Our first question comes from Ryan. Ryan says, I'm a university professor and a comic artist. I'm getting ready to launch my upcoming book on Kickstarter on New Year's day. All right. So that's a little bit of a reveal that this question was submitted a little while ago, because we were recording this in March and he's talking about New Year's day, um, moving on though, Ryan says in an effort to get the word out, I'm planning a big online tour in which I'm talking with different, a different media outlet every day of my month long campaign, my question is, I fear that I may be devoting too much time to promoting the release rather than finishing the book, my comic is almost complete, only two more pages to go, but I'd really like to have it done by the launch.

Any tips for prioritizing that deep cartooning work in the face of trying to make big noise about my upcoming project? Well, Ryan, it's a good question because I want you to be very wary of the publicity marketing. It is an easy trap, a seductive trap for those that are producing commercial creative products to allow your energy to be increasingly drawn towards strategies for getting the word out.

Now, the reason why it's so seductive is because it presents a completely different type of challenge than actually producing creative output. It's a challenge that is not trivial, but it's very tractable. It's what I used to call checklist productivity, where you can go online and take an internet marketing course and follow some podcast of internet marketers and figure out a checklist, do this, this, this, and this, and feel like you have some insider knowledge that the normal person won't do, but it's also consistently executable steps.

Make these calls, do this with your website, set up a funnel this way. So it's very fulfilling. It takes effort and it feels like it's insider information, but you know, for a fact you can get it done. Checklist productivity is incredibly seductive because there's never this moment of I'm just stuck, I'm trying to produce something new.

I don't know if it's good or not. I could fail. I could produce something and it's bad. I couldn't have an idea. Checklist productivity, you can always get through. Writers, cartoonists, artists get very seduced by this because man, that's so much more appealing than actually producing writing or producing cartoons or producing art because it's tractable, check, check, check.

You check off the check boxes as you go. So I want you to be careful, Ryan, that you're not allowing your time to be increasingly consumed by these marketing publicity plans because it's fun, because it's better, it's easier, more fulfilling in the moment than actually trying to draw cartoons.

Now it's not to say that stuff doesn't matter, but what I typically talk about is that when it comes to creative output, the number one thing you have to do is be so good you can't be ignored, you have to produce stuff that is of really high quality. You got to do that.

That's the core. Without that, with a few exceptions of internet influencer weirdness, you're never going to get somewhere that far. That's where your attention has to be. And then you want some sort of reasonable publicity marketing plan based on what you have available that helps try to spread the word, but if you don't have something to spread the word about, it doesn't matter.

So you almost want to confine the marketing publicity to like here are reasonable, tested things to do. Here's when I'm going to do this work. I put it in a box, I'll execute that. It's a three week period. But what I really care about is the production. So in your case, I would say you need some cartoonish equivalent of the John McPhee method.

And by the John McPhee method, I'm referring to an essay I published on my blog and newsletter recently, where I talked about on the occasion of John McPhee's birthday, his method of writing, which is 500 words a day. That's not a lot of words for a particular day, but as he says, you keep doing that and over time, you're going to produce quite a bit of work.

And he has 29 books, a Pulitzer, two national book awards nominations. So you need whatever your equivalent is as a cartoonist is what I'd recommend of 500 words a day. And the reason why I'm going for that tractable amount of words is because you're a university professor. This is not the only thing you're doing.

And I would do it first thing in the morning. And I don't know what that's going to take for cartooning. Is it a panel a day, three panels a day? I don't know the pacing, but basically like 60 to 90 minutes of work. And I would just make that an unviolatable core of your day.

You just do that every single day. The marketing publicity stuff that has to compete with all of your other university responsibilities. You're, you know, you try to fit it in where you can, and you have to use some weekend and evenings, maybe like that has to compete with your syllabuses and faculty meetings and everything else you're doing.

But the core is my 500 words a day, my creative production at my creative peak, not a ton every day, but enough that you look back over a month. Hey, I produced a good amount. You look back over a year. You say, I'm very impressed by what I did.

You look back over a career and you say, I've been a pretty productive artist. So that's what I would recommend. Go to this core of deep creative work that never, you don't violate. The publicity marketing stuff, get that done as you can have a plan, but keep it reasonable.

No one ever made themselves a long-term sustainable career as a respected creative do solely or primarily to publicity, it's always, always come down to producing stuff that people can't ignore. The publicity marketing is all just about a Delta on how long it takes people to actually discover it.