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Tea Cup Whale: Find Your Creative Niche

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Want to stand out from the rest of the pod? The Tea Cup Whale shows you how to: • Discover your own, unique creative niche • Grow your creative career by thinking “small” • Be competitive without having to compete • Combine creative passions to create new ways to stand out • Become a magnet for opportunity • Find artistic satisfaction and recognition Includes real life examples and exercises to find your creative niche!

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The Tea Cup WhaleHow to Find Your Creative Niche & Be Big in a Small World

Table of Contents

1. Fishmonger, Pirate or Tea Cup Whale?How to Find Oneself in Sea of Possibilities

2. No Seats on the Life BoatYou Can Sink or Swim While Old Media Treads Water

3. The New WaveSurf it to Success

4. Be Fond of the PondHow to Fit Your Fins with Your Vision

5. Big Fish + Fish Out of WaterNetting a Niche

6. Sea ChangeTaking an Apt Cue

7. Make a Splash

8. Make Contact

© 2012 FMRL • All rights reserved. Text by Daedalus Howell Public domain images sourced from Wikimedia except where indicated.

For information about other FMRL projects including custom content and books, visit FMRL.com.

P.O. Box 5124 | Berkeley, CA 94705 | (510) 992-3675

Visit author Daedalus Howell at DHowell.com.

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1. Fishmonger, Pirate or Tea Cup Whale?How to Find Oneself in Sea of Possibilities

Finding one’s creative niche – one’s specific, unique creative calling in a sea of infinite possibility can sometimes feel like drowning. As creative people, our minds are awash with the flotsam and jetsam of potential notions. Some eventually dry up, beached like driftwood and others arrive as galleons full of gold. Unless you have a creative niche within which to spend this intellectual capital, chances are you’re just treading water. Which is to say, drowning slowly.

Even whales have to come up for air. In the very least, this is what I hope this book will be for you – a breather; a chance to catch your breath and assess your options before plunging back into the murky depths. This is also a primer on how to find a nice cozy pond and become the biggest fish in it.

What this book won’t tell you is how to sell your catch of the day (like some kind of “blogging pro”) or how to pirate someone else’s catch (same thing but with the tip of a tricorn hat). Nor is it Moby Dick, which, in some editions, clocks in at nearly 2,000 pages. This book is tactically brief and can endure being picked at like a shrimp cocktail.

What this book is designed to do is galvanize you into a course of action that will help you sail into the ever-expanding horizon

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of your own creative career, on your own terms, by finding a niche that is entirely your own.

2. No Seats on the Life BoatYou Can Sink or Swim While Old Media Treads Water

This is the problem: Everyone wants to be a working writer, musician or artist of some kind but like a never-ending game of musical chairs, the seats at the table keep disappearing. To extend the metaphor, the table itself is disappearing.

Most arts-driven industries have undergone massive contractions since the advent of the Internet and other market forces. Those that are miraculously beating the near infinite odds and landing themselves 15 minutes of fame, though they’re not receiving the big pay-offs they might have expected in yesteryear. Moreover, there is truly no rhyme or reason as to whom makes it and why.

Don’t take it personally. The old “system” is completely unpredictable because (drum roll) there is no system. It’s just a network of discrete individual actors trading places and trying to stay afloat. If you want to make a career being creative, you have to launch it yourself.

“I grew up poor, I had little formal education, no real skills, I don’t work especially hard and most of my

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ideas are either unoriginal or total crap. And yet, I walked right into a job for which I was ill-prepared and ill-suited – and somebody else already had – and I got it. If you ask me, that’s the American Dream, right there. Anything can happen to anyone. It’s just random.” – Nellie Bertram, The Office

3. The New WaveSurfing to Success

Never before has the opportunity to realize your creative career ambitions been so reachable. Using tools that are readily available and often free, you can manifest your creative work and bring it to market by sheer force of will. You don’t need permission, bottomless pockets or even total mastery of your medium – just your personal vision, drive and a little moxie. Your secret weapon is your own creative niche. When you find it, it will be transformative.

If you are a creative professional or on the precipice of launching your creative career, you are a Tea Cup Whale waiting to happen. You don’t have to have a creative writing degree (or any degree), you don’t have to have a resume dotted with gallery internships, or be particularly hip or arty, young or seasoned – you just need to be willing to “think small.”

Most books of this ilk, if not conventional wisdom, advise one to “think big.” Success, as most imagine it, is the result of making a huge splash when, in fact, it’s the result of tiny waves building into a tsunami. This book is about making those little waves; it’s about carving out your own inlet out of the deep blue by thinking small as a means to get big.

I wrote this book because this method worked for me. Sharing it with you provided an opportunity to examine and codify my experiences in building my own creative career – a career, which readers like you help make possible. So, consider this my belated “Thank You.”

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I’ve made my living as a writer in one form or another since going pro 15 years ago. I’ve written for newspapers, national magazines, TV and film and have a couple of books out (click here for a more thorough bio), not to mention blogs galore. My film work has screened internationally in festivals and on television. Though I pride myself on being a working writer, success did not come swiftly but slowly as I accrued various milestones over years. It wasn’t until I alighted upon the concept I refer to as The Tea Cup Whale that I was able to make real progress. That’s when I found my creative niche.

Several years ago, I was one of thousands of aspiring writers who drain into Hollywood only to find myself continually washing out time and again. And I was one of the lucky ones – I had great agents, positive meetings and occasional development, ghosting and rewrite work. The “big break,” however, never happened. Though I enjoyed several small breaks (sold some short films, optioned some scripts), I never amassed enough velocity to smash through whatever invisible barrier separated me from the perceived riches on the other side. That’s just how it goes for the vast majority of aspirants in an industry saturated with talent.

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That’s when I decided to change my thinking. Instead of trying to stay afloat in a big city where the sheer amount of competition made me feel like a living creative cliche (or worse, a clone), I moved to a small town and set about being a big fish in a small pond.

By focusing on a specific niche – in my case, satirizing small town life in city whose life’s blood is wine – I was able to hone a voice, offer something new and finally break through. Not only

did I grow a sustaining local readership that enjoyed my cheeky assessments of wine country living, I also reached a wider readership that perceived me as as a dependably humorous expert in living in Wine Town, USA. Within 18 months, I had a

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full-time salary, local celebrity and I was being interviewed by NPR. Moreover, I won the first of two national writing awards based on my wine country work. I later became the “Official Lifestyle Ambassador” for the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau, which led to a profitable series of travel videos.

By deliberately seeking a subject that had yet to be explored in a new and unique way, I was able to relaunch my career and attract new opportunities. This year, I’m enjoying the success of a new collection of my wine country-themed writings, I Heart Sonoma: How to Live & Drink in Wine Country. Back in the day, when everything I wrote began with “FADE IN,” I could not have imagined writing such a book. I was blinded by the pursuit of an impossible identity. When I finally matured and decided to create my own identity vis-a-vis the Tea Cup Whale, my career took on new velocity. Just to bring it full-circle, at the behest of friends and colleagues, I’ve written a small town wine country-themed comedy, which has already attracted entertainment industry interest by virtue of the fact that I’m the guy who owns that niche.

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” ― Herman Melville, author, Moby-Dick

4. Be Fond of the PondHow to Fit Your Fins with Your Vision

You know the saying, “Big fish, small pond?” That’s what this book is about. Plain and simple. I’m recommending that you find

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your own small pond and be the biggest fish you can be. Or in other words, be the whale in the teacup. You might be saying, “All you’re doing is classing up an old metaphor with some bone china and an aquatic mammal.” Yes, I did and clearly it’s worked thus far – how will it work for you?

Since you’re reading this book, it’s safe to say that, like I once was, you’re probably a “small fish in a big pond.” Here’s my technique in a two words: Change ponds. This can be done philosophically or physically, strategically or intuitively. The question is which pond is next for you?

So, You’re an Artist – now what? Presuming you’re confident in your talent as a writer, artist, musician or other sort of evil genius, the Tea Cup Whale will help address what to do next – how to breakthrough to a dedicated audience and begin one’s path toward, as Orson Welles put it so aptly in the original Muppet Movie, the “standard rich and famous contract.”

What’s salient here is that this contract will be between you and your audience rather than you and some Old School Media Entity. Forget trying to “make it” with the big players – swim with dolphins not dinosaurs. Be your own enterprise, build your own empire and start by finding your creative niche. This is how you’ll break through the clutter. The recipe is simple:

Take one, large aquatic mammal and a single bone china tea cup. Add water. A recipe for disaster? Perhaps. Below, I’ll explain to you how it’s done – at least the part about finding one’s creative niche. If you say it cannot be done, per the proverb above, please step aside.

Learn to Capiche the Niche.For those who aren’t versed in the patois of low-rent mafia movies, “capiche” is Americanized-Italian for “Understand?” as in, “If you don’t come up with the ten large you owe me by tomorrow, you’ll be six feet under, capiche?” One might say the same of your writing career if you don’t capiche the niche. Albeit, your career will likely meet a less violent end, it will still be over. That is, unless you find a way to differentiate yourself as a specialist, an expert, a Jedi in a specific field of interest that is also shared by your prospective readers.

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Al Capone, subject of dozens of low rent mafia films.

Make your own niche by being your own niche. Here are the three fool-proof strategies I’ve either employed myself or have witnessed colleagues successfully using to launch their own creative careers.

Be The this of thatChristopher Sawyer, the Sommelier to the Stars, as he’s been called is a wine expert and writer I’ve known since high school.

“Pairing” wine and film the way one would normally pair wine and cheese. It’s a cheeky notion but one that garnered him coverage in Esquire Magazine and guest-writing gigs galore, not to mention free travel and accommodations as an industry expert whose opinion is not only valued but results in billable hours. Simply put, Sawyer positioned himself as the first (and, as yet, only) Sommelier of Film.

Take two passions, collide them together and see what emerges. You may be sitting on a novel combination. It worked for painter Annie Strack, who combined her talent as a visual artist with a an interest in life at sea:

When people ask me what I do, I do not reply that I am an artist; I tell them that I am a maritime artist. This type of specific answer is always greeted with interest, and leads to more questions about my art. It

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allows me to explain the type of art I do, and gives me the opportunity to talk about my creative processes. – Annie Strack, maritime artist

If drilling down isn’t working, drill up.For example, my professional creative passions run the gamut from novels and film to music and entrepreneurship. Reconciling all these notions into a single career objective was a challenge. At first, I thought I could package myself as a Renaissance Man, however, I soon realized that I merely looked like a “jack of all trades” and an “ace of none.” Finding this elusive unified field theory of my present interests was maddening until I took a step back and found a lot in which all of my pursuits co-existed.

Sir Francis Drake, Renaissance Guy

It’s sort of like the hierarchical nomenclature used in biology – genus and species. Instead of looking through the micro lens of speciation (writing, filmmaking, et al), I looked through the macro lens of the genus that contained them all: creativity. Thus was born my project blog Creative Lot, which looks specifically at creativity as it relates to writers.

Create a Cross-PitchEverything is a hybrid these days – from the half-and-half in one’s coffee to the electric cars zipping down the diamond lane. Screenwriters have long-nurtured hybrid consciousness, hence ye olde “cross pitch” wherein the tone of a prospective project is

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described as being “this meets that.” The results, to continue the metaphor, are often mixed, but the practice makes for quite a parlor game. The trick is to lay the title on your cinephile drinking buddies and have them decipher its cinematic genealogy. A couple of my favorites: I Love the Smell of Napa in the Morning (Sideways meets Apocalypse Now) or My Life as a Droog (A Clockwork Orange meets My Life as a Dog).

How can a silly movie game help you find your niche?Imagine your potential niche as the middle area of a Venn diagram – all you have to do is pick to points of passion to combine

Take an artistic pursuit with which you might be smitten, like painting. Add a second passion point – perhaps silent movies. Drill them both down a notch to, say, portraiture and actors of the silent era. Presto!

Theda Bara screen by silentsandtalkies.blogspot.com

In the middle of your Venn diagram you have “portraits of silent era movie stars,” an instant niche that is an attention magnet. You can see the gallery show already: “Portraits of Silence” with the painting explanations presented in the style of silent movie subtitles. It’s dying to be a coffee table book, not to mention the blogosphere of film and art buffs will eat it up.

Take the medium of your core talent and augment it with an ancillary interest. One way to do this with some algorithmic mojo behind you is to Use Google’s Keyword Tool.

Don’t Let the Googleplex Give You a Complex

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It may seem counterintuitive to use an online tool used to optimize advertiser AdWord campaigns as a means of divining one’s artistic calling but it works. Think of it as a contemporary version of the entertainment industry adage “Give the people what they want” (for a darker take, listen to the Kinks’ tune of the same name). Anyone can get a free Google Adwords account by registering (go to adwords.google.com to do so). Once inside, look for the “Tools and Analysis” tab and select the “Keyword Tool.”

There, you can simply enter a word or phrase related to your creative pursuit and see what related searches people are literally making using Google’s search engine. Bloggers often use this trick to find keyword strings to use as Google bait and drive traffic.

For kicks, I entered “Apples” and saw that there were over 6 mi l l ion sea rches fo r the forbidden fruit (and quite p o s s i b l y t h e c o n s u m e r electronics as well). It got me thinking that we’ve seen a lot of paintings of apples (thanks Cezanne) but not a lot of poetry.

In fact, in my very cursory search, I found only two poems specifically about apples on

Google’s front page. One was A Short History of the Apple by Dorianne Laux and the other After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost. Working from a hunch, I entered “apple poem” into the keyword tool and discovered that over 12,000 people had searched for the same phrase last month. Apple poetry – whodathunk? A niche is born.

Perhaps you don’t want to be an apple poet per se but might you consider being the editor of an apple poem anthology. Surely, there are more than Laux and Frost’s odes to the fruit out there. All you need to do is aggregate, write a kick-ass preface and wait for NPR to call. I can already hear you on Fresh Air, “Well, Terry, the idea for the apple poem anthology came to me sort of the same way ‘gravity’ occurred to Newton...” Take a bite of the forbidden fruit and launch your career as a literary scenester.

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Like Herman Melville.

.

5. Big Fish + Fish Out of WaterNetting a Niche

Another technique is to create a “reverse-niche” wherein you reflect upon various passion points through a specific and consistent “lens” or perspective. The more esoteric the better. For example, if you’ve ever been the proverbial “fish out of water” you know what it means to be an outsider. Being on the outside of an issue, however, affords one a unique perspective. You very likely have a unique take on most subjects as refracted through the prism of your own experience. The fact is, all of us are unique, it’s just a question of finding the most unique aspect of our lives using it to filter and color your inspirations.

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I rest my case, your honor.

In this case, it’s not about where you are but rather where you’re coming from. I once interviewed an Internet marketing impresario and former wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuk, who had great advice in this area. By way of an example, he said “If you’re a lawyer and you also Hula Hoop – then be ‘The Hula Hooping Lawyer.’” Now, you might observe that a Hula Hooping lawyer might not be taken seriously by his colleagues and you might be right. A hip-whirling attorney WILL BE NOTICED, however, especially by those potential clients in need of an attorney who is sympathetic to the needs of toy-makers, inventors and game designers not to mention media seeking experts on the intellectual property law in the toy industry during a baby boom no less. The Hula Hooping Lawyer suddenly sounds hip (I couldn’t resist the pun).The essential soundbite here is: “You are your own differentiator.” Or as Mr. Vaynerchuck is fond of saying, “Execute on your DNA” (to the untrained ear, this sounds less like marketing genius than eugenics-for-one, but trust me, it’s actionable advice).

6. Sea ChangeTaking an Apt Cue

We used to do a version of this one in poetry class to inspire juxtapositions. It didn’t do much for poetry but created a heap of rock band names. Given my predilection for the stage, I call it The Apt Cue.

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Take a piece of lined paper and create a column of numbers, 1 through 6 on far left margin. On the opposite margin, aligned with your numbers, write the letters A-P-T-C-U-E so that 1 is on the same line as A and 2 with P and so forth. Fold the paper in half lengthwise, down the middle. In the left column, write 6 separate ways you might identify yourself using your occupation, geographic location, religion – anything really. Perhaps you’re a redhead – if that’s been a significant part of your personal identity, put it down. If you’re a tennis pro, it goes on the list.

Now, on the right margin, write down 6 creative passions (if you run out, you can repeat a couple). List these next to the letters that make up Apt Cue.

This is where the magic happens. Re-list your six identifying characteristics in reverse order, and number them backwards from 6 to 1. Once you’re done with that, arrange the letters in APTCUE to read TEACUP (tricky, eh?) and re-arrange your passions to match their original letter.

The reason we did all this writing and rewriting is to create truly random relationships between your passions and identifiers so that you could see them with an open mind. Moreover, sometimes dumb luck kicks in and a match is made that would otherwise not have occurred to you. That’s your niche. Feel free to move your passions and identifiers around – it’s very likely you’ll find a combination that’s as unique and as inherently interesting as you are.

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7. Make a Splash

After appraising your talents, interests and wealth of personal insights (and perhaps a little inspiration from this book!), you’ve found a niche that can be entirely your own. Brilliant, you’re growing fins. You’re also growing curious. You may even be asking yourself:

Is my niche too small or too esoteric?

Yes and that’s the beauty of it. The fact of the matter is, as unique and wonderful as you are, there are always others like you, who share your interests and will look to you for guidance. It’s like that scene in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, when Brian says to a crowd of thousands, “You’re all different!” And in unison they reply “We’re all different,” except one wag who says “I’m not.”

What do I do with my niche now that I’ve found it?

Simply put: Do your work. Put it online. With a modicum of search engine optimization and a commitment to creating quality content, you will find an audience. What you do with your audience once you get it is the subject for another book (check back frequently!). In the meantime, concentrate on mining your niche as far as it will take you. To quote Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.”

When you find your niche, you find an inlet to self-expression that will not only amplify the scope of your creative career but

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will likely lead to opportunities you might otherwise never have noticed.

Let me not think of my work only as a stepping stone to something else. And if it is, let me become fascinated with the shape of the stone. – Ze Frank, artist/blogger

Sure, someday you may outgrow your niche or better yet, gradually grow into your own niche and become a bona fide brand unto yourself. Power to you. Until then, you should recognize that finding your niche is just a beginning. What follows is dependent on the application of your talent, your ceaseless commitment and a belief, above all, that you have something worth sharing. As a Tea Cup Whale, you’re as sure to make a splash as I was to end this with aquatic cliche!

– Daedalus HowellBerkeley, 2012

DHowell.com