I’ll Love It When A Plan Comes Together (Business of Art)

This is hopefully the first of a series of posts about the behind the scenes of turning Bulmash Media into a rewarding third act that will carry me into my early 70s.

Being a solopreneur in the arts sucks!

My title doesn’t quite match the “A-Team” meme. I will love it when a plan comes together. But so far, I’m still trying to define the plan that can make me say “I love it when a plan comes together”… when it comes together.

Whether you’re a writer, composer, painter, or other artist, odds are you’ve spent most of your time learning and practicing making art. Training in making a good business and marketing plan might have been part of your duties at your day job, but it’s unlikely you really marinated in the knowledge and mindset enough to make it easy to implement for your own work.

As an independent artist, you have to do a lot of the day-to-day operations: you’re product, publicity, marketing, vendor relations, shipping, customer service… Until you get successful enough to make it worthwhile to pay people to do it for you.

Basically, to be a successful right-brained person without a big bankroll, you have to acquire left-brain skills and do a lot of left-brain work.

T-minus 10 weeks until launch

While I’m working hard to finish my audiobook for the January 19th launch and the next novel for a July 6th launch, what am I doing to make sure not only that people will find it, but the kind of people who would enjoy it find it? The answer: I’m not really sure.

Distribution

I know that I’m going to put it up on YouTube in a video form, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, maybe some others. For the Audiobook… Amazon/Audible, maybe some others.

Advertising and Marketing

I’ve allocated spend for this. Aside from promoted posts, maybe some targeted ads on podcast networks. Which networks, types of ad collateral, and how I’ll test and refine for each ad/network are all TBD. Despite having a marketing budget, if it’s all spent on generating impressions that get few clicks and those clicks don’t convert well, was it just a burnt offering on the altar of my ego?

I have to figure out how I’ll learn from my failures and do enough research and ideation to reduce the number of failures to learn from.

Brands and Branding

While my first “big” project with Bulmash Media is The New Heroes of Old™ (NHOO), Bulmash Media is supposed to be an umbrella for different projects including NHOO, Bulmash Music, and maybe some scripted series (humorous web toons mostly). What is the Bulmash brand and how does it distill into NHOO, Bulmash Music, and Greg’s Shorts (I’m workshopping that title for the webtoons)?

Is the brand really whatever the fuck my brain barfs out? Bulmash Music has been. People ask me “what’s your genre” and I look at them like they’re idiots. I write song lyrics and the genre is whatever fits best as I noodle around with Suno.

I have four brands, three logos, and only the shallowest idea of what each brand is. In the beginning, I thought “I am the brand.” But that’s like me thinking “humanity is my audience.” Both are too inexact and too broad. Maybe, long term, I can expand the definition of who would be a member of my fanbase, but when I’m reintroducing myself to the broader world, what do I want them to think when they hear my name, hear my sub-brand names? I don’t honestly know.

Monetization

• Get YouTube and some other distribution channels for the podcast to “revshare” level (where I get paid a portion of ad revenues from the platforms running my content).
• A Patreon? Tip jar?
• Print, electronic, and audiobook sales…. mostly through Amazon.
• Merch, though I really haven’t thought about what that tangibly means.

I’m in weeds I didn’t even notice

As the talent and the money, I’ve focused more on the storytelling and performing to make the product, but I’m much less focused about how I package, brand, advertise, and sell the product. And if I don’t want to push my launch dates yet again, the next ten weeks are going to be a bit of a “crunch time” as I not only get the audiobook and podcast finished, but push the second novel to complete first draft and figure out how to turn it all into a successful business and brand.

So as I build out the plan, I’m going to blog about it. How am I defining my brand? How am I designing my launch/go-to-market and ongoing promotion? How am using those to define how I package myself and my work?

I’ll let you know!