The Complete Creative

This week I’ll be down at San Diego Comic-Con, and with all the hype around that event, I decided not to post an interview this week. I didn’t think it would be fair to any of our upcoming guests. So instead, I am doing something special. I’m giving you a sneak people inside my Facebook group, Writers and Authors Making Money Selling Books. It’s a completely free group I moderate that helps authors make more money by selling more books.

                This episode is the audio from a live video I did for the group about the difference between something being complicated and it being hard. It’s a really important concept I hear people confusing all of the time, and I wanted to clear it up for the group.

                If you enjoy this group, head on over to www.writingandsellingcommunity.com and sign up for free. 

                Listen to this episode if you want to learn:

-How to get off the fence and start doing the hard work of writing

-Why most advice is so complicated when it comes to making it as an author

-How simple the business side of writing really is

                And many more insights I hammer home along the way. If you like this episode, don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on iTunes, and if you want the FREE first chapter of my new non-fiction book Sell Your Soul: How to Build Your Creative Career, all you have to do is enter your email at www.gosellyoursoul.com

Thanks a lot!

Jeff Goins is a national bestselling author of five books, most notably among them The Art of Work and his new book Real Artists Don’t Starve.

 I was in the launch group for his new book and I loved it. It was everything I wanted to say, except much more eloquently and cohesively stitched together. If you’ve ever struggled with making money as an artist, this book makes the strongest case I’ve ever seen, full of a hundred stories of people who’ve made a living as an artist, making every type of art, both historically and through to today.

Now, if you’re already in the right headspace to make a living as an artist if you’ve got a good relationship with making money, and if you’re ready to rock and roll, maybe this isn’t the book for you. However, if you’ve struggled with making money in the past, or you need to get in a better headspace to make a living as an artist and not feel guilty about it, then this is the book for you. Check it out in the link below.

Click here to check it out.

In this episode, Jeff talks about

-Why struggling as an artist isn’t required

-Why real artists don’t starve

-The biggest mindset shift you need to make a living as an artist

-The most important key to building an audience

-Why you are doing a disservice to your audience by not letting them buy from you

And much more. Make sure to head on over to www.goinswriter.com if you liked this one. You can pick up some freebies from Jeff once you buy the book. He also has a great podcast called The Portfolio Life, which you should check out.

If you want a free chapter of my new book Sell Your Soul: How to Build a Creative Career, which is sort of the companion book to this one, just click here.

If you haven’t joined our Facebook group to help you make more money selling books, click here.

And don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you liked this episode.

Today’s episode is all about animation. I talk with animation director Vinton Heuck about his career trajectory, working up from a storyboard cleanup artist on X-Men and Spider-Man to an animation director on Young Justice season three.

I actually met Vinton without having any idea his resume. We were at a small convention called San Fernando Comic Con last December, and he was showing off his new book Mabigon, an original epic fantasy tale with Arthurian legend tones. We talked for a while during the show, and I friended him on Facebook later.

Then, a few months later they did the show again, and I was talking with Larry Houston, one of the directors of that seminal 90s X-Men cartoon, and he was talking about working with Vinton, and I said, hold up, the Mabigon guy?? That led me down the rabbit hole of asking Vinton all about his past and finding out he’s got a resume as long as my art.

We got to be friendly enough for me to ask him to come on the show and talk about his experience in animation, from a kid in Washington trying to work in comics (and getting a shot at drawing Green Hornet back when Now Comics owned the license), to driving down to Los Angeles to work for Saban on Captain America and Silver Surfer, to bouncing around Sony on Jackie Chan Adventures and Godzilla, until he finally found a home at Warner Brothers on The Batman show from the early 2000s, eventually rising to become an animation director on season 5.

Along the way, he’s worked with DC comics and made his own comics. If you’ve ever wanted to track an animation director’s career, Vinton gives a deep dive on exactly his step by step process to getting where he is today.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn:

The step-by-step of how Vinton went from living in Washington working as a security guard to directing Young Justice.

The secrets to surviving in animation for 20 years.

Why it’s so important to remain positive

Why success is all about perseverance

What he would tell himself to cut years off his career struggles

What he did right in his career to make him the artist he is today.

If you want to check out Mabigon, his original comic, head on over to www.mabigoncomic.com today. If you want to check out Mabigon on Facebook, click here.

If you like this show, please like, review, and subscribe to it by clicking here.

If you haven’t joined our Facebook group yet, now is the best time by clicking here.

When it comes to living a creative life, there are two types of motivation you can use in order to find meaning in your work. These forces can drive you toward success or madness, depending on which one you choose.

The first is external motivation. There are many types of external motivation, like the desire for fame, glory, money, or some sort of validation outside of yourself which will make your work meaningful.

Most people I encounter begin their creative life focused on these external motivations. They want to be actors because of a desire to walk the red carpet and make lots of money. They want to paint so they can be hung in the Met or the Louvre. They want to work for Marvel because millions of people will see their work and recognize them.

People motivated by external factors, however, quickly fade out. Almost nobody will ever be hung at a prestigious gallery, or work for Marvel, or achieve any sort of fame. That realization hits people like a ton of bricks and they run away without ever looking back.

Even if somebody does achieve some measure of success, that success may not exist in three years, three months, or even three days. People that achieve great fame and success often talk about the crippling depression that comes right along with it.

That’s because relying on external motivations to validate your life is a hollow pursuit. The only true way to succeed and be fulfilled is to be internally motivated by the love of creating something. This is the second type of motivation; internal motivation.

Being internally motivated means your validation comes from the creation of something, not from somebody appreciating it. It means you can motivate yourself instead of relying on other people to do it for you. The appreciation of your work by others is a bonus, but the true validation comes from making it in the first place.

Additionally, internal motivations create better art because you are no longer hamstrung by what society wants you to create. You are no longer looking for the right thing to make. You are making something that is unique to you. Ironically, by making something unique to you it becomes easier to find an audience for your work.

I’m not saying that external validation isn’t wonderful. There is nothing like selling something you’ve made. However, the sale of the product should be a bonus on top of the creation of something great.

I’m also not saying you should create without ever worrying about something’s salability. This is a book about making a career as a creative after all, not about creating weird and unsaleable material. However, the first step in creating great content is to actually make stuff for the sake of making it.

At the beginning of your creative pursuits, nothing you make is going to be saleable. Until you can hit that stride of making consistently great work, it’s important to create for the sake of creating and let that be its own reward.

Then, when you get to the level where you can create saleable material you can hold true to that internal motivation as a rudder while you look for ways to sell your work to a mass audience.

A perfect example of this is Laika. They are a stop motion animation house in a world full of computer-generated animation. Yet they have still been able to find an audience and put out Coraline, The Box Trolls, Paranorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings. That’s an amazing testament to internal motivation.

By developing that internal motivation, you will never be devastated when a product doesn’t catch on because the true value was in the creation of it. By being able to validate yourself, you can always keep going even in the face of tremendous adversity.

This episode showcases my dear friend Sebastian Jones, whose company Stranger Comics is seeing the type of explosive growth you hope for every company run by good people. With their message of inclusion, focus on fantastic stories, and 20 year journey to bring the world of Asunda onto the world stage, Stranger went from tabling next to me with one book and a couple of kid’s books and one graphic novel two years ago to getting massive 10”x20” corner booths and blowing out the type of sales numbers that would put your jaw on the ground.

Along the way, Sebastian has kept humble and focused. We had an amazing talk with ranged from creating worlds to selling at shows to building an audience over time, to handling scaling rapidly, and even what it’s like co-writing with Amandla Stenberg, who played Rue in the Hunger Games movies.

This is one of those interviews you don’t want to end because you have hundreds of unanswered questions, and every answer led to a dozen follow-ups, but what Seb shared was amazing, and I hope you will check out his new Kickstarter for Niobe: She is Life, which closes just a couple of days after this goes live. They’ve already passed $50,000 and their first OGN was one of the best I’ve ever read.

Listen to this episode is you want to learn:

-How to build a new world over more than 20 decades

-What most fantasy authors get wrong when writing their books

-The most important thing about building a shared universe

-The secret to finding a rabid audience and keep them coming back for more

-What Sebastian would do differently to cut years off his struggle to get where he is today

-The method Seb uses to get massive publicity for his launches

You can find Stranger comics on all the major platforms @strangercomics. Make sure to check out Niobe: She is Life on Kickstarter today by clicking here.

If you liked this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe today by clicking here.

If you haven’t joined our free Facebook group yet, you can do it today by clicking here.

Russell

This week on the show I’m excited to have Hope Larson as a guest. Hope is the current writer for Batgirl, but I know her from her amazing work on Chiggers, Compass South, and the A Wrinkle in Time graphic novel, along with having the most reasonably priced original art I’ve ever seen. I picked up three of her original pieces at ComicART two years ago for $25. Here is here bio, from Wikipedia:

While Larson was still in college, Scott McCloud took an interest in her illustrations, encouraging her to create comics. Soon after, she was invited to the webcomics anthology site Girlamatic and produced her first professional comic, a web serial entitled I Was There & Just Returned.[4] Afterward, Larson concentrated on a number of small, handmade minicomics, combining her interests in comics, screenprinting, and bookmaking.

She contributed to comics anthologies Flight, True Porn 2, and You Ain't No Dancer, while working on a web-serialized graphic novel, Salamander Dream. This eventually became her first full-length book, published by AdHouse Books in September 2005; she moved to Oni Press for her second graphic novel, Gray Horses (released March 2006).

In 2006, Larson signed a two-book contract with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster. The first book under this deal, Chiggers (released June 18, 2008, under the Atheneum Books Ginee Seo imprint), is a graphic novel about "nerdy teenaged girls" who meet at summer camp. Chiggers is intended for a 9- to 12-year-old audience.[5]

March 26, 2016, It was announced she would be the new writer for DC Comics Batgirl A run that saw the character go on a backpacking trip through China on a voyage of self-discovery.

In addition to comics, Larson has worked as a freelance illustrator for various clients, including the New York Times.

She has also worked as a letterer on such books as Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's Local.

Hope is awesome, and another in a truly small amount of comic book creators I’ve had on the show which has been published by traditional publishing houses AND mainstream comic book publishers.

Listen to this episode is you want to know:

How to learn to write better as an artist, even if you are self-taught

The But…Therefore strategy made famous by Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park (listen to the original by clicking here)

What Hope would tell little Hope about pitching to editors

How to sustainably build a career (newsflash: it’s hard)

The ins and out of publishing contracts, like what does being paid in thirds mean and how do you earn out

The difference between mainstream publishers and direct market ones

If you like this episode, head on over to Twitter @hopelarson or Instagram @despairlarson, and check out her slow-updating webcomic at solocomic.net.

And if you haven’t checked out Compass South, pick it up here, and make sure to also buy her new book Knife’s Edge by clicking here. I loved Compass South and can’t wait for my copy of Knife’s Edge!

If you like this show, please rate, review, and subscribe today by clicking here.

And if you want to make more money selling your books, join our free Facebook group by clicking here.

This week on the show is another live show, but it's not a panel or a workshop. This panel is a spotlight panel with Ken Levin, founder of First Comics in both the 80s and during its relaunch in 2011. 

Ken started First Comics in a world that only knew Marvel and DC, and he entered the scene as one of the first champions of creator rights that led directly and indirectly to the creation of Image Comics, and the industry as we see it today. 

Of course, that's only one of Ken's claims to fame. Ken is also the lawyer behind every big comic creator from Neil Gaiman to Garth Ennis and beyond. He's been an executive producer and producer on almost every relevant comic book movie since the early 2000s, most notably Preacher, the amazing series from AMC. 

So the City of Indio's Fantasia Comic Con brought me in as a moderator to ask Ken some questions, and let me tell you, this was the easiest moderation panel I've ever done. Ken could have talked for another six hours straight without another word from me. 

If you ever wanted to know about the history of independent comics, how to turn a comic book into a movie, or anything else that's happened in comics since the early 80s, this is the panel for you. 

If you like this episode, go find Ken at a show (he doesn't do a lot of social media), and check out First Comic's books. They are awesome. They put out Zen: The Intergalactic Ninja, several books from the Yuan Twins, and much more. 

If you like this show, head on over to iTunes to rate, review, and subscribe to the show by clicking here.

If you are an author or creator who wants to make more money selling books, join our free Facebook group by clicking here.

This week I’m bringing you a live workshop I did at Wyrdcon 2017 about how to build an audience from scratch. This is the holy grail, people. There is no point in making things if you don’t have an audience to buy it, unless you really don’t want people responding to your work. Since every artist I’ve ever met wants more people to respond to their work, it’s critically important that we are able to talk about building an audience.

There is an audience from literally everything on the planet, and if you can find yours, then you can start to make money on your art.

Here’s the description of my panel, straight from the Wyrdcon website:

Whether you are an author, and artist, a game designer, or a baker, you need an audience to buy your product. Building an audience is the critical factor that grows your business. Without it, your business can't become sustainable. Join Russell Nohelty, publisher of Wannabe Press and host of The Business of Art podcast, as he breaks down audience building and makes it attainable for everybody. 

The last part of that description is the most important in my opinion because this panel is all about making the process of building an audience attainable for everybody.

Listen to this episode if you want to find out:

-The five steps you must follow in order to build a rabid fanbase

-How to find your ideal client avatar

-Why you need to figure out your audience before you go looking for them

-Where to look for your ideal audience online

…and much more.

Hope you enjoy it.

Have you ever started a comic and not finished it? Are you in the middle of production on a comic and getting lost in the weeks? Do you lie awake at night trying to figure out how your book will ever get done?

That’s the topic of this week’s live episode, recorded at Silicon Valley Comicon. It’s for everybody that’s been in the weeds producing a comic and doesn’t know where to go next. I put together an amazing panel of guest who’ve all successfully produced comic books, from creators to publishers to artists and everything in between. Here’s the description, straight from the panel guide.

TITLE: How to get a comic over the finish lineDESCRIPTION: Does making a comic seem insurmountable? Are you stuck in the middle of production? Then this is the panel for you. Join a group of veteran indie comic creators as they discuss what it takes to get a project over the finish line and into the hands of readers.MODERATOR: Russell Nohelty (Wannabe Press)SPEAKER 1: Hannah McGill (RAWR! Dinosaur friends; www.hannahmcgill.com; @hannahcomb on Twitter)SPEAKER 2: Garrett Gunn (Franklin and Ghost, Go West; www.geekerymagazine.com; @somewriterguy on Twitter)SPEAKER 3: Barbra Dillon (Fanbase Press; www.fanbasepress.com; @barbrajdillon on Twitter) SPEAKER 4: Madeleine Holly-Rosing (Boston Metaphysical Society; www.bostonmetaphysicalsociety.com; @mhollyrosing on Twitter)SPEAKER 5: Christie Shinn (Personal Monsters; www.horatotastudios.com; @horatorastudios on Twitter)

You’ll recognize some of these guests from other episodes of my show over the years. You can listen to Barbra Dillon on her own spotlight panel here, and she talked about building an audience with Madeleine Holly-Rosing here.

You can also catch Madeleine on previous panels talking about Kickstarter here and how to sell at conventions here, along with her spotlight episode here.

Also, catch Christie on her own spotlight panel here.

If you enjoy this episode, please rate, review and subscribe to our show by clicking here.

And if you are an author or creator looking to make more money selling books then join our free Facebook group by clicking here.

I won’t lie. Pat Shand is a guy I’m a little jealous of because he seamlessly weaves comics and novels into one awesome career. He’s raised $20,000+ on Kickstarter and had exclusive contracts with comic publishers. He’s written Marvel books, including Guardians of The Galaxy, and he’s just killing it.

I’m not even gonna attempt to list out the rest of his bibliography here, but you can find it by clicking here.

I don’t know how Pat and I met, especially because we live on different coasts, but I am super excited that we did because he has been an awesome and supportive friend along with making great projects. I must track down Vampire Emmy and the Garbage Girl somewhere. It’s essential to by existence.

Pat came on the show to talk about building a living as a writer and to pimp his new book Clonsters, which is on Kickstarter now. You should check it out. The art is incredible.

Listen to this episode if you want to know:

Why you shouldn’t be afraid to reach out to your fans

How to bridge the writing gap between comics and novels

Why networking is so important to writing success

How Pat writes 3+ novels in a year

Why you shouldn’t be pissed at creators if their covers suck

How to book jobs (both the sneaky way and the best way)

Why you should always buy from creators you meet

How to test an artist properly

If you like this episode, tell Pat by finding him @patshand on twitter. Talk to him positively about stuff you love if you want to win his heart.

If you are digging this show, please head on over to iTunes to subscribe, rate, and review it today by clicking here.

If you are an author or creator yourself, don’t forget to join our FREE Facebook community, Authors and Creators Making Money Selling Books, by clicking here.