Jeff Goins is the bestselling author of five books, including Real Artists Don’t Starve. His blog, goinswriter.com, is one of the most-read blogs for writers and creative folks.

Jeff has always been a creative person who likes to make things. As a kid, he drew his own Garfield fan comics with a friend.

Jeff’s dad taught him how to play guitar when he got older. He was in a number of bands that played really bad songs.

It was in high school that Jeff started to write stories for fun. He also acted in plays during his high school career.

Jeff gained more experience with writing as a writing tutor. After he graduated college, he toured with the band for a year. The most fun Jeff had during that year was writing weekly blog posts about the touring experience.

After a year, he quit the band and moved to Nashville, where he was hired as a copywriter by a nonprofit. He eventually became their director of marketing, and learned quite a bit about traditional and online marketing.

That’s when Jeff had the idea to use the brand-building strategies he learned at the nonprofit to build his own personal brand as a writer.

Today, goinswriter.com is Jeff’s ninth blog. The first eight blogs he wrote for failed. goinswriter.com succeeded because Jeff took the right steps and didn’t quit. Jeff’s successful blog allowed him and his wife to quit their day jobs and do this full-time.

Jeff’s Author Journey: Defining Moments and Small Steps Forward

Jeff’s success has been made up of both huge defining moments and small, consistent steps forward. When Jeff was 27 years old, his boss enrolled him in a coaching program for professional development. Early on in those meetings, someone asked him what his dream was.

Jeff had seen many of his friends quit their day jobs to pursue their dream—only to be back at a day job within six months. He didn’t think he had a dream. So he replied, “I don’t have a dream—I have a job, I have a family. I don’t need a dream.”

Jeff’s coaching buddy replied, “That’s funny. I get the sense that your dream is to be a writer.”

That resonated with Jeff and he said, “Yeah. I guess that is my dream, to be a writer someday. But that will never happen.”

Jeff’s coaching buddy pointed out, “Jeff, you don’t have to wait to be a writer. You just have to write.”

Jeff published a 500-word blog post the next day. Every day for a year, he published a blog post between 500 and 1,000 words long.

Throughout that year, when he met new people and they asked him what he did, he told them, “I’m a writer.”

This wasn’t a case of “faking it until he made it.” Jeff believed he was a writer. Then he took small consistent actions until he became a professional writer.

“People won’t take you seriously until you do.”

– Jeff Goins

Jeff developed a system for creating daily blog content that allowed him to write and edit a post before publishing it to his blog. Want to learn from his experience? There’s a link to his three-bucket content system in the links section of the show notes.

How to Deal with Fear

“Fear is what happens to us when we hesitate to do the things we know we need to do. Fear is what happens when we wait. ”

– Jeff Goins

When you act quickly, there’s no time for fear to creep in. Children have very little fear. Fear is something we learn as a result of watching the consequences of certain actions. We think, “Oh, if I do this I will get hurt.”

Because Jeff was producing daily content for his blog, he didn’t have much time to feel fear. He knew his content wasn’t necessarily that good. But this was his writing practice. He was just practicing in public.

Jeff knew that if he wrote on his blog long enough, some people might notice. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to practice his art to improve his skill.

There’s something interesting that happens when you put yourself into a daily practice: It doesn’t allow you a lot of time to feel afraid.

Most people feel fear and stop what they’re doing. When Jeff studied other successful people, he came to realize successful people also feel fear. The difference is successful people feel fear and yet still do what they’re afraid of.

“I began to see fear as a friendly reminder that I’m moving in the right direction.”

– Jeff Goins

From Blogger to Author

Six months after Jeff started regularly blogging, he was approached by a traditional publisher who asked him if he was planning to write a book.

He signed a deal for a small book contract. That gave Jeff the confidence to keep going. He also began to notice that readers of his blog were asking questions he couldn’t answer in a long blog post.

“I don’t think you write a nonfiction book because you want to. I think you write a nonfiction book because it’s the most succinct way of saying what you have to say.”

– Jeff Goins

A lot of people have a blog post go viral and think they should write a book. Jeff doesn’t agree. He thinks you should only write a book if you need the length of a book to express your idea.

If you’ve expressed all you need to express in a blog post, then move on to the next thing.

The Message of Real Artists Don’t Starve

Jeff writes books because:

• He’s serious about something.


• He has an experience with something.


• He has something unique to say about the topic.

Real Artists Don’t Starve puts forth the bold argument that if you’re starving as an artist, that is your choice. Starving is not a necessary byproduct of being an artist.

Jeff has met a lot of people doing great work and making a decent living who aren’t national celebrities. These people are thriving artists and creative entrepreneurs. They are making a living from their art and loving it.

Jeff lives in Nashville, and he kept meeting people who said that making a living as an artist is impossible. He wrote the book Real Artists Don’t Starve to introduce these two groups of people to each other.

“It is possible to do creative work, and make a full-time living off of that work, and now is the best time to do that. If you have a dream, a passion, a gift you want to share with the world, you have no excuse not to make a living from that, if that’s what you want to do.”

– Jeff Goins

How to Be a Thriving Artist

The first thing you have to do to become a thriving artist is educate yourself. There are many ways for artists to get paid for their work today. There are many artists who are making a living by selling their art.

The next thing you have to do is realize this isn’t a path to becoming Taylor Swift. This is simply a path that helps you earn an income from your creative work.

Use the internet to find the people who need your art. You have to find your 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly would say. That’s not a lot of people in the grand scheme of things, but it is enough people to build a platform that will support you financially as long as you nurture it.

If you can find 1,000 people who resonate with your message and need your art, you can make a living from that kind of exposure.

We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that you have to be famous, or that you need a big break in order to be a thriving, successful artist.

You can find the people who need your work and connect with them directly to exchange value with them.

How to Find Your True Fans

Jeff has a few tips on how to find those 1,000 true fans.

Mindset

You have to think like a thriving artist. You have to see the value in your work so that you can market it effectively. You have to take your work seriously before anyone else will.

You have to cultivate that mindset. You have to begin to think in terms of what’s actually possible. You have to dream a little bit.

Michelangelo was the richest artist of his time. At the end of his life, he had the equivalent of $50 million to his name. Before Michelangelo, artists were working-class citizens. After Michelangelo broke the glass ceiling of what was possible for an artist, artists of the Renaissance became aristocrats or upper-crust people.

Michelangelo was told his entire life that his ancestors were noble. His family believed it, and when he became an artist, he proceeded from the assumption that he was of noble birth.

• He got the wealthiest patrons to commission his work.


• He charged 10 times what contemporary artists were charging for the same type of work.


• In short, he did everything differently and got a different result than artists who came b