Photo by Jingming Pan on Unsplash
Building creative assets should be the first concern of any creative business owner. Independent creative professionals often severely limit themselves by viewing their creations solely as labor. Instead of building creative assets that can continually generate income, creatives do the work, get paid, and then let someone else (e.g., a publisher, label, or company) unlock the surplus value of the assets they created.
Creatives put in the time and effort to develop a piece of work but don’t know how to turn it into assets that can help them reach their full potential.
But building a portfolio of creative assets can generate income and create new opportunities. In addition, creative assets can lead to massive growth in revenue and visibility.
Let me show you how.
Get into the business owner mindset.
I was talking to a client the other day, and she said, “too many artists think of themselves as employees and not business owners.”
I heartily agreed because I had seen how when creatives go out on their own and retain an employee mindset, they deprive themselves of the massive upside that being a business owner creates.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an employee, but if you’re out on your own but not thinking like a business owner, you’re making your life much harder.
And this holds in the creative game.
Creative business IS business.
But if independent creatives don’t step fully into the role of a business owner, it’s hard to think in terms of creative assets they can leverage.
The valuable tough love that nobody wants: if you’re an independent creator and behave like an employee and not a business owner, you give away a ton of autonomy and financial upside.
As a business owner, your job is to create assets that generate income and long-term opportunities well after making the assets.
Learn to leverage creative assets in multiple ways.
I’ve noticed that the most successful creators have something in common: they use a single creation in multiple ways.
A book becomes a course, a podcast, a video series, a movie, or all of the above and more.
Each time you convert your creative asset into a new medium, you unlock new opportunities and revenue.
As the owner of a creative asset, you can take something you made and use it in various ways. In the content marketing world, they call this “repurposing,” It works by taking a single creative asset and converting it into different mediums or formats.
You can also permit others to repurpose your content into something else in exchange for money or something (“licensing”). For example, think of how the author of a book gets a lot more when someone buys the rights to produce a film of the book.
Use copyright law to support your creative assets.
Copyright law supports creative assets, so any creative needs to know some basics.
The most important thing you can do as a creative intent on building assets: register your copyrights.
While copyright registration is not strictly necessary, it’s pure tomfoolery not to do it. Copyright registration allows you to enforce your rights and keep others from using your creative assets without permission.
Since copyright registration can give you attorney fees and extra damages if someone infringes, it is an effective deterrent even if you never have to go to court.
Every creator should build creative assets.
We live in a world rife with opportunity for those who approach things the right way.
Building creative assets involves:
- Thinking like a business owner.
- Learning to leverage assets.
- Putting a rock-solid legal structure in place.
While some might feel intimidating initially, the rewards here can be astounding.
