Sub-Genius Patronage Lessons

A friend and I were chatting about patronage and the arts.

I’ve been having a version of this conversation with my creatively-minded friends my entire life.

Can you actually make a living off of making lil descriptions of life in some other format (be it songs, or art, or poetry, or blog posts, or YouTube videos, or…?)

The conversation always goes back to starting small.

The conversation always ends up somewhere around Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans.

But there’s one other touch point I always think of and rarely say out loud.

I didn’t say it in this last conversation.

I needed to flesh it out first, so here it is for my Personal Archive - it's been quietly informing my creative thinking for years.

It comes from the Church of the SubGenius.

For the uninitiated, Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond were two Texas friends that bonded over a shared obsession with those crazy pamphlets you (still?!) find in a convenience store, stuffed unassumingly between a magazine and a candy bar.

Any pamphlet you find in a place like that is guaranteed to be written or produced by some crazy person that wants you to join their crazy organization.

It’s a weird case study in modern social media echo chambers (but that’s a longer reflection for another post).

Stang and Drummond found these pamphlets fascinating.

Who made them? Who read them? Who read them and then joined one of these crazy organizations?!

Most importantly - why couldn’t THEY make pamphlets like this too?

Sure looked fun.

Stang and Drummond reasoned (and, they had DARK humor, OK? Brace yourself, this is tough, but this is also them) - if a group like Heaven’s Gate could convince hundreds of people to commit suicide, then surely they could convince, in a way less harmful way, a few thousand people to simply send them a dollar, right?

So they made their own pamphlets, complete with ads to send in $1, for more information of course, and that’s how the Church of the SubGenius was born.

For my creative friends who want to get paid for their art, take note.

Be weird. The farther from normal you are, the more differentiated you can get comfortable with being, the better. Commodities are the same, but specialty items and especially luxury items know how to stand out.

Know it. Be very aware of your status as weird. Own your weirdness completely. Know exactly what makes you different and lean into it deliberately.

Then, give people a simple way to appreciate you. They made it $1 for more information, but really, the donations were proof-of-concept monetized appreciation. If you liked their sense of humor, sending in a dollar proved you were a fan, and they answered with sending you more.

The key insight for monetizing any size following: don’t forget that it doesn’t even have to be monetary.

Like/follow/subscribe/tip/whatever.

The more direct you make the appreciation, the less you’ll have to worry about middlemen taking a cut.

This is invaluable advice for smaller scale creators.

If you’re weird and entertaining, people will help fund your weird pursuits, and IF you form the relationship directly with them, and not exclusively through somebody else’s platform, your cult doesn’t end until you decide to end it (that isn’t supposed to sound as dark as it came out, but, you get it - right?).

The SubGenii are a key part of my sense of humor and probably how my site ended up with the name Cultish Creative.

I like being creative at a religious level, and I don’t want to hurt anybody along the way.

Appreciate this post? Subscribe, share it with a friend, and come hang out with me and my friends on Cultish Creative YouTube.

BYOKA (Bring Your Own Kool-Aid).