• Creating

Sean Platt: Creating, Selling & Innovating

By Todd Henry

I recently had the privilege of connecting with Sean Platt to discuss the mashup between creativity and entrepreneurship (full audio of interview below). Sean is pioneering the genre of serialized fiction for the digital age, and has a lot to say about how to balance the need to create out of a love for the work with the need to create something that your market will find valuable. Here are a few of my key insights from our conversation.

Your best work will likely come from tapping into a deeper passion for your current work rather than seeking the buzz of new work. It’s critical that we are able to to drill deep into the themes that fuel us and apply them to our work. This will tend to lead to doing our best work, right where we are. Sometimes working for others provides you with rails that allow you to do better work.

We cannot treat our work as too precious. A healthy creative process must involve a certain amount of distance from the work. We can’t hold it as precious to the point that it limits our willingness to take creative risks.

At the same time, we must not undervalue our work. In the “race to the bottom” that results from the rise of digital media, artists of all stripes must be careful not to fall prey to the temptation to give away work out of a fear of going unnoticed. There is a balance between generosity and neediness.

There are still gatekeepers, they’re just more distributed. With the death of mass (as Seth Godin recently called it) we are now faced with the need to attract and grow communities to help us gain larger audiences for our work. The challenge is that there are now more voices in the mix competing for a limited bandwidth of attention. The artist must now be experienced at creating, packaging and selling and can no longer simply engage in their art. This also raises questions about what this will do to the value of art minus marketing. (Would we have had The Beatles if they’d been required to make their living performing concerts instead of in the studio recording amazing music?)

These are a few learnings and thoughts from our extended, multi-topic chat. Your thoughts about what’s above or anything else from our conversation?

Listen: 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

RELATED ARTICLES:

• Getting Ideas By Getting Messy
• What Do You Do When You're Working?
• Four Ways To Stoke Your Curiosity
• 10 Questions That Will Help You Find Your Voice

FTC Disclosure: Some of the links in this article may be "affiliate" links, especially those to Amazon.com. AC will receive a commission if you buy the product through these links. We only endorse products we like.