Hollywood Insider Help by Nancy Fulton Nancy Fulton

Remember you can always find videos, workbooks, and live interactive events designed to help you earn a good living doing what you love at NancyFultonMeetups.com. In this podcast I provide four strategies I think every creative pro needs to know in order to fund projects both large and small. They include raising money from investors using Regulation D or Regulation CF, presales, donation-based crowdfunding through sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, and swiftly selling your creative work directly to customers through services with few if any start up costs.

Over time most of us working in the entertainment industry develop close personal, professional, and creative relationships with people who seem to share our vision for the kinds of projects we want to produce. Some of us are even fortunate enough to have family members in the industry who want to work beside us to bring common dreams to fruition. And, indeed, one can point to some very long term production partnerships like the Coen Brothers, the Wachowskis, Michael Bay, Brad Fuller & Andrew Form, that have turned out to be incredibly profitable and creatively powerful over many decades.

Having said that, one of the most dangerous things you can do from a financial, personal, and a creative perspective is to commit to producing a project with a friend or a family member without carefully weighing the risks and taking significant steps to limit them. It would be a shame if deciding to produce a film with someone you love and love to work with resulted in the termination of an important relationship and an expensive financial disaster. It’s also true that even people love you can make expensive mistakes that cause you significant personal, professional, and financial harm.

In this episode filmmakers learn what executive producers look for when funding films. Note this is a posting of an interview which is a couple of years old. I'm making it available now because it helps those seeking executive producers and/or co-producers understand what stage a deal should be in before they approach those they want to work with.

Jim Jermanok (jimjermanok.com) is an award-winning writer, director, stage and film producer based in New York who started his career as a beloved agent at ICM representing leading lights like Alan Arkin, E.L. Doctorow, Helen Hayes, Ben Kingsley, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Miller, Dudley Moore, Andy Rooney and Henry Winkler, among many others. He is also an entrepreneurship expert and speaker who actively works with creative pros to help them earn more from their work. His recent bestseller, BEYOND THE CRAFT: What You Need to Know to Make A Living Creatively! (http://amzn.to/2hmx6YQ), and the workshops he delivers worldwide help entertainment industry creatives master the skills they need to achieve their personal, professional, and financial objectives.

In this podcast we are going to talk about how to become profitably famous when you are a writer, actor, producer, or other entertainment industry pro. The mechanics of creating your own fame, and earning a great living while you do it, are something anyone can learn quickly. In fact, by the end of this podcast you will realize you already understand how fame is profitably manufactured. What this podcast will do is help you see how to apply this insight to your own work.

This is an important podcast for you if you feel like people only ever get famous or wealthy by accident, or if it seems that nothing you do really moves your career toward the kind of success you would like to achieve.

In this episode you learn what financially successful standup comics do differently to ensures they earn a lot more from their work than their competitors do. Talented standup comics who master their craft are in the unique position of being able to learn quite a lot of money specifically because they can perform anywhere, and their content can easily be packaged and sold in many formats. But being talented and prolific isn't enough. In this podcast they learn 4 specific things they need to do to actually be financially successful. The same tips will prove useful to those who wish to earn a living as professional speakers, lecturers, etc. Remember to find events to attend live online or face to face, visit nancyfultonmeetups.com.

A quick shout out to Burt Teplitzky who asked me to address this topic before one of his shows. Burt runs one of the best clean open mic's in Hollywood at the Kibitz Room in Canter's Deli which has been a Hollywood Hotspot for almost a hundred years. If you are looking for a place to try out your work, and you want to go where the pros go, this is a great open mic to sign up for.