When you look at the list of your clients, the list of people who purchase your creative work, what do they look like? Do all of those people or businesses look the same, or do they differ in some way? And when you look at the type of creative work you do, does it all fit into a tiny little box, or do you work in lots of different spaces and in lots of different ways? When you think of how you make income in your creative business, does it all come in the form of immediate payment, or work-for-hire agreements? Or do you also have money coming into your business that’s based on past work? In today’s episode, we’re going to have a conversation with multi-disciplinary artist Steven Jay Cohen and learn why, when it comes to the kind of artistic work you do and the way you do it, there is freedom in diversity.

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Hello, and welcome to Episode 58 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I am so excited you’re here with me today. I learned so much from my conversation with Steven Jay Cohen, and I hope you will too.

Steven has been a friend of mine since we first met in 2019, at a gathering in New York City before the Audio Publishers Association Conference that year. He has taught me so much about what it means to be an artist working in the audiobook space, and also what it means to manage my creative work like a true business, and not just a constant hustle.

Steven works in a number of artistic mediums. He’s an actor and audiobook narrator. He’s a skilled audiobook engineer. He is the creative force behind the delightful podcast Yet Another Dating App, and he’s the owner of Spoken Realms, a boutique audiobook production company.

In fact, Steven is going to be one of the faculty members for the Thriving Narrators Retreat, which is taking place in Cincinnati, OH just under two months from when this episode is being released, August 22-25, 2024. When the idea for the Thriving Narrators Retreat was first hatched, Steven was one of the very first people I knew I wanted to have on board. Because he works as an audiobook narrator, as an audiobook engineer, and as an audiobook producer and casting director, he has a unique perspective on the industry that not really anyone else that I know of within audiobooks can bring. His wholistic view of the world of audiobooks is quite unique, and I’m thrilled he’s going to be sharing his experience and expertise with the narrators attending the retreat.

If you’d like more information about how you can be part of the Thriving Narrators Retreat, all of that information can be found on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. And if you’re listening to this podcast episode in the future, and August 2024 is long past, I still encourage you to visit the Events page of my website. I’ll always keep that page up-to-date with everything going on in the Starving Artist No More community. You never know, the exact event you’ve been waiting for might be coming up!

But let’s get back to my recent conversation with Steven, which you’ll be listening in on very shortly.

As I’ve already expressed, I greatly admire Steven’s work from a creative perspective. He’s a powerful narrator and a perceptive coach. Some of my own most impactful coaching sessions have been working through a text with his guidance.

But in addition, I admire Steven’s creative entrepreneurship skills as well. He has crafted an artistic business that allows him the freedom to choose what projects he wants to be involved in, that supports him financially with enough consistency that he can say “no” if he doesn’t think a project is the right fit, and he can say “yes” to a project that is a true passion project for him, without worrying about exactly how and when he’ll receive the financial reward for that work.

In short, Steven has succeeded in fully developing the asynchronous income plan for his creative business, and he’s enjoying the freedom that comes from that.

If you don’t have any idea what I mean by asynchronous income, then I encourage you to go back and listen to Episode 8 of this podcast, which is all about Asynchronous Income: what it is, and how you can incorporate it into your creative work.

But, to give you a quick idea, what I call asynchronous income is what everyone else calls “passive” income. It’s income that comes to you over time as a result of work you’ve done in the past.

I really don’t like the term “passive” income because it implies that it is money that comes to you passively, without you doing any work, which is not at all true. “Passive” income is not actually passive. You do have to participate in the generation of income! Income doesn’t just appear – it doesn’t come out of thin air. Money doesn’t really grow on trees. You have to work to build an income stream that pays you gradually over time. Even if you are investing in the stock market, the stereotypical source of passive income, you have to first work to make the money that you then invest. Passive income requires a LOT of work; you just aren’t paid at the time that you do the work.

So, it’s not actually passive, but it is asynchronous. Asynchronous income is income where you put in the work up front and then are paid for that work over time, hopefully at a rate much higher than your normal rate. You do the work, and then you get paid for that work on a recurring basis into the future. Anytime you do work that will continue paying you far into the future, you are building your asynchronous income.

Developing asynchronous income in your creative business is where you get to break the connection between your income and your time. You invest a set amount of time up front to set up whatever income stream you’re pursuing, and then over time, that investment of time pays you back without needing much, if any, additional investment of time. You do the work once, and you get paid for it many times. All of a sudden, your income isn’t dependent upon you completing a set number of projects per week or per month; income is coming in regardless of whether or not you worked that week or month.

Having a strategy for asynchronous income is one of the six components of a thriving creative business (and you can learn all about those six components in Episode 54 of this podcast). Asynchronous income is what gives you paid time off, whether that’s for sick days or for vacation time. It’s what acts as your cushion if you have a lean month, what might have been a famine month before you implemented your asynchronous income plan. It’s what gives you the freedom to take on a passion project.

And figuring out the right asynchronous income plan for your creative business starts with diversifying your clients and the kind of creative work you do.

A recent New York Times morning email about the Tony Awards included this little nugget:

“You can’t make a living from releasing records alone,” said Sara Bareilles, the singer-songwriter who wrote the score for “Waitress” and is now writing songs for her second musical, a stage adaptation of “The Interestings.” “Artists in general understand how diversification of creative output is not just helpful, but kind of essential.”

When you look at your clients, are they diversified? Do you have a variety of types of clients? For me, in my audiobook work, diversification of clients means that I'm working both for publishers and for indie authors. It means that I'm working for different types of publishers: the big ones, and the smaller ones. I pursue work that is royalty share and PFH, or per finished hours, the audiobook world’s version of a work-for-hire contract. I work in a variety of audiobook genres. I even have one e-learning client so that I'm doing a bit of non-audiobook voiceover work as well. And, diversification is one of the many reasons that I made the decision to start coaching about two years ago.

In his book How to Make Money While You Are Sleeping (which I’ll link in the show notes), author and photographer Rich Sammon compares this diversification of creative output to using peanuts to feed an elephant. (And yes, I know that peanuts aren’t actually good for elephants and aren’t part of an elephant’s natural diet, but just go with me, or rather, just go with Rick Sammon’s analogy. Even if it’s not a realistic analogy, I do find it a helpful one.)

So, elephants are big animals, and a peanut is a really small little thing. One peanut is a pretty tiny little bite. A single peanut isn’t going to go very far in terms of satisfying an elephant’s hunger. But if you have enough peanuts from enough different places, then all those peanuts can add together to make a huge meal, and they can actually do a really good job making an elephant feel full. When you’re feeding an elephant using peanuts, the goal isn’t to satisfy the elephant’s hunger from a single little peanut. It’s to add all the peanuts together to create a satisfying meal because there are so many individual peanuts. Even though each individual bite is tiny, added together, you’ve got a full and happy elephant.

The same thing goes for your artistic work and your creative business. If you can spread out your income sources across lots of different clients and lots of different aspects of working within your creative industry, you give your business diversity, which transfers into giving your business strength. Anything that you can do to broaden your client base will give you stability if something happens that impacts one kind of client.

Let me give you some examples from my own artistic business narrating audiobooks. If something happens in the market that makes mystery/thrillers (one of my primary genres) no longer as popular as they currently are, it's ok – I work in other genres, too. If something happens that causes my royalty share sales to dry up, it's ok – I have ongoing coaching revenue, too. Or, if something happens that causes my work-for-hire publisher work to dry up, it’s ok – I have royalty income and coaching income, too. If something happens that impacts one of my publisher clients, it's ok – I work with indie authors, too. And on and on.

As Sara Bareilles told the New York Times, “diversification of creative output is not just helpful, but kind of essential.” There is freedom to be found in diversity.

Look at your client list. Is it diversified? If not, what steps can you take in the next quarter (because the 3rd quarter of 2024 starts this week!) to pursue clients that are different than the ones you currently work with?

Steven has some great ideas and concepts to share, so if you’re not sure how to answer that question right now, after you listen to our conversation, I’ll bet you have more than a few ideas of what you can do to develop asynchronous income in your creative business, and to find the freedom that diversity of creative work can bring. Let’s take a listen.

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Jennifer: Hello and welcome to the incredible, the multi-talented, the multidisciplinary artist, Steven Jay Cohen, who is a performer and entrepreneur. Steven, I'm so excited you're here today to chat with me.

Steven: Thanks for inviting me, Jenn.

Jennifer: I am really looking forward to our conversations. So with that in mind, let's dive into that first question. As I alluded in my introduction to you, you are a multidisciplinary artist and entrepreneur. You're an accomplished audiobook narrator. You are a skilled audio engineer. You are a writer. You're an audiobook coach. And some of my favorite coaching sessions that I've ever had have been with you. You are a director. You own a production company that produces not just audiobooks, but also radio-drama-style podcasts and all sorts of audio storytelling. I'd like to start today with you giving us a bit of a rundown about how you branched out in all those different directions with your creative business. What led you to work with such skill in so many different areas?

Steven: Well, I've been doing this for a long time. So I've been performing professionally since the early 90s. And along the way one picks up a lot of skills and does a lot of other things as you then bring those things back to the work. When I came to audiobooks, one of my first coaching sessions was with Scott Brick and he talked about his interactions with Morgan Freeman early on. And a big thing was that being conscious – he didn't use the word brand. It was really more instead of thinking of yourself as an actor, thinking of yourself as a talent agency with a roster of one. That means that, as you're thinking about your business, you're not simply looking for the next job as much as you're also thinking about, “Well, can I afford to acquire rights to this thing that I'd like to be part of making the movie of? Or, what other opportunities can I bring together to take care of the talent on my roster, who happens to be myself?” And I found that to be incredibly informative very early on. And that piece of advice happened at about the same time that a different coach, Jeffrey Kafer, was talking about the importance of diversity in one's catalog, that if you're making money off of royalties from content, the more diverse the catalog, the more stable the income. And I brought those two things together and realized that the more different ways I could help create art, even if I had a very small finger in each pie, that over time that becomes a very stable base. And the higher that stable base of income becomes, the less I need to say yes to a piece of work that I don't actually want to do, so it then gives me more freedom to then sort of curate the kind of work I'm currently doing.

And I don't know that that was the plan really in the beginning, but that's sort of what everything evolved into over time,. After a certain point that in audiobooks, most of what we do is work for hire. So we get paid for that work and then we don't see any income usually beyond that point. Not all of it, but a lot of it is that way. And getting to a place where I was making enough from the little pieces of work I had done that I could look at a job and say, “My rent next month is taken care of. So do I really want to do this book? Do I feel like that is something I can do? Do I feel that is something I want to do? Do I want to associate that with me moving forward?”

Steven: I think the wide diversity of things made it possible for me to do that way sooner than it would have if I was relying on the next job to be the major source of what was coming in to support the work.

Jennifer: Absolutely. The freedom that comes from that assurance that you're financially taken care of, that the work that you've already done and that base you've already built will give you what you need financially. That assurance must be very freeing.

Steven: And it takes a long time to realize it's there. Neil Gaiman talked about it in this wonderful commencement speech he gave to the Philadelphia School of the Arts. It's amazing.

Jennifer: Okay, I will find it and put that link in the show notes for our listeners.

Steven: And there's a lot of really good things in that speech for entrepreneurs, but this particular point was a great one. He talks about how early in your career, your day is basically putting messages in bottles and sending them out, hoping that something is going to come back to you. But he talks about how at a certain point in your career, you start getting more bottles back and you have to start figuring out which ones you want, as opposed to all of this outlay that you're doing very early on.

Steven: And it takes a while to realize, I remember very specifically when there was a project offer that came in, and I knew I had gotten it because of a lot of the work I had done previously. It was very much in line with a lot of the work, but it was very heavy and very dark and I wasn't really sure I wanted to do it. And I had the weekend to think about it, and it was over that weekend that I realized, “Wait a minute, I don't need to do this. Do I want to do this?”

Steven: And that shift just really helped change my perspective on what was coming in. It wasn't always hustling for the next offer as much as it started to become, “What do I really feel I could add value to and what do I think is going to help me grow artistically?”

Jennifer: That is a beautiful place to be. So how do you think that has changed your decision-making in from that before time to that after time? What decisions are you making differently?

Steven: Well, I'm still taking hard work, but I'm taking hard work that I feel like I can grow from. It does a few different things. It changes the nature of the work, but it also sort of changes the nature of what does it mean to not be in the booth. Not everything that's creative happens behind the microphone. You know, when you're in that hustling mode, any day you're not recording can feel at least to some point like I'm missing the opportunity to make money. Whereas now, if I'm not in here, I'm taking that to work on things musically, or I'm taking that to work on writing a different script, or working with somebody else on an idea to bring things together. So I feel like I've gotten to a place where I can actually interact with people about how best to leverage what they want to do or how to sort of create other opportunities for the future, as opposed to “I'd really better get this person who hasn't hired me in the last 18 months to think about me for a project that's coming up because I absolutely desperately need that.”

Steven: And my self-worth was totally wound up in whether I got the job or not. I know which other narrators I'm typically up against for work. So it's also made it so much easier for me to appreciate when one of them has gotten the job. It becomes, “You know, I could have done this book, but Matt Godfrey is going to do such a beautiful job with that piece.” As an example, hearing that he got it instead of me, and realizing that it's going to be in really good hands and being able to let go of it.

Jennifer: It takes that pressure off a little bit.

Steven: The difference between “I need this job to pay the rent” versus “it wasn't my job and it went to the right artist,” is it provides space to relax into just being in the moment, as opposed to needing to be on all the time.

Jennifer: For sure. And I have to imagine that your creative process is a little bit freer and more relaxed and more open because you don't have the pressure of needing to be in the booth making money every single day.

Steven: Exactly, exactly. So that diversity helps with that. I think a big fear, not only inside our segment of the creative economy but in a lot of places, is AI and machine learning that are sort of starting to move in. The more diverse your palette is, the more diverse the media that you're using for the work that you're doing, the more durable your income is, if that makes sense. It gives a little bit more peace of mind. Rather than “I am an audiobook narrator in a box that is a very specific shape,” it's very much the willingness to say, “All right, I exist in this box, but I need to grow beyond the box in order for this to be something that I can do for the long term or something that is going to fulfill me for the long term.” It shouldn't just be box shaped.

Jennifer: Absolutely. “I exist in the box and I exist outside of the box.” It's a both-and situation. So let's say someone is listening to this and they're saying, “My gosh, this is absolutely what I need to do.” How do they do it? How did you figure out what other avenues besides actually sitting behind a mic and performing into it or being on stage as an actor? Because I know you've got some other acting experience too, but besides doing the acting thing, how did you pick what you wanted to do?

Steven: Well, there was a lot of happenstance, a lot of things that sort of fell together. I wound up falling into an audio book distribution contract and helped build a side business that allows people to bring projects that are sort of their “square peg projects” that don't fit on a platform like ACX or Findaway easily for numerous reasons, and allows them to self-produce and still get it distributed. And someone early on looked at what I had built and they said that I really needed to take that to a business incubator, to a startup sort of scene. And there was one out here and I showed up and I wound up going through both the incubator and the accelerator. And I learned a lot about that way of looking at a business.

Steven: I really feel that running a creative business like a startup is a lot more appropriate than thinking about things in terms of a traditional business plan that has very defined parameters and edges. Because the nature of a startup is that you think this is the idea, you're going to figure out how to test it, and as you're testing it, you might pivot and iterate and change and evolve or realize that branding that felt like it suited you six months ago now doesn't feel like it's quite the right fit as you're seeing other things coming back to you. So I feel like I picked up a lot from bringing a business through an incubator. There's so much stuff out there that you can jump onto YouTube and sort of see about the different ideas about pitching and pivoting and what they refer to as the minimum viable product. So MVP in the case of a startup being something very different than it does in sports.

Jennifer: Yes.

Steven: You are the most valuable player if you're 100 % of your roster. But figuring out what is the minimum viable product, what is the thing, the essential element of you that you are then bringing to your potential clients as value. Because we are a B2B business, at least in this part of the arts. I'm not directly selling to consumers. I am pitching my business to mostly publishers, sometime indie authors, but in all cases, that's my business going to their business and fulfilling a business need for them to get a different product to market. That product is based upon the acting choices that I might make or that you and I might make if we're recording a larger project like The Indestructibles or anything like that.

Steven: But that is still a business-to-business business, a B2B business. Understanding “this is my value add, this is me summarizing what my value is in a tweet.” Although that sounds silly, that was one of the first things they had us do when we were applying for the incubator. To this day, if somebody is very amorphous and can't really describe what is it that you bring that the actor or the narrator next to you isn't – What's your unique value add? – and they're casting around for it, giving them the goal of “it should fit in a tweet” really does help. It's sort of like the micro version of an elevator pitch, right? It's not, “I've got you on the elevator for three minutes.” It is, “Write it out in this short form.”

Steven: “What is your unique value add” is a wonderful place to start.

Jennifer: Absolutely. It seems like that might sort of focus it, maybe a little like putting a magnifying glass to the sun, that you've got that really intense power right there. So much can happen when you have that kind of laser focus.

Steven: Right, often when I'm working with people, I will bring up some things that come from author Simon Sinek. He talks about what is your why, because his basic idea is people don't buy what you do or how you do it, they buy why you do it.

Steven: So with all other things being equal, if Robert Fass, Matt Godfrey, and I are up for the same role and we are all equally qualified to do the part, why? What gets us behind the microphone? What is the thing that drives us? What is the thing that is unique? And those things do come out in acting choices. But you can then come down to the why and understand that that is the unique thing that you can bring to your branding.

Steven: Why is an Apple computer and a computer from Hewlett Packard, both of which are capable of running Mac OS because there are a number of HP and Dell machines that can run Mac OS. So if you've got a Dell and a Mac and they are physically identical on the inside, in fact, you could hack the Dell to run Mac OS, why is that Mac selling for $1 ,000 more than that Dell?

Steven: It's selling for $1,000 more and selling successfully because Apple is not selling computers. The product in the end that's being purchased might be a computer, but Apple isn't making the sale based upon the fact that it's a computer. They are focusing on why they do what they do. And that becomes the differentiating moment.

Jennifer: That's a beautiful way of thinking about it. So I do actually have a podcast episode that I'll link in the show notes about finding your why as a creative, but that's more from a motivational perspective so that when the hard times come, you know internally yourself why this matters to you. I don't know that I've ever really thought about it exactly in the context of using that to inform your branding. That's a really good thought.

Steven: Right. The decision making part of your brain is not the part of your brain where speech lives. You make decisions in the limbic part of your brain. That's why we often say, “It didn't quite feel right.” Why did you choose? “It didn't feel right.” We don't use thought words when we're talking about those moments.

Steven: And so “why” doesn't really come from that logic center. You can look to see that the most successful brands, whether or not they are businesses, the most successful brands do focus on why they are doing what they're doing and sort of invite you to be part of that.

Jennifer: Really good thought, Stephen. So would you mind sharing a little bit of your why so that maybe we can have an example that we can draw from when we're formulating our own?

Steven: Right. So one of the things that I will be working on when I see you later this year, at the Thriving Narrator Retreat , is actually a series of workshops to do this. When you've come up with something, you will come back to it and keep refining it. You will keep pivoting because over time you'll realize that the wording wasn't quite right.

Steven: But the why for everything, whether it is what I'm doing here right now or any of the other things I'm doing, seems to come down to one basic sentence, and I've been able to refocus no matter what's going on by coming back to this. “My goal every day is to help good people do good work.”

Steven: So when somebody comes in with an idea and I'm thinking about that, my thought is, “Well, does this allow me to help good people do good work?” And I realize that's generically phrased, but the genericism in that is what then allows for it not to always be something here in audiobooks or something over here in technology or something in education, which I spent a number of years working in. So it's helping good people do good work is realizing, “There's an idea over here and how can I support it.”

Steven: And so that's why if you're looking at the promotion that comes out of Spoken Realms, the promotion really is about finding new things that have recently come through the system that we can try to elevate the conversation on and make some more connections with. You know, those aren't things that people are paying us extra to do. We're looking there going, “what really exceptional things have come through the system recently? What can we help to try to shine a light on?” That's what we're trying to do there with those pieces.

Jennifer: It's very collaborative and supportive and community building, which is a wonderful thing.

Steven: Yeah. Simon Sinek has a couple of good basic things that he'll talk about. A good place to start if you're basically trying to cast around and figure this out is to sit down with a friend and persistently but gently work on, “Why are you my friend?”

Steven: Because eventually, once they give you all the surface answers and they're getting frustrated because they haven't gotten to, well, why am I your friend? They'll start to go, “I don't know.” And as they get to that level of frustration, they will then push past and give something that doesn't quite sound like an answer, but will get closer to the why. “What is the value add that you bring to the relationship?”

Steven: There's a couple of videos of him online doing exactly that with people. There's a training which I wound up doing about guiding people through this process. And I find that once you've found the why, even though the wording will slightly change, once you've got that kernel, your branding will continue to change, but it will usually then become a different view on that same thing that is essentially you in that moment in the middle.

Jennifer: For sure. What you're saying relates very much to that podcast episode that I have. Like I said, I'll link that in the show notes because the question that I encourage people to ask as they're thinking about the why behind their creative work is, “Why does my creative business or my creative work, whatever term relates to you, why does it matter to me?” And then come up with that answer and say, “Okay. You know, it matters to me because it's what I pay my bills with.” Well, why does it matter that you get to pay your bills? And just keep asking and asking and asking over and over again, “why does this matter?” Until you dig down to something that feels like it has that kernel of truth in it that you can really hang on to.

Steven: Yeah, and doing that conversation not with a spouse, not with a family member, but with a close friend, seems to work better than somebody who you have that even closer relationship with, because it's harder to break through that little last moment as you're basically being the five-year-old going, “But why? But why? It becomes harder to break through that moment. But if you if you accept what they say and then you take it and you keep turning it back into a question, if you've got a friend who's willing to do that with you, you will find a kernel, something that is very unique in there. And if you do that with multiple people, you usually will find that they are complementary answers, which is a good way to kind of triangulate in on it if you're not really sure what direction to come at it with.

Jennifer: That is a beautiful way to think about what you uniquely bring to a creative project. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that, Stephen. I want to pivot to our final question, which is something that I ask pretty much everyone who I interview for this podcast, which is, I would love for you to tell us about a few of the tools or the resources that you use in your creative work that help you to be the incredible artist that you are.

Steven: so I have gone through the whole tool of the week thing, and they can just become overwhelming and can become projects in themselves to maintain. And so at a certain point, and I don't remember who pointed this out to me, that a lot of the features that we were paying for in extra tools, whether that was things for relationship management with potential clients or whatever, that a lot of those features were already baked into things that we owned. We just weren't looking at them the right way.

Steven: A lot of what you're paying for in a relationship manager actually exists in your address book on your iPhone or your Android phone. It's just not organized the same way, and you can use tags to get at that. Or there's a lot of things just in the regular calendar that you can use repeating meetings to trigger. And so once I realized that was the case, I began to pare everything back.

Steven: I started to understand that the less physical systems I had on top of things, the less I was likely to fail at using a system. And then I wouldn't use that failure to undermine my own feeling about myself and my ability to keep doing the work because that was getting in the way of me really utilizing those systems well. If I had gone all in on using something that was supposed to help keep me organized and make stuff happen, if it didn't work for me, I felt that I was failing, instead of “this software wasn't a perfect fit for me.”

Steven: While I was doing that culling, I had shown my daughter while she was in college the Pomodoro technique because she had this pile of stuff to get done. And as a thank you for my birthday that year, she got me a little pomodoro tomato timer, a physical timer. And I keep it on my desk because I know it works. I don’t use it every day, but it is physically sitting there for those times that I've gotten overwhelmed. So then I go, “All right, for the next two days, I'm breaking everything down into pomodoros and I'm going to turn the tomato and here we go. I will have 27 minutes of that and a three minute break.” I know the system, but I have learned for myself that if I try to live by the systems, anytime I fail to do that, then becomes the background track, which can get in the way of trying to get back the creativity.

Jennifer: Sure. I like to think of those sorts of things as “most days habits” rather than an everyday habit. I have most days habits that I find really supportive for myself and my creative process, but I let go of the need to do them every day. It's just most days.

Steven: Right. So it's like journaling with a pen and paper instead of journaling on a computer. Taking some things back down to very, very simple places appears to be helpful, I think in part because we spend so much time with screens. So anything that I can do that wasn't yet again dependent upon the computer, whether it was a physical timer or realizing that journaling on the computer felt different than journaling with pen and paper, all of those things of giving myself something that is completely non-virtual did help break things up and does help sort of change how my mind is processing something.

Jennifer: What a beautiful idea, Steven. Thank you so much. This conversation has really given me a lot to think about. I thank you for your time.

Steven: Thank you.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Steven Jay Cohen as much as I did! If you found today’s episode helpful, make sure to subscribe to this podcast so that you never miss a future episode. I would be so grateful if you would leave a review for me in your podcast player of choice. Reviews, especially those in Spotify and Apple Podcasts, are what help new listeners find this creative corner of the podcast world. And of course, if you have a creative colleague who you think needs to listen to today’s episode, or any episode, of the Starving Artist No More podcast, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! A huge thank you goes to my husband, Arturo Araya, who does all the audio engineering work for this podcast, and a huge thank you also to Steven Jay Cohen, for sharing his time with me, and all of you listening. As I mentioned, Steven will be a faculty member at the upcoming Thriving Narrators Retreat taking place in Cincinnati this August 22-25, 2024, and as of this podcast being released in the first week of July, registration is still open, and we still have spots available. If you’re an audiobook narrator, we’d love for you to join us. You can get all the details on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.

As Steven said, diversification of your creative work and your client list can open up new possibilities for you. Being in the place where you can say “no” to a project that isn’t quite right, and say “yes” to a project that is truly a passion for you, is an incredibly powerful place to be. Expand your view of who you are as an artist. Don’t box yourself in. Yes, you exist in the little box that holds your creative heart, but you can exist and thrive outside of that box, too. It’s a both-and situation. Diversity of your client list truly can bring you creative freedom. I can’t wait to see what you create.