Building the next evolution in my poetry career

It's been 17 years of working to build a sustainable poetry career.#

For much of the journey I was focused on my in person community in the Boulder, CO area where I've lived for the past 16 years. It was very successful in being connected to a strong creative community of incredible artists but for the most part we're still relying on gig work to pay our bills, even musicians with a million streams on spotify, consistent shows, touring and new albums regularly.

I've shown up across all the digital spaces but none of them ever landed for me. The idea of just posting endlessly while platforms made billions and put as many roadblocks between me and the audience I cultivated never sat right with me. None of my friends that developed a sustainable career made it happen from that route. I've had a patreon and tried different platforms that had similar features. I still had to endlessly post just get them to check it out then convert them into a monthly membership. The initial lift was so heavy until your audience was built that it made it very difficult to succeed. It wasn't the quality of the work that was the issue. An independent artist having to wear all the hats and compete with hustle culture entrepreneurs with ad spend while the platforms make billions while throttling access to our audience is a toxic game.

This hurdle of building the audience on our own terms was the biggest hurdle I saw for myself and my community. It was with NFTS and OE's, open editions, that I first saw the potential for offering a collectible digital artifact as free collect to build your audience. The NFT world ended up being having the same kind of challenges that I found everywhere else, finding the audience and building awareness, but with the added friction that much of my established community had to be educated. The amount of energy it took didn't feel matched for what was possible in that current form so let it go and kept exploring.

Now with Metalabel's infrastructure I've found a low friction and supportive environment to launch a campaign that feels aligned with my values and capacity as solo independent artist over come this hurdle.

Yesterday I launched Season 1 of the Post-It Note Poetry Campaign. For the next year or so I'll be releasing poems on post-it notes as collectible digital artifacts. Each one will be released individually and be available to collect for 2 weeks. The first one is available for 13 more days and you can collect it here

Post-It Note Poem 1 of the season that is 1. Collect while you can.

I'll never let the dreams die. I'll keep feeding them till I'm worm food.