Book Description
The book provides both inspiration and practical advice or all those involved in running or setting up a creative business.
David Parrish draws on his own experience of running creative businesses and the insights he has gained from helping hundreds of people in creative enterprises. He combines his own perspectives with research from successful businesses to offer sound advice and some new ideas to help creative enterprises to develop and grow.
Written in an engaging and common-sense style, the book provides useful advice about managing creative enterprises, using established techniques and some new ideas. It's a book which can be read straight through - or dipped into for specific ideas and help - or both. There's something for everyone involved in the business of creativity, whether established enterprises or those about to start up.
The best creative businesses integrate creativity with good business practice, hence the need to mix the approaches of both T-Shirts and Suits into a workable business formula. This book demonstrates through its ideas and examples how the apparently different approaches of the worlds of T-Shirts and Suits can come together to create successful enterprises.
"The business of creativity is the art of turning recognition into reward,
and the science of turning intellectual property into income streams."
- from T-Shirts and Suits
Designed in a readable and user-friendly way, the book covers marketing, intellectual property, competition, assessing feasibility, finance and company structures. It also helps the reader to clarify their own ambitions and values in relation to their creativity.
The book's themes are illustrated by snapshots of how creative enterprises are successfully using the ideas presented in the book.
In short, this book makes a practical contribution to the development of successful enterprises in the creative sector.
From the Publisher
Foreword by James Purnell MP, Minister for Creative Industries and Tourism.
As Minister for the Creative Industries and Tourism, I am pleased to write a foreword to this new guide to the business of creativity.
The UK is arguably the worlds most creative nation. America may have bigger creative industries, but we punch well above our weight. But having creative people isnt a guarantee of economic success. Arguably, the UK has been great at inventing but not so good at exploiting those inventions. The challenge is to turn that creativity into industrial success and we must find ways to turn talent into hits and hits into profits. In other words, we must become creative entrepreneurs, not just creative inventors.
Publications like T-shirts and Suits will help inform creative talent to become more successful entrepreneurs.
What David has done in this book is to enable the most creative people to also understand and use the best business practices. He has used his experience as a practitioner, consultant and trainer to present key ideas that can be used by creative entrepreneurs, both established and new. Furthermore he has used his own creativity to propose new ideas and to explain vital concepts, for example about intellectual property and marketing, in a clear and entertaining way.
I congratulate this contribution to creative entrepreneurship and I applaud Merseyside ACMEs publication of this book.