I know you've been unable to sleep for the last few months, wondering what became of Jesta in the final weeks of the Music Success In 9 Weeks challenge! Well, worry no more for here in all their brutal honesty are the answers you've been seeking…
I never got around to blogging the final week of the course and giving my overall view on the book, but it doesn't mean that I wasn't putting into practice some of the things I had learned. It was simply a case of being far too busy. The main event that put my blogging (in particular) on hold was the release of my album “Previously…” which wouldn't have happened anyway without the inspiration given to me by Ariel Hyatt's book. It was one of my goals to get the album project done and once started it took up a lot of my already limited spare time. I'm very glad I've done it though – after all it makes more sense to try to build fan lists and buzz once there's an actual product to market. Having an album of material out of my head also gets me excited for new songs which I hope to get done in a much shorter time frame.
I also had a personal life change which meant that I am spending considerably more time looking after my two sons. Yes, I love them to bits and enjoy the time with them but it's frustrating to have so few available working hours in a week. The days really need to be much longer to fit everything in! It's tiring running around after kids as I'm sure a lot of you know, so my attempts to stay up really late at night to catch up have generally failed.
These are not just excuses I'm making and no, I didn't “give up” on the challenge. The course brings up so many points that I think it would be really hard to properly implement the things taught in a chapter in just a week. As the weeks go on, more and more ideas build up and inspire your own independent thinking resulting in a time management bottleneck. So perhaps the number one thing I've learned indirectly from the book is that to create real music success you need plenty of free time! With other work that needs doing and a family to look after it's incredibly difficult to build on the things I've been taught. I'd love to be able to rely totally on my own music to pay the bills, giving me more time to spend on marketing, promotion, building a fan base and of course creating more music. I guess that's something I have to work towards this year.
Chapter nine itself is all about leveraging your fan list to generate additional continual income opportunities targeted at specific levels of your audience. This is partly through a system that could be seen as “membership levels” and is something that I have already looked at when investigating some of the fan funding systems on the internet. It's a great idea, but I don't think I'm quite ready for it yet as I still need to work on the earlier chapters of the book. So I'll keep it on the back-burner for now and jot down any ideas I have about it for future reference.
As for the book – I'm certainly not abandoning the ideas within. It's a very useful tool with many things that I already knew but that needed hammering into my brain and other things that I would never have thought of. It does however demand constant review and re-reading to make sure that you're sticking to the correct path. At the end of the day the ideas are no good unless you actually get off your backside and DO THEM. I'll be reading it again very soon and I'm certain the next time around more of it will make sense, more of it will sink in and more of it will get actioned to make me into a megastar (in my own household at least!)
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