The Creative Entrepreneur: A DIY Visual Guidebook for Making Business Idea Real, published by Quarry Books (2008).
Get The Creative Entrepreneur Book on Amazon.
This book, with full-color images on every page, is based on workshops I began teaching for creatives on how to put together projects and businesses.
There is no way I can separate having a healthy creative practice from having a healthy creative business (the creative practice is the foundation for everything!) so the book is really 50% inner work and 50% nitty-gritty business and strategic thinking.
The full color images show how I have approached solving problems (of both the business and personal sort) all of my life, by keeping detailed visual journals and sketchbooks.
This visual approach to problem-solving was something that kept me company during a difficult childhood, and then the main tool I used as a therapist when I worked in psychiatric hospitals with teens and adults.
Over the past 25 years of facilitating workshops, I’ve kept evolving the tools of working with expressive writing and image-making, blending it with the best of psychotherapy, mindfulness practice, critical thinking and business strategy.
I really love the dance and interplay of all of these elements. Many creatives and artists think they are not good at business, or math, or some other thing that keeps them stuck. Just like so many people think they are not artistic or creative, these are mostly learned myths that can be evaporated with the lightest touch of creative practice using kindergarten art supplies.
For example, there is a whole chapter in the book that is all about the left brain/right brain characteristics, and how to use both effectively. Whatever task we’re attempting in our creative life or business, whether it’s brainstorming or editing or number-crunching, all we really need is the right tool for the job. Understanding the left/right brain characteristics helps with all that.
I’ve even gotten letters from people saying it helped them better understand their spouses! Opposites attract, right?
You’ll find lots of practical tools in The Creative Entrepreneur book, including journaling prompts, case studies, ways of working with image (especially if you don’t think you can draw or are not artistic), real-world, full-color examples of my student’s work to inspire you, plus a few of my own sketchbook pages demonstrating certain techniques.
The Creative Entrepreneur (link to Amazon) has been a best-seller on Amazon and won two Benjamin Franklin Independent Press Awards: Best Book in both Craft and Business.
If you get the book, I highly recommend the print version, as the Kindle and iBooks versions don’t do the beautiful layout justice. Like many visual books, The Creative Entrepreneur doesn’t translate well to Kindle or other ebook layouts, which I find disappointing.
If you do have The Creative Entrepreneur book, I’d love to hear your thoughts. How has it helped you to work visually with journal prompts? What new ideas did you take away? What else would you like to know about, that wasn’t in the book? You can leave a comment here, or email me.
Authors love to get emails about their books – don’t be shy!
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Previous Projects & Experiments
Because creativity is mostly about experimentation.
Sketchbooks, My Personal Creative Process. An experiment in subscription-model delivery of content. For more than a year, I published issues twice a month, made up of first-draft content and select items from my own sketchbook writings.
For this service I used letter.ly to deliver the content and manage subscribers and billings.
Just as I was trying to decide whether or not to keep publishing content using this model, letter.ly announced that they were closing up shop. So rather than switch deliver platforms, I took this as a sign to focus solely on one publishing project at a time (in addition to my blog).
If you are interested in reading/participating in my current behind-the-scenes, work-in-progress, please check out A Cartography of Higher Purpose. Thanks!
