After reading your last newsletter I decided to give it a try myself giving away my most useful post for free. It was a long article about how I think about an artist portfolio, sharing all the things that have worked really well for me. It has doubled the number of daily subscribers as well as gotten some fans over the line to become paid subscribers so definitely a useful trade off. Also It doesn’t feel great to have your ‘best work’ behind a paywall
In the YouTube space, a lot of people complain about slow subscriber growth (I may be guilty of that myself but I'd never admit that, here), but subscribers are not just numbers. They represent real people and I think that's true of all interaction online. It's no use having 10,000 followers on a given platform if they're not interested or invested in what you do as a creative. Better to have 1,000 engaged followers than 10x that amount of strangers.
Maybe the biggest issue is expectation. If I release a comic, a video, a drawing for free then I should expect the world to acknowledge and appreciate that. But I think the reality is that you'll have to release hundreds, if not thousands, of free stuff in order to eventually receive acknowledgement from others. Luck and talent can speed that process up, but I think for the majority, we're definitely the tortoise in this race. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
After reading your last newsletter I decided to give it a try myself giving away my most useful post for free. It was a long article about how I think about an artist portfolio, sharing all the things that have worked really well for me. It has doubled the number of daily subscribers as well as gotten some fans over the line to become paid subscribers so definitely a useful trade off. Also It doesn’t feel great to have your ‘best work’ behind a paywall
In the YouTube space, a lot of people complain about slow subscriber growth (I may be guilty of that myself but I'd never admit that, here), but subscribers are not just numbers. They represent real people and I think that's true of all interaction online. It's no use having 10,000 followers on a given platform if they're not interested or invested in what you do as a creative. Better to have 1,000 engaged followers than 10x that amount of strangers.
Maybe the biggest issue is expectation. If I release a comic, a video, a drawing for free then I should expect the world to acknowledge and appreciate that. But I think the reality is that you'll have to release hundreds, if not thousands, of free stuff in order to eventually receive acknowledgement from others. Luck and talent can speed that process up, but I think for the majority, we're definitely the tortoise in this race. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.