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Make Your Own Rules
Stories and Hard-Earned Advice from a Creator in the Digital Age
By Andrew Huang
Table of Contents
About The Book
YouTube sensation Andrew Huang offers practical tips and hard-won advice for creatives seeking financial stability while staying authentic.
How does a musician with acute hearing loss, a refusal to perform live, and no industry connections carve a path to millions of followers and lucrative royalty checks? In Make Your Own Rules, Andrew Huang shares stories from his two decades as a music industry misfit and offers advice on both the artistic and business sides of working as a creator in our digital era.
Beginning with auctioning his songwriting skills on eBay as a teenager, Andrew continuously found new ways to thrive in a music career over the last twenty-plus years. His storied career and hard-won wisdom can help aspiring digital creatives find success as well. Organized by sections on building your creative foundations, growing an audience in the digital age, making money, and staying true to yourself, Make Your Own Rules pairs personal anecdotes with concrete advice applicable to any freelance digital creator. You’ll learn how Andrew became an early adopter of sharing music online—for free!—and how he leveraged social media to grow an organic following and amass millions of song streams and video views. Additional chapters provide insight into his designing an online course and music production tools that have been used by tens of thousands of people, and how he created revenue streams for himself that didn’t exist previously.
With open-minded perseverance, Andrew made up his own rules for life. His unlikely journey will inspire creators to find opportunity, financial stability, and fun in their pursuits.
How does a musician with acute hearing loss, a refusal to perform live, and no industry connections carve a path to millions of followers and lucrative royalty checks? In Make Your Own Rules, Andrew Huang shares stories from his two decades as a music industry misfit and offers advice on both the artistic and business sides of working as a creator in our digital era.
Beginning with auctioning his songwriting skills on eBay as a teenager, Andrew continuously found new ways to thrive in a music career over the last twenty-plus years. His storied career and hard-won wisdom can help aspiring digital creatives find success as well. Organized by sections on building your creative foundations, growing an audience in the digital age, making money, and staying true to yourself, Make Your Own Rules pairs personal anecdotes with concrete advice applicable to any freelance digital creator. You’ll learn how Andrew became an early adopter of sharing music online—for free!—and how he leveraged social media to grow an organic following and amass millions of song streams and video views. Additional chapters provide insight into his designing an online course and music production tools that have been used by tens of thousands of people, and how he created revenue streams for himself that didn’t exist previously.
With open-minded perseverance, Andrew made up his own rules for life. His unlikely journey will inspire creators to find opportunity, financial stability, and fun in their pursuits.
About The Author
Philip Bowser
Andrew Huang is a partially deaf Toronto-based musician, music/video producer, and YouTuber with over 2 million subscribers. A versatile and prolific creator, Huang has released over 2,000 songs in a massive range of genres, and his YouTube content runs the gamut from music education to equipment reviews to interactive projects with fans and other industry titans. He lives in Toronto with his family.
Product Details
- Publisher: S&S/Simon Element (February 15, 2024)
- Length: 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982190415
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Raves and Reviews
This is a perfect guide to navigating the ever-complex and wondrous world of the creative arts, packed with practical and insightful information that will help individuals at any stage of their journey!—?Nahre Sol - Pianist / Composer / Creator
Very few people turn me into a bumbling fan boy faster than Andrew Huang. I get stupidly excited every time he releases a YouTube video. This book is an insightful, candid peek into his thinking and creative process, a must read for anyone trying to turn their art into a living. —Jad Abumrad - Musician / Composer / Creator of Radiolab, More Perfect and Dolly Parton’s America
"There are single sentences in this book that took me 10 years to learn on my own. If you’re looking for motivation, you’ve found it. I wish I had this book when I was starting out." —Chuck Sutton, artist and music producer
"Andrew Huang is a creative force of nature. He's a living prototype for the current and next generations of content creators and musicians. Make Your Own Rules, much like his music, is filled with deeply relatable and hooky story telling with a message. Wise, thoughtful, normally heavily obscured information is shared here about creative process and monetization in a modern context. This should be required reading for music students and anyone trying to move from hobbiest to full time creator. Absolutely Inspiring, I loved it.”
- BT, Electronic Artist, Film composer, and Software Developer
"A book as remarkable and multifaceted as its author, Make Your Own Rules is revealing, inspiring, encouraging and deeply informative. Any creative person of the Digital Age — whether they’re familiar with Huang’s wildly creative online work or not — will benefit from this deep dive into his impressive journey thus far.” -JJ Abrams, Writer/Producer/Director
"Andrew has done what I thought was impossible—he has managed to take a field that is rapidly changing and create a book that is timeless in its usefulness and relevance to any artist that wants to share their work in the digital age. If there was a course in content creation this would be required reading." - Malinda Kathleen Reese, musician and creator
Resources and Downloads
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- Book Cover Image (jpg): Make Your Own Rules Hardcover 9781982190415
- Author Photo (jpg): Andrew Huang Philip Bowser(0.1 MB)
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