its core, it’s a publishing company. Our goal? Well, simply, to give you great stories, and hopefully give aspiring talent a stepping-stone to enter the industry.

See, years of going to conventions like the San Diego Comic-Con, and attending panels about breaking into the industry, there has always been one constant message…

…you don’t need anyone’s permission to make comics.

So with that, Big Head Productions was formed.

Starting this venture is not only to give myself a resource to publish stories rattling around in my brain, but any comic professional and/or aspiring creator will tell you, breaking into this industry is extremely difficult. And even with programs like DC’s Talent Development Workshop, they ask for previous publishing experience. And even then, getting a foot in the door to independent publishers is no easy task.

So like I mentioned earlier, in addition to publishing stories in my head, I do hope this venture will grow to where we can provide mentorship and an opportunity to publish to aspiring creators to get experience to competitive at a major publisher level.

So welcome to Big Head Productions: a place for great stories, creativity, and opportunity. I hope you like what you see with us, we got a lot of great things coming!

Sincerely Yours,

— Ben Lee

Storyteller & President of Big Head Productions, Inc.

Ben Used to work as an art director for a marketing and ad agency and had for years before he quit to form his own company last September. I’ve been following his story through my own social media accounts and wanted to show you guys how somebody just launching their business operates. It’s not polished. It doesn’t have a clear direction, but it’s raw and honest.

We talked a lot about his art. He’s trying to take on fewer clients now so he can focus on products. Products make the world go around in the long run. In the short run, they eat a lot of time and energy. Luckily, Ben talked about the extensive plan he had when he quit his job.

I love his strategy about writing a resignation letter and seeing how it makes you feel. You don’t have to send it. But see if that letter fills you with regret or joy and take it from there.

He also talked about looking up articles about when to quit your job. If looking up articles like that isn’t a good sign that you need to quit, then I don’t know what is one. However, he found one about the amount of time it takes to leave your job, and what you need to make sure you have to be prepared. It turned out Ben fit all those requirements, so he took the leap.

One thing I dug about Ben was his Indiegogo campaign strategy for his first comic book. He didn’t have the book done, so he had to make empathy with his audience by making them like him. How did he do that? By making the campaign focus on baby photos of him, talking about how he always wanted to make a comic. One thing people don’t do enough is to make people empathize with the creator of the book. They are very good at showing the book, but not why this book is important.

If you don’t like the creator of a piece of art, you probably won’t like the art itself. You can’t only rely on that empathy, but it’s a great place to mine especially if you don’t have a project finished.

Another thing I love is that ben isn’t shy to hang his work anywhere. He had a show in a furniture gallery for goodness sakes. One thing I admire about people like Ben and previous guest Angela Fullard (whose episode you can listen to by clicking here), is that they hang their art anywhere. While a gallery might not need or want you, there are plenty of businesses that would love great art. And then you can talk to the owners and build your business with corporate clients. I know nobody wants corporate clients, but they pay like 10-100x better than art world clients and they always need work.

In the end, this episode is great because it shows an artist trying to find his business. We talked a lot about stress and how to deal with the stress of a business, and how to make your business work. I saw a lot of myself in Ben. He wanted to figure it all out. Unfortunately, it always takes time. You have to learn what you know and learn the levers to pull in your business to make it function.

Ben has a lot of questions in this episode and when I prod him about certain things like a mailing list of marketing plan he’s definitely unsure about himself at times. But I think it shows a great portrait of a new business. I think it shows how hopeful we can all be when we start something.

Ben had a great plan and I really hope it all works out. I plan on coming back to this again in the future to show how Big Head has progressed, whether their plan works out or they have to pivot. For me, it’s all about pivoting. How fast can you fail, how often can you pivot, and how much can you do to succeed.

I love one thing Ben said above everything else. I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically "I'm 38 and single. If not now, when." I couldn't agree more. 

You can find Ben online at www.yellowrant.com and www.bigheadprod.com.

Enjoy the episode.

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Being accepted into San Diego Comic-Con as an exhibitor is a huge thrill. Especially in the curated area of small press, acceptance is truly a form of validation. It means that you are worthy of representing Comic-Con and that your work was one of the best from a worldwide pool of applicants.

It’s a real thrill that lasts about ten seconds.

That thrill is immediately replaced by one horrible thought: “Oh my god that’s a lot of money!” Between buying enough merchandise, getting your banners ready, booking flights, shipping, reserving a hotel room, and spending money on food at the show you are looking at thousands of dollars in spending just to get through the show!

The average attendee spends $2000+ just to get to the convention. You can imagine that exhibitors pay way more.

It’s a daunting amount of money and nobody wants to piss it away. But how do you ensure you can make back your costs at a show with thousands of other booths, most of which have way more money than you, and a constant stream of distractions to prevent people from ever finding you?

I interviewed nine indie creators to find out how they stand out at a show as big as San Diego, and how you can too. All of their advice is pure gold. Here are their answers, edited for clarity.

“At San Diego you really gotta have a unique flare to your work. Since I don’t do princess stuff the first thing I blurt out is ‘hey, do you like books for girls that aren’t about princesses?’ That makes everyone stop. When you’ve got a funny tagline about your books it stops people and gets them to laugh, then they come over and look at your table.”

It also helps to have a giant display of what you are doing. If you have plush dolls you have to get them out there so everyone can see them. The more you interact with people the more likely they will buy your stuff.”

Mary Bellamy from www.marybellamy.com, @zorilita on Twitter

“I stand out about being simplistic. My work looks very simple. It’s mostly black and white. When you go a large shows it’s all color, color, color everywhere. When you get to my stuff it’s like whoa, no color. It’s amazing how that pops.”

Ted Washington from Puna Press, @tedwa on Twitter

“The best you can do sometimes is to communicate directly with people as they pass by in ways that they don’t expect, preferably nonoffensive ways, but that get them laughing and interested. If they are hit by the unexpected that gets their attention.”

Doug Dlin from Antarctic Press, @antarcticpress on Twitter

“I’m very tall so that helps. Really I just try to compete. I try to look as professional as I can with as cheap a setup as I can because my margins are so tight. But a lot of it is kind of like dating. You just make eye contact and smile. You don’t creep on people. That goes a long way. Have your pitch ready. Be professional. The setup is not as important as presenting yourself professionally. Don’t be reading your phone all the time. Engage with your audience while they are around because that’s why you are here.”

Thom Zahler from www.thomz.com, @thomzahler on Twitter

“I try to display as much cuteness as possible so you can see all of it. I try to have a lot of price points for whatever people can afford.”

Val Hochberg from kick-girl.com, @kickgirl on Twitter

“Don’t sit down. Be active. Engage the people. You’ll do better just by looking somebody in the eye and saying hello than sitting back and doodling.

Nick Doan from Monster Elementary, @monsterelem on Twitter

“We have these great big white fluffy bunnies at the booth. People stop and look at that and say what the hell? Stuff like that.”

Jim Hillin from Wireheads, @wireheads on Twitter

“I make sure I have a strong booth presence, something eye-catching like a banner and a good table display. At bigger cons, I have a bigger table so that helps, but I mostly rely on my fans and my table to catch people’s eye.”

Josh Howard from Dead @ 17, @joshuahoward on Twitter

“Make yourself stand out. Interact with the fans. You see a lot of people sitting back behind the table not interacting. They will just sit there and let people go by. You have to get their attention.”

Mike Purcell from Bare Bones Studios, Bare Bones Studios on Facebook

As a person who cons all the time, this advice is gold. Each of these interviewees had a unique booth presence that caught my eye. They also interacted with fans. The simple act of engaging with fans will set you apart from the pack.

That’s so important for indies. We have to be out engaging with people. When nobody knows who you are it’s critical to press the flesh with as many people as possible.

People at cons are looking for cool stuff, but more importantly they are looking for cool people. If you can stand out from the crowd with a good booth presence, an engaging personality, and a cool book, you will go far to building your fan base.

Let me end with my piece of advice to stand out at big cons: Sign people up for your mailing list.

This may not help you at the con you are currently at, but it will help you at every con you attend in the future.

If you don’t have a mailing list, you can’t reach out the next time you are in town. When you have a mailing list, you will be able to tell people about your booth every year, and every year your traffic will grow.

You will stand out because you will be in the hearts and minds of your ideal fan. Every con-goer has their list of must-buys for a con, and if you haven’t made it onto that list the first year, you might by year three…but only if you keep in contact with the people that dig your work.

Russell Nohelty is a publisher, writer, and consultant. He runs the publishing company Wannabe Press (www.wannabepress.com) and hosts the twice-weekly podcast The Business of Art (www.thebusinessofart.us). If you are ready to take your career to the next level, book a free 30-minute strategy call today!

We talked earlier this week about how to market yourself as an exhibitor, but there’s a big pool of people who go to cons as attendees that are trying to market themselves as well. That’s how most of us start. I don’t know many people who start going to cons as exhibitors right off the bat. Why would you? That’s a big investment without any product. Almost everybody I’ve ever met started by going to cons, then went to more cons, then started exhibiting. When you are at the beginning of your career, there is nothing better than going to cons to get access to your favorite creators and authors.

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However, there is etiquette behind marketing yourself as an attendee just like there is in marketing yourself as an exhibitor. Almost everybody at a con is willing to take a couple of minutes to talk with you, but if you want to get the most from your favorite creators, here are a couple tips to maximize your experience.

1. Buy something from their table.

Some creators make 50% or more of their income from a few shows a year. In order for them to maximize their revenue, they need to sell books. If you are sitting by their table, people will be less likely to stop by their booth. So every minute you take of their time costs money. Which is fine. We all expect questions to be asked, but if you like the creators, buy something from their table. I always tell people that $20 buys five minutes of my undivided attention. When I was attending cons I made sure to bring $200 to buy time from people I respected. I wanted to make a good impression, and it stuck.

2. Ask intelligent questions about their work.

I know it’s a silly thing, but us creators will bend over backward for our fans. If you’ve read our work, let us know before you ask us questions. If you do that, you will get much more out of the creators than if you just start pelting them with questions. But more importantly, don’t just say you like their work, ask them a question about why they did something. Everybody says “I like your work” if you can say “I really liked when you did X, what was the reason behind that?” It’s going to make you stand out from the crowd.

3. Have something to give us, but understand we probably won’t be able to look at it until after the con.

I love getting hand-outs and books from people. I really read everything that people give me. However, it’s hard for me to read it at that moment. Here’s why. We are tired. We are fried. We are in sales mode. It’s noisy. It’s crowded. It’s hard to think. Giving notes is a part of my brain that just doesn’t function at shows. However, if I tell you to email me later, I mean it. But just make sure that your leave behind is the best representation of your work possible.

4. Ask to get in touch after the con, and then do it!

I tell everybody that comes to my table that I really want them to email me after shows. I tell them all the time that I’ll answer questions and comments. Do you know how many people take me up on that offer? Nobody. I’ve maybe received 10 emails this year out of the thousand people I’ve given that offer. If you are a creator and somebody tells you to get in touch with them…do it! Get their contact information, tuck it away, then wait a couple of weeks, and then email your questions. I can only devote a couple minutes to somebody at a show, but after a show I can give much more. Plus, I can really think about the answers to your questions. If you actually take the initiative and email these people back, they will notice. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them.

5. If you have a project and you want to pitch somebody, make sure you have a budget and plan in place when you talk to them.

Cons are great places to meet people who can move your career along. Many people will try to find artists and writers at cons to work on their project. Just remember we are very busy and tired. We can’t keep straight everything about your project, so it’s up to you to be succinct, have a budget in mind, and do the leg work.

6. If you want to talk with a person more, scope out the hip after hour spots.

Every con has a bar where people go after the event to get a drink. If you can figure out the spot you can scope it out and talk to the artists and authors when they are comfortable, instead of in the hustle and bustle of a con. Just remember to be considerate if they are in the middle of a conversation.

7. Follow them on social media before the con and start engaging with them.

This is a big one. The most points of contact you can have with somebody before an event, the most likely they are to remember you. So start early. Favorite things they say on social media. Tweet at them. Be engaged.

8. The more times you see a person at cons, the more serious they will take you.

You can see this in your own life. The more often you see a person the more you like them. If I see you at cons for a couple years and then I see you tabling your own stuff, guess what? I’m going to take you more seriously than the first time I saw you. So just remember that these things build over time. The more often you can see somebody and show improvement, the more you respect you will get with that person.

If you follow these few tips, you are going to have a much better time meeting up with your favorite creators and making an impression.

I hope you learned something. If you liked this episode, please subscribe to us on iTunes, stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate your support.

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Today on the show we have Colleen Dunn Bates, publisher, founder, and editor of Prospect Park books (the Pasadena company, not the NYC one). Here’s a bio from www.prospectparkbooks.com

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Publisher, founder, and editor Colleen Dunn Bates started her career by studying journalism at USC. She’s worked as a writer and editor in radio, newspapers, magazines, and books. It’s the book business that stuck. She started Prospect Park Books in 2006 with the publication of the first edition of Hometown Pasadena. A sixth-generation Southern Californian (yes, that means she surfs), Colleen takes great offense when New Yorkers mock Angelenos as airheads who don’t read. The mother of two adult daughters and the wife of the editor/producer of the TV comediesThe Comeback and 2 Broke Girls, the longtime Pasadena resident is an emeritus board member of PubWest and the LA restaurant critic forWestways magazine. Here she is on LinkedIn, here’s an amusing profile of her in Booklist, here’s a Q&A with her on novelist Caroline Leavitt’s blog, and here’s a Black Hill Press podcast interview in which she rambles on about publishing.

Colleen is celebrating her 10 year anniversary of Prospect Park this year, and in that time they’ve published over 50 books, and grown a small press into a viable business. I love the voice that comes through on Prospect Park’s website. Here’s a really awesome passage on why they do what they do:

HERE’S WHY WE DO THIS:

— We love creating great books and finding them the audience they deserve. It’s just plain fun.

— We also love being businesspeople, so we take the business part seriously. We’re showing that book publishing can be a strong, successful business.

— Our writers, designers, booksellers, sales reps, and marketing folks are just plain good people. Smart, funny, generous, and a joy to work with.

— We get to deduct the cost of buying books from our income taxes.

Do you see that? Even though this can be a stuffy section, Colleen added depth, humor, and a unique voice to her park. When you read these words you really hear their unique voice.

I really dug talking to Colleen. This is the kind of ideal interview that merges creativity and business perfectly. My favorite part of this interview was when we talked about how she promotes all her books. It’s around 30 minutes in and its pure gold. She lays out everything from advance galley copies all the way through second and third galleys, getting blurbs, and building an audience.

What I really love about Colleen is how she broke everything down to its smallest bits. We talked about why it’s important for an author to have an audience, how authors can be more appealing to publishers, and why book covers are so important.

This is one of the biggest problems with books from self and small publishers. They have no attention to what makes the book unique, and why anybody should buy it. At its core, the cover of a book should speak to the audience that will buy the book. If your book is a cozy mystery, it should feel like a cozy mystery. If your book is a literary masterpiece the cover should feel like that. The judge a book by its cover cliché is so true because what you see on the cover is what you should expect inside the book. The cover should speak to the intended audience for a book.

More importantly, when you see a good book cover, it shows that the author cares about the quality of what they are presenting and gives a good indication that the book inside will be quality. Maybe it’s crap, but there is no other visual way to decide if you like a book on the spot.

Does a good book cover guarantee sales? No. But if you have a bad book cover you have to fight so much in order to make sales. You want people to easily buy your book. It’s hard enough to get somebody to part with their money. If you have a bad cover design, or poor editing, or no social media presence, you have to fight uphill so hard in order to make the sale.

And social media and marketing is something we touched on a lot with Colleen. While having no social doesn’t mean you won’t get a publisher, having one definitely helps. Here’s the thing. You have to fight against my existing publishing slate, plus all the books I want to publish, plus all the books I’m determined to publish just to get onto my stack. That’s a lot of fighting. When you come to me, or Colleen, you need to have everything in a nice little bow. Colleen doesn’t know you. All she can see if the merits of the book.

It’s hard enough to make a good book. If you’ve made a great book you are now in the game. In fact, the great book is the baseline for everything. So if you have a great book, then we can talk about publishing. However, I need to know a lot more before I make that commitment. We need to know how you’ll sell it and whether it can sell…because this is a business to us.

Just remember as you fight through this wild world of publishing, make it once and you can sell it forever.

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If you make it long enough in this business, cons will be a big part of your life. We make 90% of our income at cons, and the bigger the con the more we make.

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However, big cons mean more responsibility and more chance to be lost in the shuffle. So it’s even more important to be vigilant with your marketing. It’s so easy to be looked over at San Diego that if you don’t have a good strategy to stand out above the heard it could be a horrible investment for you.

I don’t want that to happen to you, so here is a list of my top ten tips for marketing yourself at a big con. This is social media heavy, but that’s my main strategy and it should be yours too.

1. Create a new avatar for your social media page

With every big con there comes a lot of imagery you can search for online to make a good avatar. A good avatar image is square, says the name of the con, and has a nice sized space to list your location and brand your avatar. This is the one we are using for SDCC.

You can see that the title of the con is very visible, as is our logo, colors, and location. You want to make sure anybody looking for your booth knows where you are. This should be done a week or two before your con so that when people make their schedule of what to see, they can make sure to circle your books.

2. Create a new header image.

An avatar is great, but these big convention halls are enormous. Most people can’t find their way out of a hall let along navigate to your little booth. Therefore, you need a map as the header for your social media accounts with your exact location. On it, for bigger convention halls, you may have to blow up a part of the map so that you can narrow in on your location. This is the one we are using for San Diego Comic Con this year.

You have to navigate these so they work with your avatar without blocking anything important. Because of our avatar we didn’t put anything below the image. However, you can see that we used the whole map, blew up our area, and then pointed to our location in that small area. The easier you can make it for your fans the better.

Additionally, you want to make this the pinned post on your social media pages so people don’t have to scroll to see it.

3. Schedule social media posts for the week before and the week of the event. You can’t do too many of the same or they will block you.

While you will be tweeting at the event, you want to make sure you have a base of tweets in case you get busy. I always get busy at cons and never have a chance to post when I want to post. So I make sure to schedule at least one post a day with my location in the week leading up to the con, and then three posts a day with my location during the con. That way even if I can’t get to my account, I am still active.

You can set this up through Buffer, Hootsuite, or many others.

4. Send your location to your mailing list with your free offer.

Make sure to also send your location to your mailing list. Most people don’t want to go to your social media account during a con, so if they can star your email it will help them remember to find you. With your mailing list update, make sure to include what you have going on at your booth, any freebies you are offering, and why they should come on by.

5. Create promo images using your booth location.

When you are making your social media posts you want to create unique images using your booth location. For instance, our booth this year is N-2, so all of our promos will have to do with the N-2 name, like “Get N-2 it!” or “Don’t forget to get N-2 Wannabe Press this week!”

Social media is stale and people don’t want to see the same thing rehashed over and over again. If you can create these promo images then you will be memorable in people’s minds. In a sea of 1,000 exhibitors, that is key.

6. Check the hashtags throughout the day of the event so that you know what’s trending.

I’m notoriously awful at this because I’m so busy at the con. However, different hashtags trend throughout the day on Twitter. When those hashtags trend, you should be using them because it’s the best chance you have of being retweeted and getting free publicity.

7. Update your website with a new header.

Don’t forget to update your website with your new header. For every person that opens your mailing list, and finds you on social media, there will be one that goes directly to your website. Make sure your map is as high on the site as possible.

8. Have a freebie to get people on your mailing list.

One of the biggest benefits to big cons is the amount of foot traffic that comes by your booth. However, if you don’t have a way to get that foot traffic onto your mailing list for future communications, you are missing out on a ton of future sales. This was the biggest failure of our booth last year. We ended up selling 350 books, making $5.500, and getting a grand total of 50 new sign ups. That’s horrible. We should have gotten at least 500. This year we have freebie buttons to make sure we get more than 50 people.

9. Work with friends to create a promo to get people to your booth.

This is something we are trying this year. We’ve made an indie passport with twelve total creators exhibiting at SDCC. Each one has a little circle with their booth name and number on it inside a round circle, which we will then stamp as people go from booth to booth. This is a great way to get your fans involved AND give them recommendations for cool booths. In a room of 1,000+ vendors, having some direction is incredibly helpful. I highly recommend working with your friends to try to drive traffic to each other’s booths.

10. Smile, look up from your table, and say hello.

If you so nothing else with your con experience, follow this advice. Looking down at the ground is not a good way to get people to interact with you. I know talking to people is hard for many of you, but it’s essential to making connections and making fans. Just looking up and saying hello is so important, asking them a question like “Do you like comics?” is even better.

There you have it. The main point is that you have to do something to stand out from the crowd. If you don’t you’ll drown in it, and that’s an expensive ocean to drown in.

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Hope it helped.

Russell

I wanted to keep this episode short and sweet, but I get so heated about the idea of collaborations that it ended up getting away from me.

Today I’m asking a simple question. Why would anybody want to work with you?

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I’m constantly bombarded with questions about collaborating with people, and how to find artists to work with creators for equity/for free/for deferred payment. They tell me they have asked dozens of artists and nobody wants to work with them.

Of course, they won’t. You haven’t made it appeal. You’ve given them no reason to work with you. There is nothing compelling about your business plan or sales strategy. So why would somebody want to work with you?

Now I know what you are thinking. I’m awesome. Who wouldn’t want to work with me? But when you are trying to get somebody to work on your project for free or for equity, it’s going to take more than just being awesome in order to convince them.

Now, this is a very heated and contested debate. Most creators complain that writing and art should be equally valued. However, that’s not how it works in the real world. In the real world, one of these takes a longer time and more readily contributes to the sale of a book right off the top.

That thing is the art. Art can sell a shitty book. Great writing can’t sell crappy art. As the old saying goes, people come for the art and stay for the writing. The writing is what people will come back to again and again, but initially people usually buy a book for the art.

And that makes sense because you buy books from the art as well, especially from first-time writers. However, for an established artist like BKV, I will buy his book even if the art stinks. The thing is the art on his books never stinks.

It’s very unusual for a great, seasoned writer to be paired with crappy art because they know that great art sells books and reflects on themselves as writers. If their book has bad art, nothing in the world will be able to sell it.

There is also the problem of time allotment. On a good day, an artist can finish one page of art. On a good day, a writer can write an issue of a comic book. Yes, there is plotting time, and planning time in that, but even on the most generous day, it takes much more time to do a page of art than it takes to write a page of comic books. In my example, an artist takes 20x longer to do the same work.

So their time is not more valuable, but they have the ability to take on far fewer projects during the same time.

But regardless of these factors, the only one that matters is that you are coming to them with a project, which means you already see the value in their work. In this scenario, you have to convince them that you are worth investing in.

Because that’s what a collaboration is, an investment. In a comic is 20 pages and an artist charges $100/pg, then they are investing $2,000 in your project to get 50% equity. In this scenario, it is beholden on you to make sure the artist can at least make their money back. And in order to make their money back (and hopefully profit) you need a plan. You need a plan which will make it worth their while to turn down other clients to work on your book.

And it has to be more than just, my project is cool. Because at the end of the day, my project is also cool and I’m going to pay. So you have to have a plan. You have to make it more interesting for them to work on your book than take on clients. You have to make it more interesting for them to work on your book than work on their own.

Because those are their two other options. Those are the options you are competing against. You have to make a very compelling argument for them to make that deal worthwhile.

How do you do that? Lots of ways. Maybe you have ins with retailers. Maybe you have an editor at a company that is interested in the book. Maybe you plan on attending a bunch of shows and getting exposure that way. Maybe you already have a track record of success.

But regardless you have to make it appealing to them because it’s your project. You are basically trying to sell 50% equity in your company, and you have to make that company worthy of investment.

You don’t have to agree with you. You might have a more innocent version of this whole thing, but that’s the sticky wicket of it for more people. If you can find another way, they go for it. However, if you are struggling this is why. If you go up to an artist with a real proposal and some hard numbers on how you plan on making their investment worthwhile, if you are serious and forthright, and if you have a great project, you can land somebody…but it has to be worth their while.

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Today on the show we have Cynthia Reeser, publisher of Aqueous Books and Editor-in-Chief for Prick of the Spindle. Cynthia was a font of knowledge on a topic we’ve never covered here on BOA before, Literary Journals.

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Here is here bio from www.cynthiareeser.com:

On Writing

 Cynthia Reeser Constantino is the Founder and Publisher of Aqueous Books, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Prick of the Spindle literary journal. Her published nonfiction includes How to Write and Publish a Successful Children’s Book: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply (Atlantic Publishing, 2010, honorable mention in its category for the Independent Publisher Book Awards), and others. A poetry chapbook, Light and Trials of Light, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She has published more than 100 reviews in print and online, and some of her poetry and fiction can be found at such places as Thunderclap, Dogzplot, Metazen, Glossolalia, Corium Review, Artifice Magazine, Liturgical Credo, and more. A dystopic short story appears in the Daughters of Icarus Anthology (Pink Narcissus Press, 2013). Another short story appears in Follow the Blood: Tales Inspired by The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (Sundog Lit, March 2013). She was interviewed for an essay in Women, Work, and the Web: How the Web Creates Entrepreneurial Opportunities, Ed. Carol Smallwood (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). She earned her MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from the University of Tampa in 2015. She lives near Birmingham, a city undergoing a cultural renaissance, where she works as a freelance editor and writer and raises the world’s most wonderful child.

Regarding Art

 Cynthia Reeser Constantino is an artist working in various media, including oils, acrylics, graphite, oil pastels, photography, digital media, and others–but primarily oils. She is self-taught as a visual artist, her degrees being in music and literature. Having long harbored a fascination with creativity and acts of creation, she continually seeks ways to unite literature, art, and music. Her work appeared in the 2008 Christus St. Patrick Foundation Invitational Art Show and Auction in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and in shows throughout the state of Louisiana. She was the July 2008 featured artist at the Art Associates Gallery in Lake Charles. Her painting, “Music for the Damned,” appeared in the Femme Fest 2013 art exhibit, organized by the Women’s Caucus for Art of Louisiana, exhibited at The Midcity Theatre in New Orleans, LA. One of her commissioned paintings will appear on the cover of Secrets of Men…In a Lifeboat, a novel by Todd R. Baker, forthcoming in April 2016.

On Music

 Cynthia Reeser Constantino taught herself to read music at the age of nine. The piano is her first and most enduring love. Self-taught in classical piano, she majored in piano performance at the University of West Florida, where she studied under the late Belgian pianist Pierre Huybregts. She composes for the piano and her guilty musical pleasure is electronica and all things lo-fi.

I met Cynthia at the LA Times Festival of Books in April, and thought I was going to have her on to talk about Aqueous books, but time makes fools of us all and we ended up talking almost exclusively about her literary Journal, and what makes a good literary journal.

What we really focused on is what it takes to make it into a literary journal. One thing that Cynthia knows is how to make a journal great because hers is fantastic. Not only is the content fantastic, but so is the design. Design is so important in a good business. If you don’t have a good website then people will be immediately turned off to everything you do. How can you have a great book if you have a crappy website, to paraphrase something Cynthia said.

She talked a lot about what mistakes she sees in submissions. The most of which was people that didn’t spellcheck their work and people that didn’t improve over time. The spell checking is baffling to me still. How can people send submissions in that haven’t been spell checked with information is ubiquitous? I don’t know how it’s possible, but it happens to me all the time and it happens to Cynthia more.

We touched on the people not growing a bit more than the spell checking. We talked a lot about why people don’t grow as artists and decided it came down to not evaluating your work and not reading enough. Sometimes you need to take a break from your work and evaluate it later. Other times you need to go back and read a lot more other content to help yourself grow.

Reading is one of the most important parts to writing. When you read you understand the mechanics of writing from the masters. I have never read a book without learning something about writing. The more books you read the more you learn. It’s as simple as that.

This is a great interview. You’ll learn a lot from it. You can check out Aqueous Books at http://www.aqueousbooks.com/ and Prick of the Spindle at http://prickofthespindle.org/. Cynthia is online at http://www.cynthiareeser.com.

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The two levers that control your business

There are two levers which control every business. It’s the only two levers that matter when it comes to cash flow. Most people don’t think of cash flow when it comes to their business. They think about making more money. Unfortunately, making more money usually comes with extra expenses. People tend to raise their expenses to their income level.

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If you can understand these two levers, your stress levels will diminish and you will be able to make your business sustainable.

The first of these levers is Making More Money. Every business is concerned with making more money. It’s the basis for our capitalist system. However, very few businesses know what they need to do to make more money.

For my business, I make more money whenever I release a new product to my mailing list or go to a live show. Those two ways to generate revenue account for 90% of by business. When I release a new product, my existing fans buy the product and share the product on their social feeds driving in a massive amount new clients.

Since my business relies on one to one interaction with fans, the other way I can make more money is to attend more shows. And if I’m already maxed out on shows I can make more money by attending bigger shows.

So I know if I need a cash infusion then I must go to more (or bigger live shows) or release a Kickstarter. I have other ways that are long tail items (like Amazon and my existing courses) but those don’t give me immediate cash flow.

One other way to look at this is by conversion percentage. If you own a service-based business and you know that for every 100 people you talk to 10 walk through your door and 1 becomes a client, you can always add more revenue to your business by talking to more people, or increasing how many of those people walk through the door, or increasing how many people walk through your door become clients.

The math looks like this:  

100 PEOPLE = 10 WALK-INS = 1 CLIENT = $

So if you want to double revenue, you can either talk to 200 people:

200 PEOPLE = 20 WALK-INS = 2 CLIENT = $$

Or you can get double the amount of people to walk in:

100 PEOPLE = 20 WALK-INS = 2 CLIENTS = $$

Or you can get double the number of people that become clients:

100 PEOPLE = WALK-INSINS = 2 CLIENTS = $$

In each scenario, you are doubling your revenue. However, you are only doubling that revenue because you understood those levers that control your business. For me, I know that every show I go to with 1000 attendees will lead to 10 sales.

So for me either I can go to shows with 2,000 attendees and make 20 sales, or offer more products so I can make 20 sales from the same 1,000 attendees.

Knowing this lever can vastly increase your ability to make money and decrease your stress level. And if your levers aren’t enough to get you to where you want to go, you know you need to introduce another line of revenue, like a better distributor, or becoming a speaker, or opening a new business.

Making more money is the most common way have more money. However, there is another way that most people ignore. That way is to spend less money.

That’s right. If you have $1,000 in extra expenses you can cut back on, then you now have $12,000 more cash flow a year. For my situation, we currently have two car loans and PMI on our house, all adding up to over $1,000 of extra expenses per month. For a company that’s just getting on its feet, $1,000 a month is the difference between losing money and making money.

There are always expenses to cut. Sometimes you can add up 10 little cuts to equal one big cut. Other times you can cut something big (like a car payment) and do as well as finding $1,000 more in revenue a month.

It’s important to look at both of these factors and understand they both lead to a successful business. If I can cut $1,000 extra of expenses easier than I can find $1,000 in extra revenue, then that is a worthy thing to pursue.

A huge amount of my day is figuring out how I can spend less while making more. That’s the golden ticket right there. If I can spend $1,000 less a month and make $1,000 more, I’ve just won so hard it’s not funny.

And this is something you can bring to your own business. If you need $500 to start a business, you can either get a part time job or you can cut out frivolous spending, or both. If you do both then you’ll be at your goal in half the time.

So those are the two levers that control your business. Use them well. If you want to find out how you can cut expenses and increase revenue, click here to book a free 30-minute strategy call with me today.

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Today on the show we have Eva Sowinski, founder of fan*alley and awesome artist in her own right. I met her doing a show a couple of months ago and she did something I rarely see artists do: she engaged people. I don’t just mean she said “Hi”. I mean she had real conversations with them about their likes and dislikes, about why they were at the show, and what they were after. She was really funny in a way that you don’t see artists being funny often.

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Like I said, she’s an amazing artist in her own right, but she wants to talk about fan*alley, so here is their bio from the shopfanalley.com website.

fan*alley was just a vision of Eva Sowinski’s after she opened A Little Known Shop in 2013 with business partner Danielle Ochoa ofLayla and Lisette. Danielle and Eva, along with their friend Genevieve Atkerson, began hosting small craft shows filled with vendors just breaking into the art world or those looking to build their entrepreneurial dreams.

In order to expand in such a small space, Eva and Danielle decided it was time to part ways so each could continue growing in their own passions. After 1 year of running the brick and mortar, fan*alley, Eva felt the weight of running a small business on her own. She decided to cut out the overhead, as she saw all of her artists getting more and more mobile with shows. What if fan*alley was a mobile shop that curated pop-ups and galleries all over?

Now that the shop is closed, you can still find fan*alley popping up all over Los Angeles and Orange County. From comic book shops, restaurants to little unique venues. “I want to host shows that are affordable for artists to set up, continue to be grassroots, and allow our customers to get into affordable, if not free, events and spend their money on the art!” — Eva Sowinski

Eva is a creative entrepreneur in the best sense of the word. She brings together the best of creativity and entrepreneurship. She uses things like concept validation and roi. She understands customer acquisition cost and the value of retention. I don’t know if that’s because she owned her own brick and mortar store before striking out on her own to do pop up shows, but Eva knows business.

We spent a lot of time in this episode talking about shows, mostly because she’s an expert at shows both running them and exhibiting at them. Many of my friends have done her shows and loved them because they are focused a curated properly. Her shows all have themes and she brings in artists that can play to those themes.

One of the things we talked about a lot is how shy artists can open up more even if they don’t like talking to people. It all came down to three things: put your phone away, have some freebies to attract people, and have a unique twist on old favorites.

One of the examples we talked about was super emo friends. Here is an artist that took pop culture and turned it on its head by combining it with chibi and emo. Not only is it a unique concept, but it is ALSO displayed beautifully. The artist puts everything in frames and in multiple levels so you get a lot of information in a small space. Instead of competing with a thousand other artists doing the same thing, he made his mark in a different way with a unique style with drives traffic.

I still think regardless you need to hook people into your booth and make them understand that it’s about making a connection. Eva stressed multiple times the connection being the important thing when exhibiting at shows. People are there to make connections. And if you can make a connection you can also sell.

But Eva isn’t just in person, she also kills it online. Eva does something amazing where she gets the fans involved in her paintings and prints. She will post on Instagram that she’s going to do a live periscope to paint a new pin-up. Then she will ask the fans the colors she should paint the commissions. Then she’ll give away a print to one of the people watching…but because they all contributed to the print everybody wants to buy one. On top of that she just crowdsourced the best version of her print so she can sell the most of it at shows.

Now that is sales for an artist. She is taking an ephemeral product and infusing emotion into it, all while increasing sales. And she’s not the only artist that does this. She gave some great examples of other artists she worked with also crowdsourcing their work and getting people involved.

One of my favorite stories was about two sisters who are artists. They did a gallery show at Eva’s old brick and mortar shop, but during the gallery they asked people what their next show should be, and even had people preordering prints for it! They weren’t even there and their salesmanship and marketing were doing the work for them.

This was a great episode and I’m truly excited at everything Eva is doing. I can’t wait to have her on again! You can check her out on Instagram, Twitter and Periscope @fanalley and online @ www.shopfanalley.com.

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The most important part in the sale of any book is the cover. That’s why people pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for a known cover artist to do their covers.

That’s crazy of course. You should never pay somebody thousands of dollars for a cover, but it is the most important part in selling your book. 

Why? 

Because it’s what makes people give your book a chance. It’s what tells people what the book is about. It’s what stops them in their tracks as they flip through books in their local store or walk through vendor space at a convention. A cover is what convinces somebody to open your book.

Now what you do once they’re inside is incredibly important too, but if they don’t pick up your book they won’t buy it. If they don’t think your book is interesting from the cover alone, they won’t give it a chance.

And yet I see thousands of covers at every show that just…well they suck. There’s no better way to say it. They are uninspired and often tacky. They definitely don’t make me want to pick up your book. So how do you make your covers awesome?

Tell me what’s going on in the book from the title.

I’m not a mind reader. There are millions of books published every year and I don’t have time to decipher what a random word means. That may have been possible when publishers only put out a handful of books at a time, but not self-publishing means that every title has to mean something. Usually, that means more than one word on the title, but there are really good titles with one-word titles: Bound, Ransom, and Payback are three titles that convey exact what a book means in a single word. The problem is you will most likely not be the first person to use your one-word title.

Now, if you have a huge marketing budget you might be able to skirt this title issue. For instance, Firefly has a cult following even though the name doesn’t tell me anything about what the show is about. They had Fox behind them with a massive budget for marketing. You don’t have that.

Additionally, when you already have an existing brand, you don’t need much else. You can make Star Trek the name of every book in a series and still sell gazillions of copies. You are not Star Trek. You have no brand and no money, so you need to title your book so that your audience will know what it’s about.

Give me a hero image that speaks to me.

Even if you have a cool title, usually the image accompanying has nothing to do with the book interiors. Most comics especially suffer from superhero syndrome, which is the tendency to have the main character on a cover standing still, brooding off into space, without any context. This works for Spider-Man, but it doesn’t work for random book #78,215.

Another huge culprit of this is romance novels. They usually have one or two people on the cover with barely any clothing staring at each other or looking longingly off into space. This really tells me nothing except that there will me some nekkid people in that book. Of course with romance novels that’s often all you need. Fabio proved that.

But at least romance novels speak to the intended reader. You know that is a romance novel from the moment you pick up the book. You probably know the main character and its tone. I can’t tell you how many romance books get sold just on how hot the cover is alone.

But that’s my point. You have to have a hero image that speaks to the reader. For instance, Firefly’s main image was of the ship silhouetted against a planet. Now that’s a cool image. Even if the title didn’t make sense to me I would want to learn more because I like futuristic space stuff.

Figure out your audience and make your cover for them.

Is your book a cozy mystery? Psychological horror? Epic Fantasy? Then you should be studying dozens of other covers in that exact genre to figure out what readers want. It’s really not hard to do competitive analysis anymore. All it takes is a bag of Funions, a computer, and 30 minutes.

Your cover is intended to lure in your perfect reader. That’s the beauty of a cover. You know that saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” That’s hogwash. You should be able to judge a book by its cover if you’ve done a good job. That way, your reader will know exactly what to expect.

Don’t go to a cover mill.

Please don’t go to a cover mill. If you buy your cover online from an already done template I promise at least a dozens others have done the same thing. Make your cover original. It might cost you a little more now, but it will lead to tons more sales in the future.

At the end of the day, your cover is a way to show your awesome book off to the perfect reader. It tells people you’ve taken your time and thought about what you want to convey. A good cover shows you are professional and makes people believe in your work. A good cover leads to sales because people stop and look.

A good cover doesn’t have to cost a million dollars. It just has to have some forethought and planning.

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