Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, and print-on-demand merchandising systems like Redbubble had flourished.  It’s taken me a bit to move on the idea because, frankly, the learning curve and the technology weren’t really at the place I wanted it to be for the audience size I was working with. Much as I love Redbubble and the artist friends who sell there, the lack of integration with other storefronts presented a problem for me — putting merch on Redbubble means pushing people to Redbubble, and 2020 was basically a long exercise in figuring out how important direct sales could be. Other services offered better integration, but were location-centric in a way that wasn’t useful; they could service clients in Europe or American at a reasonable price, but shipping POD products to Australia was…well, prohibitive. But the nice thing about the new job is having the spoons to dig and research/try stuff

When you first start writing you find your cohort–people figuring out their writing process at the same time as you, submitting work to the same places you are. You built your networks at the same time. You develop new work at the same time, establish reputations, see each other at events and cons. It feels like you’re building from a similar place, heading towards a similar destination.  Somewhere along the line, careers begin to advance at different paces. One of your cohort makes their first pro sale, or wins an award at a conference. Someone has their first book come out. Someone gets sick and has to slow down, or a family tragedy interferes with their writing process and they disappear for a few years. Someone looks at the daunting prospect of making a living from their writing and decides, quite reasonably, that it’s not something they want to pursue with the same fervour as others in their cohort. All of this is natural: Our ours are not created equal; Our goals are not the same. And yet, there’s the commonly accepted wisdom among writers who have been at it a while: the friends you start your career with are

One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject. My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, where I’ve done the occasional fanfic project for the Total Extreme Wrestling game and take deep dives into the mechanics and business of wrestling storytelling. This has often spawned insights here on the blog, the occasional paid writing gig, and countless ideas that have informed my practice as both an author and a publisher. This week, I listened to one of my favourite wrestling storytellers, Paul Heyman, being interviewed by the 90s pro-wrestling cultural phenomenon known as Stone Cold Steve Austin. A huge part of the interview revolved around why Heyman’s 90s wrestling project, Extreme Championship Wrestling, ultimately folded and got bought out by the industry leviathan WWE, and Heyman broke down not just the wrestling industry, but the whole damn entertainment industry, into a three-chokepoint system where a failure at any single point will doom your enterprise. For Heyman, a successful entertainment company needs