Doing the Social

A curious thing has happened over the past few years - With the emergence of social networking like Twitter and Facebook, our business and personal lives have been merging as never before.  Sometimes this is fun, because some folks want to learn more about who they buy from as people.  Other times, it's unwanted or uninteresting...  The guy who wants to follow our pipe business updates only is not going to be interested in hearing what movie I watched last night.  When I initially set up our Facebook and Twitter accounts, I did so without much thought, setting them up as "myself", and I treat them both (My personal Facebook profile and my Twitter account) pretty darned informally.  This means that over the past couple of years, followers of our accounts have gotten to see vacation photos, movie reviews, random ranting, and a whole lot of other non-pipe-related posting. 

I am now offering an optional escape from this.  For a while now, I have had a Facebook business page set up as different from my own - Talbert Pipes on Facebook.  This account is ALL business, and that's where I post things like workshop news, previews of coming pipes, sketches, etc.  This way, the people who are interested in the pipe business can "Like" and follow our business page and be spared from my personal account updates on things like the new Godzilla movie. 

The same alternative has now come to Twitter.  I've just set up a dedicated business account, Talbert Pipes on Twitter, to use exclusively for pipe business.  Anyone who has been frustrated that my personal Tweets have usually been inane and non-pipe-related should hie themselves hence and follow that account rather than mine, because in future that Talbert Pipes account will mirror our Facebook biz account in sharing workshop news, site update notices, previews, and so forth.  My personal account will remain as random and bizarre as always. 

Finally, there is another little addition coming soon.  I've been reviewing a lot of movies for a private forum for some time now, and inspired by my buddy ZG, I'm going to carry some of those reviews over into my own personal movie review blog...  Sort of a "Pipe Guy's Eye on the Movies".  I think many pipe folks would say they have a unique perspective on things, and maybe some of that will carry over and help it be something more than yet another movie review blog.  Probably not, but one can hope.  Look for more news on this as it develops!

Form Letter Madness

I sit down to write today having just finished packing up four Ligne Bretagnes for shipment.  As tends to be the case, a couple are going to new buyers and a couple are going to repeat buyers.  I like the mix.  It's good to have repeat buyers, but at the same time, one does not want to end up selling everything to the same handful of collectors.  It does, however, spur me to post about a Talbert quirk that has been developing for some time.

Anyone who has bought from us in recent years will probably recognize this:

Enclosed you should find your pipe, its bag, and this letter. I hope you will like the pipe, and that it will smoke well for you. Please let me know if you have any problems with it. We guarantee our work, so if there is anything you don't like about it, you can return it for a full refund (prior to smoking), within the period of a week after it arrives. Thank you very much for the business, and we appreciate your interest in our work!

That's our basic form letter that I include with every pipe so people can know what to expect, what the return policies are, and to provide a signed "Thank you" for every purchase.  This is all well and good.  Then, as usual, it began to get silly...

I'm not sure exactly when the trend started, but some time a year or two ago, I was getting ready to print out yet another form letter to a fellow who'd already bought probably eight or ten pipes from us.  I figured, "He knows this by now", and included some random add-in comment about, "This box includes your pipe, its bag, yadda yadda, and this same freaking form letter". Doing this established a precedent, and it's grown since then.  It tends to start small...  After someone's fourth or fifth pipe, they might start to see small alterations in the form letter text.  This can progress to random inserted comments, Lovecraftian verse, quotes from Quint in "Jaws", and eventually escalate all the way to this sort of thing:

Where will it end?  Who knows.  Where is it going?  Probably on to start including bits of Talbert doodles, sketches, riddles, freebies, and who knows what else.  How many pipes do I have to buy before this stuff starts?  I'll never tell.  Too many, probably.  Enough so that I finally reach the point of thinking, "He's read this so many times that even including the text is pointless, beyond saying 'Thank you for the business'".  Will these signed letters start becoming collectible alongside their matching pipes?  No collector would be that crazy.  Would he? 
Thank you ALL for the business, and we appreciate your interest in our work!

Advice to Young Me

This post has sprung from a reply I made to a young writer on a forum I frequent, regarding his hopes and challenges of someday becoming a fulltime writer.  Over the past 12-nearly-13 years of being a fulltime pipe carver, I've had lots of chances to talk to people getting into the biz, and have sadly watched many people also drop out of it.  Since I know there are a number of aspiring carvers who read my website, I thought I would repost my comments here in hopes that they might prove useful for anyone thinking of getting into the pipecarving business (or any other type of professional creative pursuit). 



This is not, BTW, going to be a post about secret techniques or methods of going off into the woods to find inspiration - If you want to be a working creative, you can figure that stuff out for yourself well enough, and most of what people tell you in books and classes about "Accessing your inner creativity" is frou-frou meant more to sell a book for them than to actually help anyone.   This is meant to be useful advice.

Advice #1:  It's a process, not a home run.  On reflection, I think one of the biggest differences between working professionals in creative fields, and the fall-away wannabes, is this - The acceptance of the reality that no matter what you've just written/drawn/carved, it's really only worth so much time in food and rent, and you've got to keep creating more stuff. The work isn't about the individual creations, it's about the process of continuing to work and being able to continue to produce stuff of a quality level that people will buy.....which is really a LOT harder than getting that "one big hit" that everyone ordinarily thinks will "make them". A lot of people have the idea that they can just do one big thing, and then coast on it forever, but that isn't the case. As hard as it is to get the first few breaks, it's actually a lot harder to maintain that interest, because it's really very easy to do something that gets attention and become the flavor of the month, but the trick is to keep that going once you're past being the hot new talent that everyone is talking about. It's a pattern I've seen in the pipe collecting market, where some new guy will do something wild and get attention, and then everyone will be talking about him for a few months and he'll be loaded down with orders, then someone else will come along as the new-new guy and previous guy will watch his business evaporate and a year later he's got all his workshop gear for sale on the pipemaker forum because he can't live off his intermittent sales.
All of this is a big caution that, hard as it is to make the first few sales of your work, it's ten times harder to carry it onwards into being a fulltime living. 

Advice #2:  Motivate yourself.  If you're not doing "it" in all of your spare time, and learning about it and honing your skills, you probably won't make it regardless of how many advantages you may have (Talent, starting money, free time, etc).  I didn't have any starting help -  My parents pretty much discounted my creative career aims with a typical, "Oh, that's funny! But when are you going to grow up and get serious and get a real job?", so I had to motivate myself (And I should stress that this is not meant to sound like an overall indictment of my parents, like one of those fucking, "We're all damaged children" whine fests, because I consider myself incredibly lucky in the parental department to have had two stable and loving parents with stable jobs who cared about me and provided a happy home to grow up in, which is more than a lot of people can say. It's just that they completely did not understand why I was "weird". When I told my uncle I wanted to go to college to become an artist, his sage advice was, "Be sure to take the 101 class on how to live on $1000 a year." Har dee har..)   The funny thing of it is, I sometimes think the lack of family support for pursuing a creative career translated directly into my developing a greater self-determination to do just that.  Over the years, I've seen a number of guys get into the business with lots of fanfare and starting advantages, and last about two years... not for lack of talent or support, but for lack of determination.  Surviving as a professional creative is tough.  Here's something that sounds like mythology but isn't - When I was learning my craft, I did it through trial and error.  For a number of years I worked in an unheated garage corner where I would go each night dressed up in several sweaters and several jackets and gloves with the holes cut out of each finger, and sit and work and learn while my breath misted around me.  I didn't have a college art degree on my side or a wife who was able to cover all our bills while I learned or a family offering regular encouragement.  What I had was an obsessive drive to do this thing, regardless of what the outcome might be.  If you want to become a working creative professional, the best advice I can possibly give is to get out in the shop/office/studio and work on your craft constantly, and be able to motivate yourself to do so.  And if you're thinking, "Well, I'd really like to be an artist but I just don't feel like spending every evening painting, I'd rather play video games"... then you need to be honest with yourself and realize that you won't make it as a professional.  A lot of people read about creatives and get so enamored with the lifestyle they perceive that they start wanting that, that sort of job, without actually having the drive to pursue the craft in question.  

Advice #3:  Do it for a reason.  I can understand the desire to write something that moves the audience. My own goal in pipemaking is simpler - I basically try to make relaxation and stress relief for people. It makes me happy to know that all around the world, people are coming home after a horrible day's work and are able to sit down with a movie or a book or whatever, and have a relaxed smoke with something I have made, and that in this way I'm able to put a tiny little bit of good karma into the world that helps people enjoy just a bit of peaceful personal time in the midst of modern hubbub. Being natural things that don't suffer forced obsolescence and need to be replaced every three years, people tend to get attached to pipes and keep them forever, and make them into personal comfort objects, which makes me happy. Not really going to move anybody emotionally, but sometimes a little bit of comfort in a hard world is enough.