On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift up.

Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

Hey, you're listening to the Creative Pet Talk podcast on your host, A.D.J.

Pizza. I don't know about you, but I can get pretty annoyed by the feeling that your creative practice is resting on your ability to gain traction on social media.

I've had a little luck with that, and some ways that's been a good thing for me.

But for the most part, it's just an annoying, discouraging burden that feels like you can never get the kind of audience that you need to be taken seriously as a creator or to make it in a significant way.

It feels like the goalposts are always moving, the rules are always changing. You think you get somewhere and then someone's like, yeah, 10x, what you have in terms of following.

And it can just be incredibly discouraging and kind of impossible to ever feel like you can achieve the type of social media following or audience that is necessary to get where you want to go creatively.

And so I feel annoyed by that. I know a lot of other people feel annoyed by that.

And I wanted to explore a more practical topic on this episode because we've been in the creative side for quite a few weeks, just kind of going in the esoteric abstract, finding yourself, all that stuff that you know I couldn't be a bigger fan of.

But I've just kind of felt like I want to push the pendulum the other way. I want to talk about the practical side, the career side of the creative practice, that kind of thing.

And so this episode we're going to dive into why I truly believe that you don't need to have an enormous fandom or following to have a thriving creative practice.

And in fact, that trying to maybe the thing that gets in your way of finding that creative practice that you're looking for, that's what we're going to talk about today. Let's go.

So most creators I know today that are struggling to get where they want to go creatively, whether that's, you know, earning $40,000 on their creative work or $400,000.

Whatever it is, whatever you define as making it, maybe it has nothing to do with money, maybe it has something to do with just publishing a book like whatever it means, whoever you are, wherever you are, my experience is most of us feel the burden of needing to have an enormous following in order to make it as a creator.

And in this episode, I want to suppose that what if what if trying to have a crazy huge following isn't the thing you need to make it, but is actually the thing stopping you from making it.

What if the key to making it as a creator is actually starting with the smallest possible audience you can imagine and making for that group of people.

It sounds kind of crazy, but what if you just made for just one person, one super mega fan, like it sounds a bit risky, but the truth is that is how most people make their living.

Like you probably have heard before you don't need millions of raving fans, you just need a thousand true fans, but I want to tell you about something even more extreme than that in theory, but in practice, it actually works for you.

It works for tons and tons of people. So forget about true fans, forget about super fans and let's just think about for a second, the mega fan one mega super uber fan that's what you need and lots and lots of people make their entire living on just one mega fan.

Now before we get into what I mean by that and explore that thoroughly and apply it to your creative practice, let's go back in time to the 1970s to the first San Diego comic con that ever existed.

Now in modern times you can't go anywhere without hearing about superhero comics and Marvel movies and the DCU and everything in between right it's huge mainstream culture big huge amounts of money and fans and it's insane.

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