Too many creators are overly concerned with selling and making money, and it’s why a lot of them don’t make money.
They’re protective of their intellectual property, afraid to part with it unless they get money in exchange. They hide their work from audiences in the hopes a big company will pay them to take it wide with some kind of paid distribution.
I get it. I also want to sell books, charge for the movies I make, and get paid to perform. But the entertainment business doesn’t work that way. You can charge people for things, but you need to focus more on not charging them for things.
In the early days of Internet commerce, pioneering online entrepreneur Eben Pagan saw that his sales improved when he gave products away for free. The more stuff he gave away, the more money he made. He leaned into it, calling it “moving the free line.”
It was a strategy I used at The Onion. We gave away all our material on the Internet for free because I knew it would build a happy fan base. It worked. The Onion now has fans and followers in the tens of millions.
And I’m still using this strategy. If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you know I sell books about how to write funnier, I mentor creative people (mostly comedians and comedy writers), and I teach online courses. But here I am giving away advice for free every day.
Everyone making a living online gives away free ebooks, free trainings, free social media content, free everything. Today, the commodity is not how much you can make, it’s how much you can give.
So be like Jesus. Give away your stuff. That’s the strategy.
This reminds of something Cory Doctorow said (I'm paraphrasing): most writers' problem isn't lack of sales, it's obscurity.
Agreed. Every time I’ve tried to do something in the hopes of making more money, it’s eventually bitten me hard in the ass!