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Autonomous Creative

With Jessica Abel

For creative iconoclasts who want to pay their bills AND do the work they love, get insights, ideas, and next steps from a graphic novelist, author, & business coach. Find out how to build a balanced and productive creative life, and to thrive financially with simple, sustainable business foundations—without creative compromise.

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Featured Post

How to use your core values to build an ethical creative business that can help make the world a better place (with an activity & audio!)

Heads up: This one's a deep-dive! I've included an activity (and an audio recording of the article and activity instructions) in the blog post to help you learn how to use your core values as a powerful tool to build your confidence as a professional creative. Obviously, in this big crazy world, there is a lot that’s out of your control. We all make compromises, a lot of them. We all have to grapple with adverse circumstances (and often actual adversaries). In order avoid feeling like you’re...

about 1 year ago • 4 min read

Got 5 minutes to play around with me? I’ve put together a tiny treasure hunt for you full of old, slightly embarrassing photos, art, and ephemera from my cartoonist past for you to discover. For example: Want to see me drunk in a bar in Tijuana with semi-famous cartoonists in 1999? Oh yes you do. These photos have never before been on the internets! No joke: I had to literally scan small rectangles of paper to make this for you. my weapon of choice in the 1990s Also: unpublished work! Comic...

10 days ago • 2 min read

Once, when I told her to empty the dishwasher, my daughter’s face clouded into a scowl. But it wasn’t simply that she didn’t want to empty the dishwasher. No, she told me that she had been just about to get up and empty the dishwasher on her own. As soon as I told her to do it, I stole the virtue of doing it solo, and I robbed her of her agency. And now, she wanted to sit down and NEVER empty the dishwasher. Sound familiar? Yeah, me too. But wait, there’s more: The other day, a friend said,...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read

Ever since I named our monthly free coaching call the “Simplify to Amplify Roundtable” I’ve been questioning my own overly-complex working life. How can I counsel others to simplify, and talk about how powerful that can be in amplifying their ability to reach their goals…when I myself still juggle so much stuff all the freaking time? I’ve been teaching this concept for years: One thing at a time. That’s how you get things done, and that’s how you unleash your full potential. Yet, ever since...

3 months ago • 3 min read

I went through most of my career feeling like success was just…one…step…away, around a blind corner, and that all I needed to do to get there was… More. More work, more marketing, more income streams, more…everything. At some point—or really, over and over again—I did so much more I almost broke. I know I'm not alone. I constantly see other creatives trapped in the same cycle, which I’ve dubbed “Cyclical Burnout.” The truth is, most of what we’re taught about having a creative career (when...

9 months ago • 1 min read
The step-by-step plan to find high-value clients - The Autonomous Creative with Sarah Lacy

I’ve been talking a lot over the past year about one of the biggest contributors to the painful income gap most creatives experience: relying on selling low-cost products via a LOT of marketing, especially social media. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that approach, if you love producing content for Instagram and marketing 24/7. But if you don’t? The best way out of that crunch is to design a high-ticket offer that you can sell to just a few clients. The number one thing I hear...

10 months ago • 1 min read

Happy summer solstice (or winter solstice, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere)! Yes, I know it was actually yesterday, but I’m already going at a summer pace over here. Summer is just built different. I’ve got 2 teens whose lives utterly transformed a week or two ago when school let out. I teach art college, and summer is downtime. I’m a gardener, which means I’ve been extremely outdoors for the last several months, and now begin to get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Many years, I’ve...

10 months ago • 3 min read

The bad news is: You think you can learn yourself out of this bind. You can’t. The good news is: You already have what you need. Here are three lessons I’ve learned as a coach, from my awesome clients. 1. Things don’t have to be hard to be worthwhile It’s the nature of scarcity to make us value things that are rare. (Think gold. Sure, it’s pretty, but if it weren’t rare it wouldn’t be worth much.) The flipside of scarcity-based value is that we devalue things that are plentiful. You’re...

12 months ago • 4 min read

I’m so incredibly proud to introduce the second cohort of the Autonomous Creative Incubator! We’ve all been working so hard for this day, and it feels incredible to be helping launch these new businesses into the world! Six short months ago, these awesome creatives committed to building new businesses. Why did they take this huge step? Because they all needed to create time, freedom, and autonomy in their lives. I mean, don’t we all? But it turns out, the way that actually happens in reality...

about 1 year ago • 4 min read

What’s one of the most consistent things I hear from every single successful creative I’ve talked to? “There was this time when I just started doing this thing. I just started making this thing, and I did it because I wanted to do it, and because it was what made most sense to me creatively, I fully committed to it and I had no idea what was gonna happen, but that’s what opened all these doors.” But those doors won’t open if you’re not out there doing stuff. Listen, I know it’s a cliché. I...

about 1 year ago • 3 min read

Your creative endeavors, broadly speaking, bring all kinds of important benefits to your life. Your creative business, however, has a single MOST important job: Getting you paid, and paid well enough that you are not scrambling and struggling. What, specifically, does that mean for you? And how can you take charge of making sure you bring in the money you need? um…it involves a little MATH. I know when I mention math, creatives of all kinds tend to tune out. Mention business math? Less tuning...

about 1 year ago • 2 min read
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