You have products or a service to sell.

A shop, an event, a course you want to draw attention to. Or you’re a musician, artist, writer, or other creative trying to grow your audience. A mention in the media can change everything.

So you’ve tried. You’ve sent out press releases. You’ve approached newspapers and magazines, even individual journalists. No one seems interested. So let me tell you how it feels from the other side.

I’ve been the editor of an influential monthly magazine in the UK and on the weekly magazine of one of the UK’s big Sunday newspapers. …

“To be a successful creator, you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur or inventor, you need only thousands of true fans.” — Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine, a pioneer from the early days of the internet. He’s always worth listening to, but his 1,000 true fans theory is particularly potent for independent creators. If you’re feeling stuck, like you’ll never make a good living from…

“Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”

— Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

A fuse tripped in the house.

My faithful iMac switched off as a result, and it wouldn’t turn back on again. I’d been struggling for nearly a week to write a magazine feature, but it just wouldn’t come right, no matter how many hours I put in. And now this! Already tired and tetchy, I felt nothing was going my way.

After hours of fiddling…

One of the things I love about self-employment: having long stretches of time alone to get into flow with my work without interruptions, pointless meetings, small talk and office politics. After years of struggling to concentrate in open-plan newspaper and magazine offices, freelance life is bliss. Most of the time. But no matter how productive you are, working from home, it can be lonely.

Even introverts don’t want to spend all of our days in splendid isolation. Now that many of us are coming out of our lockdown bubbles and either working from home permanently or settling into new hybrid…

In the 1980s, Madonna was my mentor.

I was a fledgling journalist and editor, shy and lacking confidence. But whenever I felt stuck and unsure what to do next, I asked a simple question: what would Madonna do? It guided me through many awkward situations in my working life, and allowed me to borrow some of her courage when I had none of my own.

There are many Madonnas, of course. The one I turned to for advice was the character she played in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan. I was self-conscious in my early 20s, still battling with a slight stammer that sometimes made…

My name is Sheryl, and I’m a perfectionist.

I was a magazine editor, for large parts of my working life. It’s a job where content is key, ideas your currency. You only get one chance a month to impress your readers, so you want to make the best issue possible.

But once the words and pictures are on the page, it’s all about the detail. The headlines and captions, spelling and grammar, the paragraph breaks, typography and the turn arrows. It’s easy to become obsessive. And I did.

(Though the perfectionist in me wants to be honest and say you wouldn’t believe this, from my output. …

Very few people talk about the gap.

But I think it’s one of the great barriers to us making the work we were meant to make. Ira Glass, the producer of the brilliant PBS radio show This American Life, explains it best.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got…

I am talking to a writer client.

A scriptwriter, she’s had a lousy run of luck. There were projects that fell at the final hurdle. One film was given the green light, then suddenly cancelled due to the pandemic. Another idea had been continually optioned by a production company that clearly had no intention of ever making it into a TV series — but didn’t want anyone else to do it either.

She is stuck.

She’s miserable. She is spending far too much time online, comparing her stalled career with the apparent success of her peers. “I just want to write!” she says.

My reply is simple. “Then write!”

As creatives, we sometimes forget this.

We…