This is day 1 of One Thousand True Fans , today’s dispatch is titled 1020 true fans.You can checkout the entire Gameplan here.
IMPORTANT Project Notes: This week we’ll be getting a bit more personal in our diaries as we question our goals as creatives in relation to money, some of us might have no goals for our art related to money at all, and then it might move on to selling something at a weekend market, to making a living. In every case we’ll explore the questions. For the assignments, feel free to share sparingly, cover some key details if you need to or be as open as you like.
Also remember that this is not about comparing, we all have different needs, desires and capacities and what is important is understanding your own goals of how you might want to make money from your art, and how much you want to make if any.
This is a framework to help you think about your OWN goals, I use the example of $100k a year as an illustration, but really someone might be happy with earning $500 from their art while someone else might need more.
The goal of this week is to think about how money, time and art relate to one another for us.
I acknowledge that it is a tough topic to breech, but I’m also confident that over the past few weeks of interactions we have learned to trust each other a little bit, and if that is true for you maybe we can continue sharing and learning from each other, and if you prefer not to share any of your work from this week, that is also fine, you can instead do exercises from week 2 and 3 and share those.
Regardless of whether you do share, do take the time to think about these things.
"To be a successful creator you don't need millions. You don't need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."
That’s a relief ainnit.
As a kid of 5, or even 25, I hardly knew what a million was, it was an abstract unattainable concept. It was equated to making it, in any field, it felt like any thing worth doing was only worth doing if you could get a million something out of it.
Sell a painting for a million dollars, sell a million copies of a book, have a million dollars in the bank, and so on… But how do you get from anywhere to a million. And more importantly is a million even the right number?
Kevin Kelly’s famous article, transformed that idea, and should probably be credited to why the creator economy is even a thing.
Today we’re going to be talking about numbers, specifically the money we will need to earn from our art, to just do the thing. ( if you have no intention to make money from your art, I hope you will take this as a form of general knowledge, or perhaps, a ‘what if’ exercise.