The Maxiemize Stack: A New Model for Ambitious Creatives

Commercial appeal and creative truth, without losing ourselves.

You don't need more advice.

I’ve stood at plenty of crossroads where my creativity wanted to go one direction, and my business interests wanted to go another direction. When I was negotiating one of my past book deals, I knew the value I brought to the project – the talent. But I also knew that the project was a creative risk for everyone involved. A creative risk that was more energizing to me than any “been done before” book that would pay my full fee. If I had called five of my smartest girlfriends, I would have gotten five very smart, albeit competing, answers. Most of our decisions making process as ambitious creatives leaves us torn between expression and business goals. We deserve an alternative.

That's what the Maxiemize Stack is: a new model for ambitious creatives who are done choosing between expression and scale. We're making art and making coin.

Because the old way…the one where you pick between being "serious" and being yourself…is broken.

It works until it doesn't. Until the platform changes. Until the niche dries up. Until the work you were great at… no longer feels like yours.

This is a framework for what comes next.

State of the Creative Career

When I dove into writing my first novel, DAISY, the tension between creative fulfillment and financial stability was…glaring. I’d wanted to write a novel for years, but I knew that novels don’t pay. Until they do. But I needed to write that book as much for my own fulfillment as I did for what financial doors it would open up next, or not. But I didn’t want that creativity to have to pay the bills. It wasn’t fair to my muse. My Daisy muse wanted to play on the backs of financial stability, so thats what I went out and made happen, with work that still asked a lot of my creativity, my voice, my talent. My bank account was stables. My creativity was challenged. I had a lot of asks on my time, but still I felt free and in control (of the parts that were controllable)

The end-goal of a creative career is clear:

Creative Sovereignty means your creative work funds your life, reflects your voice, and grows on your terms.

But the state of creative careers is, like the world, tumultuous.

Most ambitious creatives today are being asked to do the impossible.

We're told to keep showing up online—constantly, loudly, on-brand—while still somehow making time to make great work?? We're told to "build an audience" first, then figure out the art later?? When the art is what got us here. We're told to give our best thinking to the big platforms that don't pay us, reward us, or even show our work unless we're paying to play.

You’ve probably sat in my shoes, of wanting to throw your phone out a window because social media was sucking your soul. I was on stage at a conference once giving a keynote, and my site was hacked…with porn…right on time. NOT a coincidence. Because my URL was on my instagram bio, IG blocked me. And that began a multi-year effort of fighting against a shadow ban on a platform where I’d built an audience, a platform that I’d spent a ton of hours engaging with each week for years on end, a platform that in a single swift action, took all control. My creativity was hamstrung by my ability to share said creativity on the channels where we’re told are the place to consume.

And if we want financial stability? We're told to pick: either go all-in on art or get a "real job"—as if multiple revenue streams somehow cancel out your creative legitimacy.

But here's what I know: Ambitious creatives don't want to be content engines. We want to build a life where our work builds something real. Something that pays. Moves people. And fills us up.

We want to make money without losing taste. Grow a body of work, not just a follower count. Keep our creative soul…even if we're also holding down a day job or a freelance stack or a big brand role.

That's why the Maxiemize Stack matters. Because it's a structure for the creatives who want commercial success without selling out. A strategy for the ones building in-between the binary. And a reminder that our ambition isn't the problem—it's the plan.

The Four Powers Creative Maximalists Build

When I evaluated the pieces of my creative life that allowed me to feel strong, to feel powerful, and to feel free, I saw something super clear. Super consistent. I then looked to the other ambitious creatives in my life and saw something super clear. Super consistent. Each of us had entered a word of creative sovereignty, where our vision, our taste, our voice, our bank accounts, had room to play.

Creative Sovereignty isn't a feeling. It's not a vision board or a nice vibe. It's built from tangible powers that compound over time.

Here's the Maxiemize Stack that makes it possible:

1. Creative Power

When I created my first experiential talk show, Woman On, I saw the influence of creative power, of what happens when something we need collides with art, collides with purpose. It was something that hadn’t been done before, and I could feel it as much as the audience.

Your originality. Your taste. Your ideas. This is the actual work: your thinking, your output, your frameworks, your voice. It's the intellectual and artistic property only you can generate—not what you replicate, but what you originate.

Ask yourself: If I disappeared tomorrow, what ideas would the world lose?

2. Authenticity Power

Choosing between what feels popular versus what feels profitable is just that…a feeling. I was in Brazil recently and heard the story of a wildly talented and acclaimed artist who used a traditional chinese stamp (his name) to sign the front of his paintings. More than one gallery asked him to stop. But he wouldn’t. That was his art. His name. How he wrote it. You wouldn’t let someone tell you to sign your name differently would you? No, and from the time he stuck to his truth, his art took off.

Alignment between what you make and who you are. This is your internal compass. Your boundaries. Your values showing up in your strategy. It's what makes your creative career not just successful—but yours.

It's also what lets you evolve without burning everything down.

Ask yourself: Am I still proud of this? Or just good at it?

3. Audience Power

When You’re Not Lost released to the world, I kept an album of screenshots from readers. Because I know how easy it would be to get caught up in more more more more more. Scale scale scale scale scale, otherwise “what did it even matter”. Well each of those screenshots from a reader telling me what my book meant to me…that mattered. That was actually the whole point.

The people who trust you enough to pay attention. Not followers. Not likes. Not metrics. Not reach. Trust. This is the network, readership, clients, or collectors who engage with what you're doing because it resonates. Because it's consistent. Because it's not trying to be everyone's.

Audience Power is more than a list, it's leverage.

Ask yourself: Who would notice if I stopped making things tomorrow?

4. Abundance Power

When I was ghostwriting books on the reg, I remember feeling the pressure to take on everything that came my way because I wanted to make sure cashflow was consistent. But it left me creatively drained. And then I realized I could flip it, instead of more authors – I could do more with fewer authors, by handling the many parts that naturally follow a book: Speeches, OpEds, Memos, etc. This flip freed me up to do some of my best creative and most commercial work.

Time, money, systems. The stuff that makes all the other stuff sustainable. This is the income you earn from your work. The space you protect to make it. The creative infrastructure you've built so your career doesn't collapse the second you need a break. It keeps you from burning out and selling out.

Abundance isn't luxury. It is margins. Runway. Options. Agency.

Ask yourself: Can I afford to be honest in my work right now?

What Happens When They Stack?

Bringing these four powers together feels like abundance and flow. It feels limitless. There’s enough money to take risks on your creativity, and enough creativity to power the risk. Writing Daisy was a great manifestation of this stack – I spent four years writing a novel that didn’t get picked up by a major publisher and had the financial freedom to put more money against distributing copies when my worst-case scenario came to fruition. My creativity powered a new art, that new art was the truest version of me, my audience was fully invested in this next creative step, and that step didn’t take away from abundance, it increased it.

This is where it gets good.

These four types of power don't exist in silos—they feed each other:

Creative Power builds trust → grows authenticity

Authenticity Power builds resonance → deepens that audience

Audience Power becomes leverage → generates abundance

Abundance Power → gives you time + capacity to make braver Creative work

Those interconnections are the Maxiemize Stack. And when it builds, you stop surviving—and start compounding.

So… where do you start?

I started my stack with abundant power, because I knew that for me…and my own personal makeup…my creativity depended on my financial stability. So I indexed there, to unlock the rest. But there’s no wrong, or right, place to begin. What matters is just that…that you begin.

Chances are, you already have.

If you're writing decks for a billion-dollar brand while dreaming up your own, if you're speechwriting for politicians while trying to hear your own voice again, if you're building a jewelry line at night and answering Slack pings by day, if you're a photographer toggling between client shoots and personal projects, if you're a creative director helping others express themselves while wondering what's next for you, if you're a filmmaker holding a freelance stack in one hand and your vision in the other…

You're already building your Stack.

You're doing the work in the margins. In between the algorithm. Inside the meetings. On the weekends. After the client leaves. Between emails. Before it's trending. While no one's watching.

You don't need to hit reset. Just start recognizing what you've already been building.

This column is here to help you name it, refine it, and keep it going—with more clarity, more strategy, and fewer tradeoffs.

Welcome to Maxiemize. Where we build on your creative ambition—one power at a time.

→ Got a question about where you are in your Stack? Ask me here: hello@maxiemccoy.com