Turning your creativity into dollars

THE SOLANGE STRATEGY

Lying alone in my bed on a quiet Friday night, I felt lost. I had just moved into an apartment with my daughter that we both hated. I was mad at the roaches, mad at the bed bugs biting my daughter, mad at myself for not knowing that either of these things would be a problem in that building.

On that lonely Friday night, my daughter had already escaped to her grandmother’s house for the weekend. To break out of my pity party, I opened up my Tidal app and saw Solange dropped a new album. Without thinking much about it, I pressed play expecting to fall asleep to soft R&B sounds.

Image from Apartamento - Design by Solange

But that album was A Seat At The Table. That masterpiece was Solange’s first (and only) number one album and it’s not a stretch to say that it was the most critically acclaimed R&B album of that decade (it dropped in 2016). When I woke up the next morning and scrolled through Twitter (X), I wasn’t surprised by the praise being heaped on Solange for such a beautiful, thought provoking expression of music.

But from a commercial perspective, it’s not like A Seat At The Table sold millions of units. The album sold 72,000 equivalent units in its first week. For perspective, pop star Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, Guts, did 302,000 its first week earlier this year. Maybe a more fair comparison is an album like Still Over It by R&B star Summer Walker. That debuted at number one in 2021 selling 166,000.

The difference between Solange and a lot of other musicians is that Solange leans into her overall power of creativity and doesn’t solely identify as a musician. She knows how to leverage her success from music into other creative ventures that earn dollars and fills her soul. And I’m not talking about generic partnerships with tech companies or Sprite commercials. Solange is a true creator.

For example, fresh off of the critical acclaim of A Seat At The Table, Solange began staging a multi-city, site specific performance art project. From Venice to Germany back to Los Angeles, Solange toured this series, titled Past Pupils and Smiles, to intimate audiences that featured expressions of sound and movement.

Photo by James Mollison

When that was over, Solange wanted to make the performance more accessible. So what did she do? She created a 188 monograph, which is essentially a book specialized on a specific topic, typically scholarly. Solange skipped the scholarly part and filled this book with photography and conversations with the artists involved in putting together the Past Pupils and Smiles production.

Solange didn’t stop there. More recently, she became the second black woman to compose a score for the New York City Ballet (I was supposed to go see the show but life got in the way). This again showed off Solange’s creative muscles in an unconventional manner. In fact, Solange has her own creative studio. It’s called Saint Heron and the best way to describe what they do is to say they are steeped in creativity. They’ve partnered with organizations like the Met for digital installations, and Ikea for a home collection.

Image From Saint Heron

What does all of this means for writers?

Most writers I know, including myself, are so defined by writing. We want to be authors, scriptwriters, bloggers, copywriters, ghostwriters. But there’s a world of possibility out there if we slightly shift our perspectives.

What happens when we as writers open up the aperture and see ourselves as creative beings rather than strictly writers? We move from authors to creative directors. We are no longer just scriptwriters, we’re product designers. We’re no longer ghostwriters, we’re storytellers who architect campaigns for wider audiences.

See how that works?

And here’s the best part: we don’t need any bestseller list to validate our creativity. What we need to do is create the thing and leverage it to get into the spaces outside of writing we desire. A million people don’t need to tell you it’s great. In most instances, it’s only one.

It’s happened to me. Most recently, I was asked to take part in creating a photography series that focused on traditional storytelling. The artist who reached out to me said he read some of my work and felt that I was the right person to partner with. The project didn’t require me to do any writing at all, yet there I was.

And you can be there, too. If you take a proactive approach to positioning yourself as someone who understands storytelling, or creativity more generally, you open up more opportunities to create and earn dollars. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t replicate what Solange is doing. It will of course be relative to where we are in our careers, but that should excite you, not deter you. You have so much room to grow and become the superstar I know lives inside you.