8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: selling yourself

Chapter List

  • Store Front

    Unless you’ve dived deep into these writings you may be blissfully unaware that I am doing (and posting) a lot of words.  I’ve written about writing at various points through this project, from explaining about this blog, to name dropping my other parallel projects, to lamenting my struggles with trying to get my fiction into a state of something bigger than some scribbled drafts. Whatever you’ve read, it’s probably not half of the story, but all you need to know is that I’ve been putting words on paper (digital paper, ahem) without break since leaving my government job, and that has been going on three and half years now.

    Phew!

    And with all that sitting in drives and blogs and files and all over the place, I had an idea and the inclination to do something with it.

    I built a digital publication studio… which is not really all that much to do in the modern internet: a couple plugins, more words, some imagery, a payment gateway and a storefront.

    As you are reading this, my shop has been online for a couple days.

    Now look, I’ve committed multiple times in things I’ve written to not advertising on these sites. But when I write that what I mean to tell you is that I’m not going to pepper this site with third party click ads or do sponsored posts or dive into corporate collaborations.

    On the other hand, every creative maker needs a way to sell their own wares.

    My wares are words.  My products have for a long time been (free) blogs that are not cluttered with paywalls or ad breaks or spammy experiences.

    To supplement that I decided (like any responsible creative) I should turn those free blogs (still now and forever free) into something with a bit of added value. My storefront will start to have a collection of anthologies in PDF or DRM-free ePub formats so that you can download larger collections of posts to read offline, in a more coherent order, and will be yours to own forever.

    So I lied. One advertisement is coming to this site: the occasional nudging reminder that you can support me and my sites by buying a digital download of my work. It’s the dirty side of creativity, but—and I’ve written this over and over, you can download an anthology and check—what’s the point of making stuff if no one ever sees it?

  • Self Employed

    Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.

    Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.

    Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.

    I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.

    It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.

    Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.

    For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot. 

    I would say I was working.

    The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.

    The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.

    As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way. 

    Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?

  • Free Pics

    I give away a lot of my art and photography.

    I don’t often or consciously think of it like that, but in the moments when I am challenged on the value of what I make I also tend to get snagged on this little reality: I give a lot of it away for free and don’t think twice about it, either.

    There is a value proposition mixed in there, of course.

    Value comes from demand and demand is not automatic: that is to say, my photos, say, only have value if someone wants them and just because I take them doesn’t mean they automatically have a corresponding someone who wants them. 

    Value, in this way is a bit circular. You need to create the value by creating an audience, and you create an audience by lowering the value, often to zero, of your work so that the audience can have it, learn to love it, and eventually want to pay for it.

    At least, that’s one way.

    I’ve never consciously done that… but I have done it unconsciously. I have taken photos on my own time and motivation and become the guy that someone has said, yes please, here’s money, give us more. It really has worked that way. 

    But maybe you have to give a lot away first.

    And maybe too, you have to be okay with something you made having a value that is something other than  a cash transaction.