This week on the Brand Your Passion Podcast, I talk to author and indie cartoonist-turned-creative business strategist, Jessica Abel. Jessica is the founder of Autonomous Creative and an accomplished author who’s published a number of comics and prose books, including Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life and Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio. She specializes in helping mid-career creatives build businesses designed from the ground up to meet their financial needs without burning themselves out or sacrificing their creative integrity. She’s also chair of the illustration program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In this amazing episode, we talk about the punk strategies that got Jessica known & still work today, how to get opportunities that grow your brand, the two reasons artists share their work publicly, how consistent marketing compounds over time, why you need to keep going and commit to your work long-term, and so much more.
This week on the Brand Your Passion Podcast, I talk to author and indie cartoonist-turned-creative business strategist, Jessica Abel.
Jessica is the founder of Autonomous Creative and an accomplished author who’s published a number of comics and prose books, including Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life and Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio. She specializes in helping mid-career creatives build businesses designed from the ground up to meet their financial needs without burning themselves out or sacrificing their creative integrity. She’s also chair of the illustration program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
In this amazing episode, we talk about the punk strategies that got Jessica known & still work today, how to get opportunities that grow your brand, the two reasons artists share their work publicly, how consistent marketing compounds over time, why you need to keep going and commit to your work long-term, and so much more.
Connect with Jessica
Website: jessicaabel.com
Instagram: @autonomouscreative
LinkedIn: @jccabel
Read her latest article: jessicaabel.com
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[00:00:00] Hollie: when you've been a creative for a long time, there are bound to be a few twists, turns, and pivots along the way. So how do you evolve your brand to come along with you? And what strategies can you use to keep growing your brand each and every time you show your work and share what you do in new and exciting ways.
[00:00:20] Jessica: And so when I was really secure, what kind of professional I am in the world, I was able to make clear decisions about what I wanted to do with my brand. But when I didn't feel super well grounded and I didn't quite know what I wanted to do or how I wanted to be in the world. It was much harder to do that
[00:00:41] Hollie: the voice you just heard is Jessica Abel. Jessica is an author and indie cartoonist turned creative business strategist. She's the founder of Autonomous Creative and has published a number of comics in prose books, including Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're [00:01:00] Drowning in your Daily Life, and Out On The Wire: the Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio.
[00:01:06] She specializes in helping mid-career creatives, build businesses designed from the ground up to meet their financial needs without burning themselves out or sacrificing their creative integrity. She's also the chair of the illustration program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In this awesome episode with Jessica, you are gonna learn the punk strategies that got her known and that still work today, how to get opportunities that grow your brand, the two main reasons that artists share their work publicly and why you need to know your reason, how consistent marketing compounds over time, why you need to keep going and commit to your work in the long term and so much more. So if you are ready, let's start this episode and talk to Jessica.
[00:01:55] Hey Jessica, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:59] Jessica: I'm really [00:02:00] excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:02:02] Hollie: Thank you for joining me. When the podcast began, the people who are listening would have heard a little bit about what you do right now, but I would love to kind of understand how you got to here.
[00:02:15] So do you think you have always been a creative or how did your kind of creative journey.
[00:02:22] Jessica: I've definitely always been a creative, but in terms of getting to where I am right now, it's definitely been a long and windy road. Yeah. I started out I'm in my fifties now, so I started out in the early nineties basically as a, you know, pre-internet era, as an indie cartoonist, underground cartoonist, you know, self-publishing, photocopying books. I was in a band, like all that kind of stuff. Right.
[00:02:47] And then I, I did, I, I sort of did the mini-comics. Mail, you know, was there a lot of mail art, like mailing stuff back and forth between [00:03:00] different mini-comics artists at the time. So that was sort of a big thing. And then I had my first website in like, I think it was 98 is when I first made a website, because I was leaving the country, I was moving to Mexico City and I was like, I need something here. And so I created a website at that point. And it's actually pretty stylish, like, you know, going the way back machine, it's like pretty cool. But it has a very sort of punk energy, very like in your face, like snotty, you know, it was in my late twenties at that point.
[00:03:32] And my, my comic book that by then was being published by Fantagraphics, which is a major underground comics publisher. It's called Art Babe. So it was art babe.com and yeah, so it had that kind of energy to it. And what was interesting. And I, I mentioned to you right before we went on when started recording that, I actually wrote a long blog post about this a while ago when I did have a, when I recently, fairly recently had a rebrand on my website.
[00:03:59] [00:04:00] And I sort of went back and got screen grabs of all my different websites over the years. Which I'm sure we can share in the show notes, but the, there was something that happened around like the, like I wanna say 2003 or something. I stopped wanting to be that kind of brash punk rock person and as an artist, like the work I was doing, I was working on a book that became La Perdida, which is a graphic novel.
[00:04:26] It's like deals with much bigger kind of heavy issues and stuff. And I just felt like really out of alignment with the whole, you know, I'm this cool girl and doing the cool thing and you know, all that stuff. So, I really wiped a lot of personality off my site. Mm. And it was, it went from this, you know, a black background with like really colorful kind of, you know, icons and things and all this stuff going on to like white and just, I didn't ha, I never had a blog until, [00:05:00] I don't know, 2015 or something.
[00:05:02] Really. Like, I had news, I would like post news .
[00:05:05] Hollie: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:05] Jessica: I, I just didn't wanna be. I didn't, I didn't know how to be out there as Yeah. You know, as an artist at that point. I didn't have any sense of like, how, I didn't know. I, I, I really went through a long period then of, of not really knowing where I fit exactly.
[00:05:20] Really from sort of the mid two thousands to, yeah, around 20, I don't know, 14 or something. 20 13, 20 14. And yeah, it, it got weird for a while. And then I, and then I came back with another book Out On The Wire and designed a site that was really around storytelling. And Out On the Wire is a non-fiction comic that's about storytelling techniques drawing, drawing on podcasting. So narrative podcasting like This American Life and Radiolab and Planet Money, whatever. So, the drawings that I used in that book, which are often of me, you know, cause I'm a character in the book doing interviews and stuff. So I used [00:06:00] those and I used, you know, it was, and I was, I, I felt like I had a way to kind of be the face of my site again, and the face of my brand again, in a way that I sort of lost in the middle there. And and then that evolved into, I started coaching sort of soon after that book came out. And, and initially it was a very strange transition point between, I'm an artist, here's my book to I'm a coach, I can help you.
[00:06:26] You know, it was a very different texture . And it took a long time. Like there were definitely a lot of iterations in there where I'm sort of trying to do both. And at this point you can definitely find my comics on my site, which is mostly about you and what I can do for you. But there's still a, you know, there's a page with the, with all the books on it.
[00:06:46] But you know, I had to pick, I basically had to pick how I was gonna present myself. And that was a complicated process. Definitely.
[00:06:54] Hollie: Yeah, I can imagine. And I'm, I already have some questions in mind to talk to you [00:07:00] about like that transition because that's so interesting to me. And I would love to talk to you about that.
[00:07:04] But I also would love to ask you, just based on what you were just saying, it sounds like your brand has kind of evolved, well it's obviously evolved a lot over time, but do you think that it's evolved with kind of the projects you were working on? Or how do you think you knew that needed to change at those different times.
[00:07:25] What does that look like for you?
[00:07:27] Jessica: Yeah, it definitely evolved with the projects I was working on for sure. I, but a lot of it, you know, now I have a company called Autonomous Creative and I feel like, you know, it is a very small company. It's mostly me and I have two part-time contractors who work with me.
[00:07:43] But it's, you know, it feels much more like, it has its own momentum separate from me. And that's a first. Like I didn't have that until, I mean, I didn't have a company until like four or five years ago. I just was myself, right? So the idea of a [00:08:00] personal brand was essential as an author was just like, it's a personal brand.
[00:08:04] And so yes, my branding lined up with the books I was working on. But even more so, it was about my identity and about how I felt as a professional in the world. And so when I was really secure, what kind of professional I am in the world, I was able to make clear decisions about what I wanted to do with my brand.
[00:08:30] But when I didn't feel super well grounded and I didn't quite know what I wanted to do or how I wanted to be in the world. It was much harder to do that. So that middle period again, from like, I would say probably 2008 through, yeah, like about 2014 or something like that, that period was like, I mean, I just was coasting on what I'd done.
[00:08:52] , I don't mean coasting professionally, but like in the brand, I was coasting on what I'd done before and it felt like this is not [00:09:00] representing who I am and what I am. Interestingly, that is the same period in which I had two small children. And that really threw me for a loop in terms of my professional identity.
[00:09:10] Like who am I now, you know? And just in terms of the time I was putting into it and so on. And also I put out two -with my husband- we co-authored two textbooks about comics in that period. They came out in 2008 and 2012, I think. And so that site, which is a separate website, was very clear. But then my, you know, it sort of took away in some ways from like, who am I as an author?
[00:09:33] Which at the time I was not a coach. So it's like author versus textbook creator sort of educator. You know, where does that land it? It was, that was a sort of complex thing to negotiate.
[00:09:44] Hollie: And so when you kind of came out the other side, I guess, how do you think you did that? Or how did you know that you were ready or felt like yeah, I feel secure or confident enough to put out something that feels like me [00:10:00] again?
[00:10:02] Jessica: Well, the process of working on Out on The Wire and the other book I was working on at the time, which is Trish Trash Roller Girl of Mars, which is, you know, a nonfiction investigation of Roller Roller derby on Mars. Just kidding.
[00:10:14] Hollie: Amazing .
[00:10:15] Jessica: Anyway, it's, you know, very two diff very different books, but I, in both cases, I felt like I felt more grounded as an author at that point. Like, this is work that I really believe in. I know what I'm doing here. And especially without On the Wire. Partly cuz it's non-fiction. And I did all these different interviews to develop it.
[00:10:35] I was getting an understanding of my connection, my role with the world. You know, like how did I connect to the world of podcasting and narrative and, you know so, you know, a brand in some ways is, it's, it's a, it's world building, right? It's like this is the world that I want to have exist in the, you know, and this is the world.
[00:10:57] Like, if you wanna be part of my world, this is what it looks [00:11:00] like. These are the rules, this is the, you know, these are the parameters. And so when you know what that is, you can set that up and then you, then the people who come to you, come to you with their sort of expectations of what's gonna happen formed by what you've set up.
[00:11:14] And that's what I love about it. I think it's just really powerful for that. And so when I kind of knew that it was easier for me to make those decisions when I sort of knew like, what, how do I want to be dealing with the outside world? And I think that, you know, I think that the visible iteration of that lagged by a couple of years.
[00:11:35] Cause I just didn't have time to do any work on it. Right. So it's like, I, I was, you know, more confident about what I wanted by say, 2013, but it didn't actually, I didn't actually launch a new site until 2015, because that's just how long it takes to clear the schedule enough to do it. And, and so yeah, like I think there's always, there's always like a lag, you know, but it, it's helpful too because it gives you a chance to really sink into what is it that I want out of this, and how do I wanna be in the [00:12:00] world.
[00:12:01] Hollie: Yeah. Amazing. And you mentioned just then, like obviously you were doing a lot of interviews and you've had quite a few you know, features in like ConvertKit or other places. You've also had some amazing opportunities like getting published in Fantagraphics and working with Ira Glass and publishing your books obviously is incredible.
[00:12:21] How do you think that those opportunities have kind of come about. And do you think your brand has anything to do with it at all, or not at all?
[00:12:31] Jessica: Yeah, I mean, when I, when I talk about doing interviews, I'm talking about me interviewing other people. I was interviewing them.
[00:12:36] Yeah. Yeah. For the book. So that's what I was referring to. But yes, I have had a lot of really great opportunities to speak, to be interviewed, to be featured in various places. And, you know, that started early, like very, very much at the beginning of my comics career. People, I managed to, it was a much smaller world then, so like access was easier.
[00:12:57] But you know, I sent my mini comics to [00:13:00] various sort of influential mini comics reviewers and got reviews, like really positive reviews right from the beginning. And I like going back to then, I definitely think that my brand as you know, the, this kind of, you know, cool girl punk rock cartoonist.
[00:13:18] I mean, I stood out. Most people in comics at that point were just basically not female. Like there were not, you know, there were hardly any women in the field and definitely not, you know, in a band and like dressed pretty cool, you know, like all the stuff. I just kind of, yeah, that later made me uncomfortable.
[00:13:39] Like, I felt like being out in that, you know, in the world in that way felt. I was putting on a facade and that's why I stopped being able to do it. But when it really was me, that really was who I was at that time. It that, you know, sort of embodying that physically, but also through my brand, through like initially just the comics themselves and, you know, I would, I had a [00:14:00] mailing list on paper, you know, an actual mail mailing list back then. Yeah. and I would send out, I would make handmade photocopied postcards whenever I had a new thing out. I would mail them out to my mailing list. People would send me $2 in an envelope in the mail. I had a few fans in New Zealand, and you know, that's the It, it was all consistent, right?
[00:14:17] Like all of that stuff was really consistent. But it led to, like, I, when I left Chicago, I was living in Chicago, grew up there and was living there for about 10 years. After college I left in 98, early 98, 97, I was featured in like every newspaper and a, and a couple TV show, TV stations, you know, for my new Fantagraphics book and for the, you know, it was and it was because I was a good story, you know? Like I was doing cool stuff. And people were, you know, I mean, journalists need good content, so that definitely affected my ability to put that over. And then like, [00:15:00] you know, even though what I did later was not the same.
[00:15:05] you know, I'd shifted my brand, I'd shifted my way of being in the world. Those connections from the past, my coverage in the past, it, it helped what I was doing then. Right? Like, it, you know, it, it still, it's, it compounds over time. You can let it go too long and lose that advantage, but , you know, I got a, a lot of coverage for when La Perdida came out, which came out with Pantheon, which is a Random House imprint in 2006 and like got a ton of coverage for that, lots of reviews and stuff. Did a book tour, all that stuff. And a lot of that had to do with having a fan base. You know, people who were paying attention, who over time had moved into positions of power where they can write reviews. You know, they had been these like sort of scrappy comics fans and then they were working at some website or a magazine or whatever.
[00:15:57] So, . Yeah.
[00:15:59] Hollie: [00:16:00] Awesome. So it sounds like kind of standing out in the first place, being consistent with that, and then also kind of being confident enough to just like send your work out there. Like you said, that, you know, you're just sending your work to people who were influential or you wanted to read it.
[00:16:18] Jessica: Yeah.
[00:16:18] Hollie: Do you think that that's something that like you still recommend or still kind of implement?
[00:16:22] Jessica: Absolutely. . Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that you ca, I mean, , it's, it's funny cause I've recently been going through all my archives because I'm gonna be donating a bunch of them to a big comics library.
[00:16:35] You know, it has a lot of stuff, like, a lot of crossover with this whole mini comics scene, which is a very historical moment in comics. So, I'm donating a bunch of my papers and what's been interesting is seeing how much hustle I had, like how much stuff, like lists of people that I was sending stuff to and like ch you know, checklists and procedures and all.
[00:16:52] And I, I don't, I don't think of myself as being super savvy back then, but I [00:17:00] was, I was way more so than I realized, and for sure I recommend getting outside your comfort zone and sending stuff to people. Putting it like in a I I sent stuff just like, Hey, thought you might like to see this. Didn't ask for anything.
[00:17:14] I wasn't, you know, if it was, obviously it was a review or I would like, could you review this? But I mean, if it was just, I sent a lot of comics to people I was fans of, you know, that I loved their comics. Later became a friends with a lot of those people. You know, when I'd be at a convention or something, I'd be able to, you know, like hang out with the cool kids and you know, like meet their publishers and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
[00:17:34] So doing outreach without any quid pro quo, you know, no sense of like, you owe me something really paid off. Now, at the time it may not have felt lucky cuz I sent out 50 copies and got two responses. But like I kept sending the comics to the same people and like got responses down the line and, and it really contributed to the sense that like, I am [00:18:00] somebody who's on this scene. I'm somebody doing this work.
[00:18:02] And I kind of forgot a lot of those lessons and I've had to relearn them recently. It's like getting, you know, just a little bit of shoe leather, getting your stuff out there and believing that you have something of value that people would wanna see. The stuff that I'm doing now is so different, but it's the same kind of thing where, you know, right.
[00:18:18] Like right now as we're speaking, and by the time this is goes live, it'll be very much out in the, in public, but I've been working on this huge article that's like six blog posts long, you know? It's a big honking article that's basically a about how the way that we're taught to be professionals in the creative world is just set up, sets us up to fail.
[00:18:42] You know, that like, and there are other ways to do it. Like you not, you don't, you know, if you know what's going on, you don't have to do things that way. It's, it's not just like gloom and doom. It's like there, there's actually, there's hope, right? But it's this huge, huge thing. And I'm thinking like, how am I gonna get this in front of people?
[00:18:56] How am I gonna get people? Cause I want, I want the whole world to be talking about this topic [00:19:00] because I feel like we've been hoodwinked for so long about like how to be pros, right? And what, what expectations we should have. So, and I'm, I'm just, and I'm suddenly like, I have to, like, I have to go pitch this.
[00:19:13] I have to find journalists to write about it. Like I need to, I need to get, you know, writing the thing is just the first step. Now I have to put it in front of people and get them talking about it.
[00:19:26] Hollie: Yeah. Well it sounds like, yeah, it could be a similar strategy. Send, send it to all those people that you want to read it or yeah. It sounds like the same strategy will continue to work.
[00:19:36] Jessica: Exactly.
[00:19:37] Hollie: Which is great. And a good reminder to kind of, sometimes we need to Yeah. Go back to those like grassroots, like feet on the pavement strategies to just put the work in
[00:19:46] Jessica: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people now, I think they assume that because it's hypothetically possible that when you publish something, people could find it, that they will find it, right?
[00:19:58] Hollie: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:58] Jessica: that if you post something [00:20:00] on, you know, your Instagram feed, or you have something, a blog post, or you post something on Medium that like, now you've done your job, you've done the thing, you put it out there.
[00:20:10] But people aren't gonna find it. You know, like, it's just not, doesn't work that way. Like you, you have to put a lot of effort behind it in order to get something seen. And it can feel really, I don't know, it can feel really pointless and bad sometimes because like you're, you're doing all this work and you're not seeing results from it on in the short term.
[00:20:31] But I mean, I was a mini comics artist for seven years, you know, or six years before I started publishing with Fantagraphics, and then I was publishing with Fantagraphics for four or five years before I got a mainstream book, you know, publisher, like a commercial book publisher. You know, I, the results will happen if you keep going and you keep doing the thing but you have to keep doing, you can't stop. You can't [00:21:00] just go like, oh, well, didn't work. Oh, well, I'm out. You know, and, and you gotta do a lot more than posting it on your, whatever your feed is, you know, you have to actively get it outside your own bubble and into other people's spheres so they can see it, they can have an opportunity to respond to it. .
[00:21:19] Hollie: Yeah, exactly. That was actually one of going to be, one of my next questions was about like the fact that you've been, you know, before you've made this transition, I guess, which we'll talk about in a minute, but you've been working as a comics cartoonist, artist, author for like a long time now, right? And obviously you've put in a lot of work and like you said, continued to, for that long period of time, it takes a lot of commitment and perseverance and, and believing in yourself, I guess. And there are a lot of creatives now who are maybe just getting started or have been going for a short amount of time that understandably can get a bit frustrated with things not happening [00:22:00] immediately or not seeing those speedy results. So like what do you, I guess, think about that or how do you feel about that having been working on your craft for such a long time?
[00:22:10] Jessica: I think what I would say is there are two major reasons why you're doing creative work in public. One would be because you wanna be part of an art form. You want people to see it. You wanna be part of that conversation culturally. You wanna have an effect, you know, on that realm of art and creativity.
[00:22:39] And then the other is you wanna make a living at doing that thing and this is getting back to what I'm writing about. Like those are two very different objectives. And they do not necessarily overlap. Like getting into the cultural conversation doesn't necessarily mean you're making money, or much money, right? And I think it's super important for people [00:23:00] who are getting started out and they're getting frustrated to get really clear on what it is they're trying to achieve right now. Because getting, becoming part of that cultural conversation can proceed making money, but it does not necessarily lead to making money much or at all. Right? So if that's, you know, like if what you're working on is the cultural connection part and like being part of a scene, being part of a, like a movement, you know, like affecting the world with your work and so on, focus on that. Like really focus on that. And, and that is so doable and it is very frustrating to not have an effect, but often it's because you're just really not putting yourself out there. You're not getting out there where stuff is really happening.
[00:23:46] So find other people who are doing work that's similar to yours or in your kind of, you know, parallel to yours. Become friends with them. Like, reach out to them, send them stuff for free, you know? Ask them if they'll hang out with you, you know, either [00:24:00] in real life or virtually and, and share war stories or whatever. Go to live events and meet people there. Go to like, I mean, if you're doing comics or something, then find local store owners who will carry your thing, you know, on consignment.
[00:24:15] See if they'll do a signing. You know, get out there and flyer, you know, and like put flyers up in cafes. Get people to come to your signing like you, you know, be creative about how you are putting yourself out there. And don't look at social media as the doorway like getting going viral or something is being like the way to do this.
[00:24:38] I think it stands in most people's way more than actually helps them. There's some people who are like, you know, they're really good at that and it's, that's fine, but most people they just look at what happens on social media and like, well if that's not working then it's not working. There's so many other ways to go about building that network that's really going to put you at the center of this cultural moment, you know, in your area [00:25:00] and so many more powerful ways than hanging out by yourself on your phone, like so much more. So that's what I would encourage people to do is like, and when you do that, that that opens all kinds of doors and opportunities to cool projects.
[00:25:14] Like the reason I worked with Ira Glass on Out On the Wire is because, in 1994, I was asked, I had been doing a series of non-fiction comics for a local tabloid newspaper, which is like a free newspaper that was like, you know, stuff is happening in Chicago called The New City. Still exists, but it's not a newspaper anymore. And they would hire me on a regular basis, like every few months to do like a man on the street kind of thing. I'd do go to an event and I'd write it up and make comics out of it, and it was a great gig. . I did one on a bowling alley that had punk rock shows called Fireside Bowl and Ira found it, I think it was 95, maybe clipped it, put it in his filing cabinet.[00:26:00]
[00:26:00] Three years later, he's brainstorming what he is gonna do for the pledge drive, which, many of your listeners may not be Americans and may not know what this is, but in, in America, public radio is not actually funded by the government. It's funded by the listeners. And so they're frequent like at least twice a year, but usually like interspersed with others, but two major pledge drives a year where they'll like get on that radio for a week, like hammering, like, donate, donate, donate, right? And Ira is famous for having very fun pledge drive premium stuff they send you as prizes for donating. And he thought, what if we do a comic book, you know, about how we make our show?
[00:26:40] And so he calls me, he looks me up in the white page- the new- the, the phone book- the paper phone book. This is 1998. Looks me up, finds my phone number, calls me. I had just moved to Mexico City, so I had put a call forwarding system on my phone. That was for six months, it was like a [00:27:00] message for six months giving my Mexico City phone number.
[00:27:03] Well, Ira, being a good journalist, actually called me in Mexico City. So I answered the phone in Mexico City and he is like, "hi, this is Ira Glass. You don't know me, but", and I'm like, like freaking out, you know? Cause I totally did know him like I listened to, yeah, even though it was like not a famous, it wasn't that famous, like it hadn't really hit its moment yet. But in Chicago it definitely had this American life I mean. It'd only been on the air for a couple, like couple three years or something at that point. So he hires me to do this comic book and they came out in 1999. It was a floppy 32 page comic book that was a pledge drive premium. That thing has been reprinted, I mean there must be 25,000, 30,000 in print. Like it just kept selling and selling. Cuz the only thing out there about narrative radio, like how do you make radio like this American life for all the years between 1999 and the podcast explosion of the, you know, early, you know, whatever, 2010s, that was it.
[00:27:55] And so all people in that world knew me. They all knew me because [00:28:00] I had written, I had written and drawn the only book about how to do this. And, and there are people who are like very famous podcasters now who are, who are like in radio production because they found my book, you know? So then, when I was like, well, that's really successful and people love it, so I should do more of that, right?
[00:28:19] So then I could go back to Ira in whatever, 2011 or something and pitch him a new thing. Now, he wasn't involved in the second book, like the first one. I just interviewed him, you know, he's one of my subjects. But he sort of helped me think through how to, like, which shows to use and stuff like that when we started working on it.
[00:28:36] So showing up, doing the thing, being in the new city over and over again. You know, saying yes to these opportunities was what led to having the door open to do something really big. That kind of changed my life, you know? Yeah. That's really like, you know, when people are in their twenties and they're like, oh, it's not happening, it's like, dude, [00:29:00] It takes time. Like when you're, when you're 40, tell, talk to me about it. And then, you know, people are in their 40 are like, it's not happening. And I'm, I feel it, you know, like it's not, it doesn't always, like, things don't always work out the way you want them to and so on. But the more stuff you do, the more you sell, you put yourself out there, the more opportunities there are for just who knows what to open up.
[00:29:17] And if you say yes to these opportunities, you know you're gonna head on some trajectory that you can't really predict.
[00:29:25] Hollie: And believing that it will pay off in the long term. Just have to be a little patient. Maybe
[00:29:31] Jessica: and some of it won't. And that's fine too.
[00:29:33] Hollie: Yeah.
[00:29:33] Jessica: You have to be able to like say, well that didn't work. Oh, well. You know, and, you know, but it's that one of the things I've heard a lot in, in my own podcast. My current podcast, which is called the Autonomous Creative when I've done interviews is people who are established creatives in lots of different fields, one of the things they say all the time is like, do your own thing. Do your own project. Commit, do [00:30:00] it. Don't ask for permission. Figure it out as you go along, you know? Just go make stuff. Cuz if you don't do that, if you're waiting for permission from other people, it's not coming. You, you have to sort of show who you are as an artist first before you're gonna get those kinds of weird opportunities that you can't predict.
[00:30:20] Hollie: Yeah, definitely. And so all of that has happened, obviously with all of your amazing cartoon comic works, your books and everything. What happened or what kind of caused you to pivot to start then teaching other people what you knew?
[00:30:42] Jessica: Well, interestingly, this kind of picks up the thread, the other thread I was mentioning, in this last question, which is the money-making part. So yes, my career as a cartoonist, I would say, quite successful. I mean, I was able to, you know, put book proposals in front [00:31:00] of, you know, I have an agent, like I got it, you know, got them seen.
[00:31:04] I got decent advances. Not amazing, but good advances for my last few books. But the business model of being an author, let's just be honest. It sucks. It's terrible. Right? Like that you, you know, especially as a cartoonist, like the fastest I ever finished a book was Out On the Wire, and it took me three years of like basically wall to wall work, you know?
[00:31:28] It's just really, really hard. It's like a lot of work and even, you know, people who are writing pros, they don't have to draw the whole thing, but it can also take forever, you know? And then you, if you are able to command an advance, you have that advance. But you know, my advance got paid out, like signed a contract. I get a third of it when I sign. 15% of that goes to my agent. Then when I turn in the manuscript, and this, in my case, in this, this typically, this is one of the ways that things typically work, when I turned in [00:32:00] the manuscript, I got another third. Again, 15% goes to my agent, and then when I, when it's published, I get another third.
[00:32:05] So it's like not even close to enough money to pay for my life.. You know? . Even though it looks like a big number on paper, it's like not even close. And so I have to do other stuff, right? I'm like jamming my life full of other crap to do in order to make ends meet. And at some point that, and this is what I've been writing about lately, is this idea of cyclical burnout, right?
[00:32:31] This idea of, of what creatives fall into is this, this kind of cyclical burnout where we have these great big ideas and we're like really excited about them. And you do the idea and you like plunge yourself into it. Like, and part part of it is the idea is super exciting, but part of it, like part of your mind- and this is why saying about two different reasons why creatives make stuff- part of your mind is in the money part, in the money side, thinking like, well, and this is gonna make the money for me too. This is gonna be the thing that actually finally breaks. You know, I break out with [00:33:00] this, do the thing pu- you know, pour your heart and soul into it. You get to some point and it is , it's finished, but you kind of don't have a lot of energy for launching it.
[00:33:09] Maybe you don't put, you know enough time, or you do, but it's gonna take a long time. You know, whatever. Like you don't have mon, then you're outta time, you don't have time, you don't have money because you've been working on this thing and you're broke and you bills, and you're like, what the hell am I gonna do?
[00:33:24] And at that point, you start chalking it chalking the gaps with stuff. You know, you take a teaching gig, you take a freelance gig, you start another small project, you try to sell something, whatever it is, you try to fill it all up and it's way too much and you burn out. But so you just kind of like lie low for a while, but as you're lying low, your creative brain is percolating and you come up with another idea and you start working.
[00:33:49] You get an energy back, you start working on that idea, but you don't really give up any of the other stuff. You're still doing it. And so it's like a snowball. It just sticks, stacks up and up and up [00:34:00] until you just absolutely crack, right? And that's pretty much what happened with me, where it happened with me multiple times when I, I realize now, looking back, there were multiple times in my life when I had a major burnout and then just kind of like just kept functioning enough to keep moving forward, and eventually kind of got better enough to believe it was gonna work again.
[00:34:21] And then doing the same thing to myself again. So what basically what happened is in 2015 Out On the Wire came out. But as I was finishing it, it was like a nonstop project for about 10 months, because I had to, I had to draw like 250 pages in 10 months. And I had my husband, who's also a cartoonist, helping with some backgrounds. I had interns helping me composite stuff and like get it out. But I mean, no, no matter how you cut it, it's. 10 hour days for, you know, five, six days a week, seven days a week, sometimes for, you know, 10 months, small children. You know, it, it was just, it [00:35:00] was really hard.
[00:35:00] So I finish it and as I'm finishing it and I'm like, I'm thinking, what am I gonna do? I'm thinking, I need, I better, I have to come up with a new book proposal. I have to do it now so that I can, you know, bring something in now because I'm not gonna have enough, you know? And I, I was just like, screw, I can't, I just can't do this anymore. And so I started looking for what I was, something else I could do, something I could do next.
[00:35:25] And . know, as part of my whole cyclical burnout, I decided to also do another podcast. So I did a podcast called Out On the Wire, that's based on the book, that's a fully scripted, fully produced podcast. Really proud of it. But again, that took like all my time for six months.
[00:35:40] But the, the podcast has a sort of pedagogical angle to it, like it's how to do storytelling and so, as part of that, me and my producing partner, Ben Frish, had a, an online group where people could post work. And so like, and I had been teaching since 2001, basically, you know, I've been a professor for a really long time. [00:36:00] So teaching is kind of a natural mode for me in that sense. And so I was teaching these people kind of via the podcast like how to do storytelling. And I was then also starting to learn about business a little bit, like just a little.
[00:36:16] And so I did the thing that you do, which is asking people, what do you want me to offer? Like, what, what would you pay me for, essentially? And I was really expecting people to talk to me about storytelling. Like do a little course on character development, do something on interviewing, do something on whatever. Cause that's what the book's about. But everybody started talking about how they were so blocked and not getting work done and procrastinating and all this other stuff, and can't finish projects and don't know how to blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh. . No, I know how to do that. Like, I could do that.
[00:36:45] So the first, the very first version of my first core online course, the Creative focus workshop, was born as basically a little pilot little email course about getting creative projects done.
[00:36:58] Hollie: Amazing.[00:37:00]
[00:37:00] Jessica: I didn't really know what I was doing, but like that was the beginning of a pivot into doing business and being a coach.
[00:37:04] Hollie: Yeah. Amazing. And so as obviously that worked, in some way, shape or form. So then how did you go about shifting your brand to become known as a coach and as autonomous creative, I guess?
[00:37:18] Jessica: Well, it was really tricky because at first I really had a lot of, I had a lot of, resistance and a lot of fears around being seen as a sellout and being seen as like, you know, like who does she think she is doing this coaching stuff, like she's a cartoonist. Like, what is that? That's ridiculous and didn't get that, but it sort of expected it, you know? And a lot, just a lot of that's just really internalized, you know? I just felt I, that that was, that's how I felt about it myself. And so, as I said, initially, my public presentation of what I did was I'm an author and then here's this little thing I do on the side, [00:38:00] you know?
[00:38:00] And then gradually it sort of shifted polarities, you know? And there were a couple big kind of uh, revamps on like my homepage, for example, on my website, on my social media profiles where I would change the way I was talking about myself. So going from I'm an author and I do this other thing to, I do this other thing and I'm an author to, I can help you with something, you know, like, yeah.
[00:38:24] It's, it's been a long journey and you know, really, like I said, I, I had learned just a tiny bit about business. How to build a business that is functional, how to build a business that's sustainable. And it was, man, it was really hard to get all the, get the information I needed and to figure out how to do it.
[00:38:41] And, you know, it was not sustainable for a really long time. I mean 2016 was when I finished the podcast for Out On the Wire. I was still working on Trish Trash. We moved, I was living in France at the time, my family and I, we all moved to Philadelphia to take a job where I am now [00:39:00] in Philadelphia at an art school.
[00:39:01] So I was teaching full-time, being a department chair, trying to finish Trish Trash and trying to run this business all at the same time. That was a burnout. And you know, again, like I had to make better decisions about where I was putting my time, where I was putting my energy, but I did not understand how to make those decisions yet.
[00:39:19] It took me a really long time and I'm still not any good at it. I mean, I have whatever, you know, 30 years of professional experience like heading, like living in constant burnout. Like it's hard to break those patterns, you know? But it's way better than it was.
[00:39:34] Hollie: I'm glad. And now you obviously are trying to help creatives to avoid those problems or to I guess work through them or have better systems so that they don't land in those places. So thankfully it's useful in terms of helping other people too.
[00:39:47] Jessica: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, every, everything I've done in the last whatever, 15 years has been super meta. I'm always doing stuff on myself and then like doing it for other people and like it's all at the same time. Yeah. ,
[00:39:58] yeah, I can relate to that for [00:40:00] sure.
[00:40:00] Hollie: Being a creator. Yeah, I bet. also helping other creators, for sure. Yeah. Well, we are almost out of time, so we have like, you know, covered so many things and I could still keep asking you 1,000,001 questions because I feel like. So much knowledge and so much experience. But I would love to just wrap things up with, if you could tell us one, I guess, lesson that you've learned about building your brand or branding your passion over time or a piece of advice that you would give other creatives about that what would that be?
[00:40:35] Jessica: I think the biggest thing that creatives miss in their ability to present themselves publicly through their brand, through, you know, just in person whatever is a clear ability to clear, to clearly state the value of what they do. That I think creatives are incredible and creative work is so valuable. It's so , it's so much more [00:41:00] valuable than things we pay a lot of money for sometimes, you know, that, that if you think about the things that have been most influential in your life that have really changed your life, most of them are gonna be creative work, you know? And so, you know, other than personal relationships, you know.
[00:41:14] And it, we as creatives are trained to look inward for meaning. Which, for reasons, good reasons, you know? That we look inside for our inspiration. We look inside for, what is it? We wanna talk about all this other stuff, but we're never trained in art school, liberal arts school, whatever it is, to flip that and help other people understand why you care about what you care about. Why is it important to them? Why, you know, what are they gonna get out of this, you know, relationship, why should they spend time with you?
[00:41:51] And especially with creatives, it's often time, right, it's not money so much. It's like if you're an author, you're an artist. You know, if you're, if you're doing anything, narrative, [00:42:00] podcasting, whatever, you're asking a lot of time from people, like a big chunk of time. And you need to make sure that they understand why they wanna spend that time, what are they gonna get out of it?
[00:42:11] And it's not mercenary, it's not selling out none of that stuff. It's like you, you just. Have a little empathy for other people and that they don't know. Like they don't, they can't read your mind, they don't know what's going on inside your head. They have not been immersed in whatever you've been doing for the last 10 years. Like you have. They don't know all that stuff and you need to build a bridge. And so that's, I think the thing that that flip from internal focus to external focus, which may not need, maybe shouldn't happen in the middle of a creative project, needs to happen when you're like, Well, like before you finish, but before you get, like, after you get the core of it in place so that you're not deforming your decisions based on what other people would like or whatever, but, but learning to connect, you know.
[00:42:59] And there's gonna [00:43:00] be an audience for almost. I mean, basically for anything there's, there's an audience of some kind, you know, big, small, I don't know, but like there's gonna be people interested in if you can do that thing, if you can figure out how to flip that point of view to the external, to, to exterior and figure out how to connect, what's really lighting you up with other people and what they need and what they're interested in.
[00:43:22] Hollie: That's an incredible advice. I think it's a really practical thing that people can try to practice with each project or each launch or whatever it is to kind of like, yeah, get close to the end and go, okay, I'm happy with this and I know why it's important for me, so then, yeah, how do I then communicate it with other people so they are as excited about it as I am.
[00:43:44] Yeah, I think that's, very, very great advice. So thank you so much for sharing that, and thank you so much for sharing everything in this conversation. I've, I've really valued it and learned a lot about you and about your experience and these things that I can't wait to take away. [00:44:00] So I'm sure there are a million things that the audience are gonna take away. So thank you so, so much. And I'm gonna link to a bunch of stuff that you've already mentioned, but is there anything in particular that you wanna share or anywhere that people can find you when this podcast goes out?
[00:44:16] Jessica: Well first of all, thank you so much. These are great questions and I've never really had the opportunity to discuss my brand before, so that's kind of really cool. Yeah, I've enjoyed it. I'm glad I actually thought about it before I got here. .
[00:44:27] Hollie: Yeah, you'd already done half the work with the article. .
[00:44:31] Jessica: I'm glad I remembered that I'd done the work cuz that's half the half the battle.
[00:44:36] in terms of finding me you can go to jessica abel.com. That's j e s s i c a A b e l.com and you can find all kinds of stuff there. And if anybody wants to read the article I've been talking about that I'm obsessed with right now, it's jessica abel.com/creative hyphen business.
[00:44:51] Hollie: Perfect. Well, I will link to all those things, all those goodies in the show notes. And yeah, just a big thank you again and I [00:45:00] look forward to seeing what happens next.
[00:45:01] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Brand Your Passion and choosing to spend time with me, learning all about branding, business and all things creativity. You can find more episodes just like this one at makerandmoxie.com slash podcast. If you like this one, you can tap that subscribe or follow button so that you're notified about each and every new episode.
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[00:46:14] I will talk to you in the next episode, but until then, keep creating.