Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

If you are trying to make something great, you must do the making: That work cannot be outsourced to someone else. You can’t hire your friends to do it for you. There is no firm that can produce a timeless work of art on your behalf for a flat fee.

Put a link in your email signature. How many emails do you send a day? See which social networks allow you to export your followers and send them a note asking them to join. Post online once a week asking your friends/family/coworkers to join your mailing list. Ask one group you are active in to join your newsletter. Create a physical form you can

From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. If there is anything to romanticize about art, it’s the struggle and the dedication required to get it right—and the motivating force that makes it all possible.

The difference between a great work and an idea for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real. That difference is not trivial. If great work were easy to produce, a lot more people would do it.

Faced with soul-crushing feedback or rejection, how does the creator respond? With petulance and anger? With open-mindedness and interest? With obsequiousness and desperation? Or careful consideration that parses the signal from noise? It is the creator’s choice at this critical juncture that determines so much—whether the project dies right there,

In developing a platform, we eschew the promotional apparatus that must be rebuilt and picked up anew with each and every launch. Instead, we choose to bind ourselves to an audience, to become one with that audience, and to become one with our weapon.

It can’t be, as Lady Gaga warned, “Thanks for buying my record, fuck you.” Your relationship with your fans must be more than transactional. It must be deeper. It should be for life. As she explained, she wants to tell her fans, “Thank you for buying my record—and I will live and die and breathe my art to protect your dreams because you protect min

Who else will care about the painstaking details and the consistency and integrity and the other little matters that add up to separate the memorable from the mediocre? Who else has the financial interest or the incentives to put in the effort to take this all the way?

In the course of creating your work, you are going to be forced to ask yourself: What am I willing to sacrifice in order to do it? Will I give up X, Y, Z? A willingness to trade off something—time, comfort, easy money, recognition—lies at the heart of every great work. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always a significant sacrifice that needs to