My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
–Anton Chekhov
What John Coltrane can teach you about building your audience
John Coltrane
No, don’t do that. Don’t run away.
Don’t let it scare you that I just name-dropped one of the giants of jazz.
Or that Coltrane’s music seemed complicated.
This post isn’t going to preach jazz to you. And the jazz police aren’t going to show up and arrest me for having the gall to use America’s finest art form as a platform to illustrate an important point about the power of audience building.
There’s valuable insight in here even if jazz isn’t your thing.
As a reader of thinkit creative, you could be here looking for advice on search-engine optimized writing for the web to generate online traffic and convert readers into buyers. Maybe you’re a writer looking to build a base of readers. Or perhaps you’re a professional speaker or you own a design studio and you’re looking to take your business to the next level of profitability.
Odds are good that you’re in the idea business. And that means your success hinges on finding and building an audience.
John Coltrane can help you with that.
Discipline
Even this giant of music started without an audience.
As a young musician, John Coltrane loved how saxophonist Charlie Parker wasn’t afraid to be playful with his music.
He emulated what he heard. Not as a cheap cut-and-paster of style.
Rather, his drive to decode Parker and other influential players became part of young Coltrane’s relentless practicing. Biographies on the man often quote fellow musicians who knew him early on, saying they’d never seen anyone put in the hours the way Coltrane did.
Out of the hours came the admirers. From the admirers came the listeners. And then the big breaks, like when he was invited to tour with the first time. Then the audience took hold and the Coltrane legend grew. It’s hard to imagine any of that happening in Trane’s career without the roots of discipline being as strong as they were.
Intuition
“Jazz…is a social music operating in a commercial context,” says Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in his book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. “You give the audience what you think it wants. At the same time, you improvise, and try to bring out the part of you that is the least like anyone else.”
Groundbreaking ideas rarely find their audience quickly. It starts with thinking deeply about your audience and having as much of an understanding of what they want as what they might also be open to. Research will help you, but only up to a certain point.
Intuition goes well beyond calculating a market penetration or measuring the size of an audience. There’s a deeper art. And you only get to exercise that by trying and by experimenting based on a mix of what you know is true and on a hunch you have about what might be true.
Taste
Coltrane learned the hard way early on that masterful technique alone doesn’t win many ears. In fact, more than one audience in his career booed him for doing just that. He learned that ideas—especially the big ideas—have to be presented in a way that are pleasing to others. Often that means taking the time to package your ideas attractively.
One of Coltrane’s great achievements in the American songbook is what he did with his interpretation of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic show tune, My Favorite Things. The music says more than I can say in paragraphs about that. So have a listen.
Platform
To find and build an audience, your idea or your message needs a platform. My Favorite Things was a platform for Coltrane that helped him bring big-headed jazz to a wider audience. So what’s your platform? It can be a blog, an ebook, a series of newsletter articles, or a presentation (to name just a few examples). Invest the time to design that platform properly. Hire a good designer who can help you build something that people will enjoy using. That’s the front door. It’s how you’re going to invite your audience in so that they’ll stick around and see what else you have to say.
Mastery of any creative skill only comes from finding good influences and by putting in the hours to hone your skills. Work to emulate. This is how you learn how great ideas are constructed. Only then can your own voice emerge. Take chances and find ways to build entranceways for people to access even your edgy ideas with relative ease.
There is just the work. Advice from a writer.
Classic Keys by Jim Denham on 500px
Or that you break rules. Or that you break them because you didn’t know they were rules in the first place.
Or that you’re afraid.
Who cares that you stay up late, or get up early because you’re not happy with something you wrote and you need to fix it?
Who cares that it’s the wrong word and the right one won’t come?
Or that you hate semicolons as much as I do?
You’re the one behind the curtain.
You are in the magic business, friend. And only you knows how to push that idea along.
There is no license for writers. You chose this.
No one is ever going to give you permission to do this.
And you’re often going to find more reasons to stop than to go on.
No one cares if it’s luck or talent that saves you.
No one ever says “I used to be a writer” and means it. You’re in this for life.
The readers and the money are rewards. And good ones at that.
But there is only one thing keeping score in this business of stringing together letters and words.
There’s just the work itself.
A lesson about content, mass audience and failure
You are a broadcaster (photo by cogdog on flickr)
I’m in the middle of doing some in-depth research for an important project, and I find myself thinking a lot these days about the nearly lost legacy of Charles Herrold.
It’s okay if you have no idea who he was. I hadn’t a clue either until I started reading up on the early history of radio.
Charles Herrold was a radio pioneer.
He coined the terms broadcasting and narrowcasting—possibly as early as 1909, and well before the eventual rise of radio’s golden age in the 1930s and 40s, by which time these were household names.
Like so many great words, broadcasting and narrowcasting were borrowed ideas: terms that were used to describe the farming method of sowing seeds from a container that spun outwards in all directions rather than in neat rows.
In choosing these words to describe the scattering approach of this new medium, Herrold showed that he understood the enormous potential of radio as an all-new way of reaching a lot more people than ever before, all at once.
Not just the select literate few of society, as was the case in the 18th and 19th centuries with book publishing and newspapers. All people. Not just with one program, but many.
Through radio and the way that Herrold (among others) saw its application, message became content.
Content became programming. And eventually, programming found a mass audience.
So why then is Herrold such a lesser-known in broadcasting history?
Most mentions of him indicate that he never made a profit from the industry that he helped pioneer.
Professor Mike Adams of San Jose State University summed up the problem this way: “He was in the right place at the right time” but he had the wrong technology.”
Herrold’s broadcasting was based on what engineers call the arc method, while others opted for a method involving vacuum tubes. I’ll spare you the technical details here.
What’s important to know about the arc method of broadcasting was that it sounded awful.
His audience couldn’t hear him as well as they could have. So they went elsewhere.
According to several public records, Herrold died in relative obscurity. Meanwhile, his radio counterpart, Frank Conrad went on to be celebrated in the New York Times as the “father of radio broadcasting.”
There are valuable lessons in this story that you can apply to your business and marketing efforts today.
First, it’s not enough to have good ideas or even to see the potential of something ahead of others.
Execution is everything.
Second, if you’re in the people business (and odds are very good that you are), you are a broadcaster. You can’t build an audience if people can’t hear you properly.
Let me repeat that…
“If you’re in the people business, you are a broadcaster. You can’t build an audience if people can’t hear you properly.”
Click to tweet this.
Make sure you have the right tools that cut through the noise. And remember: you have less time than you think to capture and maintain your audience’s attention.
Third, create great content just as you would build any other exceptional product in your business. Get it into the hands of your audience in a way that is most convenient for them.
These matter ahead of all things when you’re in the people business.
The habit of ideas and 10 more places I go for creative inspiration
Where do you get your ideas from?
Writers get asked this often and more often than not, the answer can be distilled to this: I don’t really know. They just come to me.
Ideas are like luck. You can believe they just happen and that you’re just fortunate to be there when they materialze. But that’s a pretty fanciful notion, isn’t it?
Here’s what I know as someone who has been in the idea business for more than 10 years on my own, and more than 20 in the writing trade: luck and ideas come from practice.
You have to make a habit of being there—of showing up and doing the thing that needs to get done to get the things you really want. There is no shortcut.
I like what Neil Gaiman says about this: “You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”
Part of the habit of ideas is to feed your appetite for more of them. I’ve talked before about 21 places for creative inspiration.
I want to share with you 10 more. The list is varied, but what they all have in common is an unyielding devotion to showing up regularly with great writing and solid ideas.
Who’s on your favourite list for creative inspiration? Let me know.
James Altucher
His positions on a lot of things might raise your eyebrows. He and I disagree, for instance, on the importance of voting (I see it as a civic duty in Canada, but I can see why he feels the way he does, living where he lives). But there’s a strange genius to what James does. I admire that, not to mention his deep sincerity. He also happens to be a prolific storyteller who understands the intimate bond between reader and writer. More than just teaching the value of not holding back at all in your writing, he also writes killer headlines. How can you help but click on a story called How I Screwed Yasser Arafat out of $2mm? I never miss a thing this guy writes.
Dan Zarella
I value a handful of field-tested research more than a truckload of opinions, and that’s why I read social media scientist Dan Zarella’s blog regularly (as well as his latest book). The takeway is more than just for social media. There’s insight here you can apply to all aspects of marketing and selling. As a direct result of Dan’s work—and his generosity in sharing his findings online—there’s a lot more certainty to writing for the web than ever before. Be sceptical of the opinionated. Act on verifiable data.
rob mclennan
Poetry is what reminds me that there are no easy answers to creative problems. As I say so often: simple is hard. I turn to many poets often for advice through their words. One in particular is rob mclennan, whom I’ve know since the days of Bard poetry readings in the basement of a downtown bar here in Ottawa. His blog isn’t just a platform for his own elegant prose, but for others, too.
Leo Babauta
As much as I’m a stickler for evidence-based research, one place where that can’t help much is in learning the mastery of living the good life in the fine sense that Aristotle once spoke of. The path to happiness is not through data, but through wisdom earned through practice. It’s that easy. And that hard. This is why I keep coming back to ZenHabits for more.
Colleen Francis
Wait, I know what you’re going to say. “Hey you’re plugging her because she’s a client!” Well, that’s partly true (I’ve been writing for Colleen for many, many years). But there’s an even more important reason. Colleen is one of the industry’s best speakers and coaches, teaching business owners and sales people to increase sales the smart way. I learn something new on every job I work on for her. If you want to be a better speaker, a better business owner and even just be smarter about working with people, Colleen has the world by the tail. So I’m happy to share her wisdom with you, dear reader.
Jane Friedman
Jane Friedman of the University of Cincinatti shares my passion for the future of publishing and has some very thoughtful things to say about that. She does a great job of helping to teach writers to think more like entrepreneurs. There are also valuable takeaways for everyone—not just writers–in search of advice and encouragement on keeping their creativity muscles well-exercised.
Jeff Goins
This is a recent find for me. Jeff’s a writer for writers. His blog is pitched at those who care about “writing, creativity, and changing the world.” And he does a great job of delivering on that. His stuff glows with an infectious positive energy and that’s why I subscribe to his updates. Bonus points for being a fellow guitar enthusiast.
Lisa Larter
She practices what she preaches about how businesses can do a better job of using social media in their marketing activities. Her post on why business owners need a “stop-doing” list helped give me a push in the right direction in 2011 and I’ve been reading her ever since. Lisa gets bonus marks for being a fellow resident of Ottawa–where a one-time non-existent entrepreneurial culture is growing today, thanks to the people who put in the time to make it happen.
Roger Ebert
Gone from us far too soon, and a giant in film review, Roger Ebert was a writer first…and one who just happened to talk about film. His ideas often touched on things that transcend cinema. He built a rather fine career on his considerable writing talents, and yet in the last several years of his life, his considerable skills somehow grew even mightier. Maybe it was in defiance of his illness and the cruel losses he suffered, but that passion he had for words was really something else. Unafraid to colour outside the lines, Ebert reminded us all that there is endless satisfaction in digging deeper into your thinking and to not just settle for what comes quickly.
Artie Isaac
I was first drawn to Artie because of his speaking style, which I admire greatly (and that includes his trademark bowtie). He’s a powerful advocate for anyone who is in the ideas business. What I’ve found has really been keeping me coming back, however, is his emphasis on ethics. He’s also a fan of Thich Nhat Hanh. So again, bonus points.
