Singles and Albums

FOLLOW THE MUSICIANS TO BUILD YOUR WRITER BRAND

The first album I ever bought with my own money was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. I bought it for my mom for Christmas, I think, but I loved Lauryn Hill so much that I bought two CDs and kept one for myself.

Today, Miseducation is still my favourite album of all time. The single she put out to promote the album was a song called “Doo Wop.” Lauryn raps the verses herself then transforms into a melodic, soul singer for the hook. I was hooked, and apparently, so was everyone else because Miseducation went on to win five Grammys, including the first hip hop album to win Album of the Year.

A lot has changed in music since then. Streaming, the influence of TikTok — music feels different than it did back when I bought that CD in 1999. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is singles and albums. As far as the industry has come, those are still the formats by which an artist’s music is presented and judged.

As writers, we can learn from these formats when showcasing our own work and building our readership.

Back in 2017, I started a blog called CRY. I called it CRY because it was a space for me to vent about my life and crying is the only action that represents every emotion.

For months, I wrote these deeply personal pieces about my inner most thoughts. I shared stories about feeling insecure about my income, about my daughter asking me if I was a loser, about whether this writing thing is ever going to work. I put it all out there one single at a time.

Slowly my readership grew, and then more quickly as I stayed consistent and reached further into my soul for stories that should’ve been too personal to share. Soon, thousands of readers were following CRY, but I was ready to take the next step.

Here’s something I learned very early on in my writing journey: If you want to build community, the mission of that community must be greater than any one individual, including the individual who started it.

I could’ve easily named my blog Kern Carter. I have a unique enough name for people to remember. But I knew I needed my message to be bigger than the messenger, and so CRY made a lot more sense for me. So when I saw the success I was having with my blog, instead of continuing to push my own writing, I turned my personal CRY blog into CRY Magazine.

Now I’m in album mode.

I told you earlier that crying is the only action that represents all emotions. You cry when you’re happy, sad, angry, frustrated, scared — all of the above and more. I took that concept and made it the mission of CRY Magazine, which was to build a community of emerging writers who are connected by the power of vulnerability and creativity.

Read my novel, Boys and Girls Screaming

CRY became the community where I met most of the writers I know today. The mission of creativity and vulnerability was like a calling card. Writers from all over the world felt connected to that vision, to that experience, because they know that writing is an emotional undertaking and CRY Magazine created a space for us to come together and share those experiences. At it’s height, CRY Mag gathered nearly 40,000 readers/month. It’s one of my proudest achievements.

That, my friends, is how you put together an album as a writer. The net has to be wide enough for people to fit, narrow enough to capture the right people, and strong enough to hold those who come.

Another singles/album strategy happened when I first started on Substack. My plan was to release a short story in monthly chapters. Again, I could’ve named the Substack the title of the short story, but through experience I knew that it had to mean more than that. Instead, I decided to call the platform Love & Literature. That decision became key.

I dropped chapter one of my short story in January of 2021. Now remember, I planned to drop one chapter a month, but with the reaction I received to the first chapter, I changed course. I decided to put out a chapter every week to build on the momentum. Then my business partner recognized an opportunity to keep telling stories, just not just from me.

After I dropped the final chapter of my short story, we had already prepped the next series of stories. In the year or so we kept Love & Literature active, we accumulated tens of thousands of views and attracted writers from all over the world to share their stories with readers who opened their emails every Sunday morning.

And to take things even further, the short story I wrote is now the foundation of a screenplay that we’re currently pitching. So we took one simple idea and turned it into a short story, which spawned the idea for a larger platform for writers, which led to the creation of a script that you’ll eventually see on the screen.

That’s album number two.

What writers are a bit naive to realize is that so much of our success is dependent on how we package and present our work. Writing without intention won’t cut it anymore. We need to be strategic from the creation to the distribution and find ways to use singles to build an album. In other words, we need to start with a theme that’s larger than ourselves, experiment until we find the opportunity, then once that opportunity presents itself, put it together as masterfully as Miseducation.

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Thanks for reading. Check out some post below that you might enjoy. And if you’re a writer trying to fight through your fears, try this FEAR GUIDE journal.