I'll Build an Audience When...
...said every creator you've never heard of.
“I’ll build an audience once I have something worth sharing with them.”
…said every creator you’ve never heard of.
This line of thought underestimates how long it takes to build an audience and earn their trust. It’s a mistake to wait to think about audience building until you’ve completed your masterpiece.
It is incredibly valuable to be curating an audience for your work in parallel to doing the work itself. It’s the difference between having an audience eagerly awaiting your work and holding a great unveiling to an audience of no-one.
It’s useful to know who you’re creating for. Establishing an audience for life rather than a new audience for each project is liberating. David Benioff (co-creator of HBO’s Game of Thrones) says that making the second season of the show was much easier than the first, because by that time they knew who their audience was and they understood how to write for that audience.
By beginning to build your audience now, you can have your people in mind when you create instead of working in isolation and then sending your projects out into a void of the unknown.
I’ve created a workshop to help you to do this, called Audience by Design. If you’d like to know more about it, email me and I’ll tell you more.
Great post, Matthew, thanks! Beginning small continues to be a gift that allows my audience to shape my work and even me while I create for them. It's a dance, really, and a very enjoyable one!