My goal with this series is simple. I want to share practical lessons that come from actually doing the work. Over the years, I have created hundreds of animated shorts, hundreds of comic strips, more than a hundred original songs, hundreds of articles and blog posts, thousands of webpages, and other forms of digital content. Along the way, I have learned a great deal about generating ideas, staying productive, building a large body of work, organizing that work, and getting more long-term value from everything I create. The first two books approach content creation from different but closely related directions.
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How to Never Run Out of Content Ideas
How to Never Run Out of Content Ideas is the first book in the series and focuses on one of the biggest challenges facing any content creator: continually coming up with things to create. The book explores practical ways to generate ideas, develop them, expand upon them, and create an environment where one idea can lead naturally to another. Rather than relying on occasional bursts of inspiration, the goal is to develop habits and methods that create a continuing supply of possibilities. It is written for people creating videos, blogs, articles, music, artwork, social media content, and other forms of creative work who want to become more productive without constantly wondering what they should create next.
Building a Content Reserve
The second book takes the next logical step. Once you have plenty of ideas and are consistently creating content, what happens when you begin producing more than you immediately need? Building a Content Reserve explains the advantages of deliberately accumulating finished content before it is needed and using that reserve to create greater consistency, flexibility, and freedom. It covers concepts such as establishing a realistic release schedule, building a reserve around that schedule, creating evergreen material, organizing a growing library, rotating existing content, repurposing work for different formats and platforms, and using accumulated content to explore new opportunities. A content reserve is more than a safety net for busy periods. Over time, it can become an increasingly valuable creative asset.
Built From Experience
These books are not based on a theory of what content creation might be like. They grew out of my own experience building the Craypoe Productions ecosystem and learning what works, what does not work, and what I wish I had understood when I started.
One of the most important lessons I have learned is that individual pieces of content can become far more valuable when they are part of a larger body of work. An idea can become an article. Characters created for a comic strip can become animated characters. A short video can become part of a compilation. Existing material can be introduced to new audiences on different platforms. A large reserve can provide months of scheduled releases while giving its creator the freedom to work on something entirely different.
That kind of long-term thinking is at the heart of this content creation series.
The new Craypoe Productions eBook store on Payhip gives me another way to share what I have learned with other creators. How to Never Run Out of Content Ideas and Building a Content Reserve are the first two releases, but they are intended to be the beginning rather than the end.
There are always more ideas to explore, more lessons to share, and more things to create.
