Introducing: Can't Not Create

Dear Best Friends,

I’ve done it! I’ve come up with a newsletter name that I love and a logo that feels truly good-enough!

Presenting…

Can’t Not Create: Stories and strategies from artists who got their start later in their career, to kickstart your creative courage - in a 2x weekly newsletter.

I came up with this name all on my own - not even the tiniest bit from ChatGPT (it could never). I was trying to draw inspiration from the style and feel of my old running blog, “Running and Then Blogging About It” - because that was pure genius. My qualifier for genius is just that when I tell people they either laugh or give me a puzzled (judgmental?) look. I honestly don’t think this one quite meets that bar, but it does include a double negative, which I hope is just as inspiring of both pleased and off-put reactions. And of course I considered “Starting an Art Career Later in Life and Publishing a Newsletter About It,” but I didn’t want to exactly copy my previous format (otherwise it would have been perfect!!).

But really, this is a newsletter inspired by me reaching the boiling point of pent-up ideas and creativity that I hadn’t been adequately honoring, and the inability to keep my status quo at the expense of spending my energy doing what I truly love.

And I want to explore the stories of other people going through the same - I hope everyone is interested in following along with my efforts, but I think seeing that this experience has played out for many current artists is exciting. And there’s a lot of inspiration and lessons to gain from them that I’d like to help share.

You also might notice that my new tagline includes a promise of TWICE weekly newsletters! Well… this is kind of to be determined, but it’s something I’m going to pilot (not this week) and see how it goes. Which is a good segue into what I learned from that YouTube video I kept saying I needed to watch!

But before I dive into that, one last reminder of what my previous newsletter name and logo were - these were truly courtesy of ChatGPT, who has since been fired from my brand team.

Okay, now forget about that name/logo forever, and let’s move on to…

My takeaways from Nicolas Cole’s Complete Guide to Starting a Newsletter

1. Curate content, or be a subject matter expert. I talked about this last week - how these are the two types of newsletters that are successful, and that people rarely pay/subscribe just for the value of enjoying someone’s writing.

   1. This nicely validated my plans to start incorporating outside voices and doing interviews (more of the information curation approach). I did get some very nice feedback that my writing is entertaining and worthwhile as well - so I’ll cover all my bases, and do both moving forward.

2. Have an infinitely repeatable model. As in, don’t do a newsletter that you’ll run out of information to fuel (this would be better as an ebook or something) or something you’ll get bored talking about.

   1. I certainly run the risk of getting bored of almost anything, but past experience shows me that this is likely a model that I will keep interest up in (as in, I loved maintaining my running blog for years, and I’ve also wanted to do creative work my whole life), so this feels safe. And I’m not worried about running out of information because there are so many people whose stories I want to share, not to mention my own efforts to track.

3. The value prop should offer something tangible. Nicolas gives example like stock tips, assets like templates to download, things like that.

   1. I don’t think I really have this type of thing to offer - yet. I do have thoughts about aggregating the ideas, resources, and strategies that I gain along the way into assets that I can offer paid subscribers along the way.

4. Speak in terms of objective outcomes. This makes sense - say something concrete that your audience will gain by following your newsletter. This could be like, “you’ll get a promotion,” “you’ll learn to save $$ in this new way,” OR it would be that you’ll be motivated or inspired to do something you wish you were doing.

   1. The last one is what I have to offer.

5. You shouldn’t start with a paid newsletter before you have a platform or following. It’s much better to start with a free newsletter and point people towards some small monetized asset, and make it a paid newsletter later on.

   1. Lol… I’m not following this advice, so we’ll see where that gets me. This makes sense, but this advice came on to my radar five weeks too late and now it would be impossible to change my current model, so oh well!

6. Give a newsletter 6 months. If it’s not going well at that point, it might be good to call it. If it’s not going well before that, it hasn’t been enough time to tell.

   1. I think this is a good idea - I don’t want to kill myself working on something that’s not helping me at all. This isn’t to say that it has to be bringing in a huge monthly income, I could it being helpful as a mechanism for connecting with other artists or as a marketing platform for my artwork. But certainly a good time to evaluate.

7. You need to be promoting it regularly to give it a fair chance. As in - if I wait 6 months to see if it’s successful, but haven’t actually put energy into sharing it, that’s not really a good test to see if it could be successful.

8. Use the newsletter content to create a self-published book.

   1. One friend that I told about the newsletter instantly had this idea, and it’s always nice to see ideas come from multiple sources or be validated. I think this would be really cool, if this continues to head in the right direction.

9. You have to be writing somewhere for free. E.g., social media, etc. and then funnel them to your newsletter.

   1. This sounds hard, but yeah - makes sense.

10. People buy exclusive content or expert content. So to get them to pay read for free, then hook them with one of those things behind a paywall.

11. Use Substack.

    1. I used Beehiiv. Whoops!

12. Match your newsletter cadence to time investment (for both writing and reading). This is where his advice about doing two issues a week comes in. Essentially, send one free issue a week, and another paid issue. But on the paid one, send it to everyone, put the paywall early on in the issue but at some kind of cliffhanger.

    1. I like this approach, but the question is: can I write two newsletters a week? If not, I’ll switch to alternate weeks of free versus paid or figure some other thing out.

13. Add CTAs (calls to action) at the end of your newsletters. Something like asking if people will refer the newsletter to a friend, gift it to a friend, or send in ideas.

    1. This seems smart and simple, so I’ll give that a try as well. Setting up newsletter referrals or gifting options are all like individual things I have to figure out and do - it sounds easy and mostly is, but not as easy as I’d expect it to be.

14. Don’t get caught up with “shiny objects” (going overboard on marketing).

    1. Okay, I won’t!

This got more granular than I planned, but was a helpful exercise in remembering everything useful from his video. If you’re thinking of starting a newsletter, I recommend you just watch his video, but for everyone else, there’s some behind-the-scenes thinking I’m doing on how I’m setting this all up.

On to weekly updates, and a note: this week I’m hiding nothing behind the paywall for anyone! So you can all have a preview of all of the personal details I share, since this component will be entirely within the paid subscriber issues of the newsletter.

Weekly Updates

Thank Yous

A very big thank you to my first-ever interview guest, Rachael of PDX Dinorama and the Sidewalk Joy Map project! I had a great conversation with her that I’m excited to share with you all, other than my insecurities about videos of myself on Zoom that I am shoving deep down inside of me in order to showcase some amazing people, including Rachael.

Art From the Week

I had a couple of art goals this week: work on the chair painting (lol) and participate in Abby Painter Art’s artist trading card exchange. I decided that an obvious choice was some cute little bicycles, and got three whole cards done before the deadline passed without me mailing them in (you were supposed to send in 6-10).

Now they have no home, but: the first 3 paid subscribers who respond to this newsletter with their mailing address will be proud recipients of them. Don’t be shy! I will be embarrassed if nobody wants one, and that’s a threat!

Checklist

What I said I’d do last week:

• Finish planning February event - I didn’t do this at all! At this point this will likely be a very small event with people I know already, because it’s kind of late in the game to plan anything beyond that.

• Finish watching newsletter video - DONE! See my extensive commentary above.

• Finish the chair painting - Remember, this is off the list forever if I don’t finish by 2/28! Yikes… I won’t be surprised if this is just never done.

• Make artist trading cards to mail to Abby for the trading card swap - Again, see above. I didn’t not do it, but I didn’t totally do it either. Honestly, getting this newsletter stuff figured out is time consuming, and I’m really looking forward to having it set up and on a regular schedule so I can focus back on art.

Things I did that I hadn’t planned:

• Updated the design of the newsletter template from the default with questionable colors and other improvements. This took an absurd amount of time.

What I want to get done before next week:

• Create a newsletter welcome cadence - I had delayed this until after I announced my rebrand (today!), so this is back on the list for next week.

• Create CTAs - Inspired by the Nicolas Cole video, I want to implement a few of his tactics, including setting up the CTAs like requesting ideas, informing people of a referral program, etc. That just means I have to set up all those features within Beehiiv, which I complained about earlier.

• Setup the Can’t Not Create Instagram - Surprise! This is an Instagram account that exists already (previously an art-related account I made but rarely used), that I renamed to go along with all this. Right now it just has the name, but no relevant content - I need to delete the old stuff and figure out how I’m going to use it moving forward. I think I’ve decided it makes more sense to have a dedicated Instagram page, but if anyone smart about marketing or social media has a different opinion, please message me before I dedicate time to this!

• Edit interview recording and prepare for sharing - My tentative plan is to share the interview in two ways (here’s another area where expert advice is welcome and invited):

  • In the newsletter - summarize key takeaways and include good quotes from the conversation.

  • On YouTube - share the full video of our conversation. Because surprise, I also have a YouTube channel I’ve created that has nothing on it!

    • While we’re at it, I’ll also just mention that I set up another currently-empty social media account on BlueSky.

• Contemplate LinkedIn sharing - Now that this is really getting set up, I’d like to share on LinkedIn, since I’m more connected there than anywhere else. I just want it to be super clear that this is something I’m doing in addition to my current job, and that people should still come to me for market research. My friend Philippe convinced me that I should definitely share here, on the early side, I just want to do it in the right way.

Cash Flow

I’m going to go ahead and share the full cash flow with everyone, for those catching up - and so you can see the excitement you’ll be missing in the future if you don’t join the paid tier!

As you can see, this has not been a profitable venture so far. I have thought about splitting out the newsletter expenses/gains from other expenses, since that’s the focus at the moment. But, big picture, I’m trying to just make money outside of my day job in general, so I like to look at all of it.

However, here’s what the newsletter alone looks like:

That’s not nearly as scary! I do wish those Stripe fees were consolidated instead of coming in one at a time - I guess that’s one advantage of offering an annual fee option. I’m not going to do that anytime soon though - as much as I’m dedicated to this newsletter, I need to prove it out for a while longer before I’m promising anyone that this will be happening in the same capacity one year from now.

Metrics

• Subscribers: 37 leading up to issue #5 (+2 from last week)

  • No new paid subscribers

• Beehiiv analytics for Issue #5:

  

• Time spent this week:

  • Newsletter: ~10.25 hours

  • Art: 2 hours

What’s Working and What’s Not Working

Working:

• Completing an interview - I have to admit that I’m very proud of myself for getting some interviews set up. There are a lot of elements to the process that feel very scary to me and have stopped me in the past (see previous issue), and I’m really glad I got that going quickly and have an interview complete!

• Updating the design/logo - I think this was something I was excited about last week too, but now I’m even more excited to have officially updated it and have something I’m willing to share more broadly with the world.

Not Working:

• Analytics cadence - I’m thinking that weekly is a little much to share all the analytics of things like cash flow and subscriber growth. Kind of fun for the first month, but I might adjust moving forward because I just don’t know that it’s super interesting.

• The low-hanging fruit is tapped out - I think I’m maxed out on subscribers I’ll get from sharing on my personal Instagram. That’s fine and kind of by design - just means I need to start phase 2 of sharing more broadly!

• Interview skills - I’m pretty good at getting on a call and getting the information I need. But making that sound entertaining and polished at the same time is harder. I want to run a few more interviews and then reflect and think about how I could tighten things up and improve. Audio/visual quality could certainly be better, my background, lighting… stuff I was trying not to stop me from moving forward. But on my mind to improve at some point as well.

And there you go - Issue #6 of the newsletter / Issue #1 with the new name. I’ll be back next week with the first interview of the newsletter!

Your friend,

Colleen

PS. Don’t be shy about responding to my requests for advice (or areas I haven’t asked for advice, but should have)! And if you’re a subscriber, don’t forget to send me your address to receive a one-of-a-kind bicycle artist trading card!