about jessica

I spent 20 years doing everything “right.” now i teach what actually works.

about jessica

I spent 20 years doing everything “right.” now i teach what actually works.

I'm Jessica Abel

I'm a cartoonist, author, and business coach for creative professionals. I started out mailing photocopied hand-bound comics to anyone who'd send me 2 dollahs cold-hard-cash. Nine books, piles of comics, hundreds of illustrations, and 25 years of teaching later, I run a business coaching practice.

How did we get here??

It took two decades doing everything the creative career rulebook said to do, skirting disaster, railing against the machine, before I understood just how deeply the rulebook got it wrong.

The rulebook looks like this:

Make great stuff
Get published
???? ✨magic✨
Settle into a comfortable middle-class life

What happens, of course, is even those who make it to step 2 keep looping the beginning.

Step 1 → Step 2 → No magic? Back to Step 1 → Step 2 → Still no? Step 1 → etc.

Here’s a story about “success” vs. success in creative fields.

In 2015, I published Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, a 200-page graphic novel about storytelling and radio. After writing and revising the script for two years, I ground out those comics pages in 10 months flat (with help from Matt Madden and several interns).

When it came out, it got rave reviews. From the outside, it looked like I'd finally “made it.” I was on an actual book tour. I was on stage with podcast stars Roman Mars and Glynn Washington, my comics projected 20 feet tall. Ira Glass was recommending my book from the stage when he spoke.

And that IS success. I’m very proud of the book and how influential it’s been!

BUT.

Behind the scenes, the story was far more complicated.

My book advance (which had long since lined my landlord's pocket) was in the high five figures. Impressive! Except, spread over the three years it took to make the book? I was making less than minimum wage. And until I earned that advance back in sales, I wouldn't see another penny from my publisher.

(Spoiler: Eight years later, I still hadn’t earned out. At that point, the book had sold about 24,000 copies. And to be clear, in today’s publishing world, that’s really good! And yet all those sales have made me exactly zero dollars beyond my initial advance.)

The real problem wasn't the book. It was what came after.

The problem was not just that I was underpaid for all my work on that book.

It’s that NOT having ongoing income meant it was impossible for me to take the time I needed to get to work on a *new* book.

I just couldn’t afford it.

Instead, I had to scramble to make sure my family was safe. So I did what most of us do: I piled on more work. Teaching gigs. Freelance jobs. Department chair position. A new business. A new course. Whatever it took.

And to be clear, finishing Out on the Wire had left me completely burnt out. This just made it worse.

I could not keep it up. Things had to change.

And I knew it wasn’t just my problem. Nobody teaches you how to design creative work so that it can actually bring in family-supporting money—not in college, not in MFA programs, not anywhere.

I finally got it: step 3 would not happen on its own. I had to make my own magic.

So in 2015, I joined a business coaching program.

I mean, seriously, business?? 2005-Jessica would have choked.

I remember the thrill of finally gaining some insight into why all my hard work wasn’t turning into the kind of financial security I needed.

I remember being pissed off.

Despite two decades in my field, hugely varied, extensive experience, I felt like there was literally nothing I knew how to do that could turn into a viable business.

I was 45 years old!

I wrote this note to myself…

Oct 15, 2015

“I don’t know what I have to offer that’s worth any money.”

It took a few years of intensive study to figure out why, exactly, in actual concrete math, my expectations were so off. Why hard work (and great work) wasn’t enough. And why even the creative business I was building wasn’t totally solving the problem.

During that time, I launched the Creative Focus Workshop, my course for creative professionals on finishing self-directed work, and started writing seriously about creative productivity — including introducing the concept of idea debt. Those posts became Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life (2017), my guide for working artists and writers.

I worked with hundreds of creatives, helping them finish their projects, something that truly gives me joy. Over the following years I kept testing and refining the ideas in the CFW, which eventually led to the Creative Engine — my four-phase framework (Collect, Decide, Act, Reflect) for finishing self-directed creative work.

I thought the problem we solved was project management skills. It wasn't.

I kept seeing the same pattern: people would make progress, then hit a wall. The CFW was working, people were finishing things they’d never been able to before. But there was a ceiling. They couldn't sustain focus on their best work because they were stretched too thin. Better finishing systems could help at the margins, but the root cause was upstream: the high-effort, low-return ways they were scrambling to bring in enough money.

I felt pulled to share what I’d metabolized about business to other creative people like me.

But I couldn't ethically help people “monetize their passion” or whatever other zeitgeisty dream they had when I knew the math didn't work. I'd lived that trap. I wasn't going to send other people further down that path.

I sensed there was a connection between time/money and creativity, but I couldn’t name it yet.

The breakthrough came in 2019 when I read Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan. I picked it up expecting theory. I found my entire career staring back at me. Operating under scarcity of time or money doesn't just feel bad, it literally degrades your decision-making. The tunnel vision, the anxiety-driven busyness, the inability to zoom out and make smart choices. That's what scarcity does to a brain.

I saw it in myself first. Then suddenly the struggles I'd witnessed in students and clients over the years clicked into a different kind of sense.

The missing word: Capacity

Finally, with that word, Capacity, I could see the whole picture. I saw how finishing and getting paid were connected. I developed the Ground Truth framework — a method for designing a creative business that's genuinely profitable without requiring your nights and weekends, by starting with your real financial needs and real capacity.

That's when I could finally teach what I'd been wanting to teach all along: How to solve two problems that look separate, but turn out to be intimately connected:

You can't make enough money doing the work you want to be known for. You're stuck doing low-level execution when you have high-level expertise. Or you are doing higher-level work but stuck working too many hours, underpricing, with the wrong clients. The work that pays isn't the work you love.

And your most important creative projects never get finished. That book, that film, that course, that body of work that expresses your unique take on the world—it keeps getting pushed aside because everything else is always more urgent.

These aren't two separate problems. They're the same problem.

Creative professionals tend to see finishing their work and getting paid for it as two separate problems. They're not. Both trace back to the same constraint: capacity. And capacity is solvable.

When your business is designed around what you do, not what you need, you end up trading time for money at the commodity level instead of leveraging your expertise. A business like that is set up to EAT capacity. And when you have no spare capacity, your vision work remains out of reach.

But when you redesign how you make money so your expertise generates more income in less time, you free up capacity.

And when you have capacity, you can actually finish the work that truly matters.

That's why I teach both pieces. You can't solve one without the other, and no one else is teaching them together.

I've worked with 1500+ creative professionals since 2015. And I spend hours every week on my own art, because I finally built a business that makes that possible. That’s what I want for you, and that’s what we do here.

Welcome.

Stop working nights and weekends

So how do you actually redesign this relationship? You need a systematic way to evaluate what you're offering and what it actually costs you, *in both time and money.*

That’s what you can do with the Ground Truth Framework: a systematic, repeatable, logical way to figure out exactly what to offer and what to charge. More than that, Ground Truth gives you a lens on every aspect of your business so you can tune it to your needs.

I walk you through it in this free class:

watch now

by the numbers

quick facts

Cartoonist and author since 1992
9 books published across indie, commercial, and self-publishing
25 years teaching at the university level
1,500+ creative professionals coached since 2015
"Idea debt" concept, published January 2016
Creative Focus Workshop — course on finishing self-generated creative projects, launched 2015
Creative Engine Framework — four-phase system for finishing self-directed work, 2020
Ground Truth Framework — business design methodology for creative professionals, 2022
Flexible Container — planning approach for self-directed creative work, 2023
Autonomous Creative Incubator — business accelerator for creative professionals, 2022
Based in Philadelphia

books

Mirror, Window (Fantagraphics, 2000)
Soundtrack: Short Stories 1989-1996 (Fantagraphics, 2001)
La Perdida (Pantheon, 2006) — Harvey Award, Best New Series
Life Sucks (First Second, 2008) — co-written with Gabriel Soria, art by Warren Pleece
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (First Second, 2008) — comics textbook co-authored with Matt Madden
Mastering Comics: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures Continued (First Second, 2012) — comics textbook co-authored with Matt Madden
Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio (Crown/Random House, 2015)
Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life (Autonomous Creative, 2017)
Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars (Super Genius/NBM, 2018)
Series editor with Matt Madden, The Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin, 2007–2013)

awards

Harvey Awards: Best New Artist (1997), Best New Series (2002)
Friends of Lulu Award, Best New Artist (1997)
Xeric Foundation Grant (1995)
Eisner nominations: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (2009), Mastering Comics (2013), Trish Trash (2017)
La Maison des Auteurs residency, Angoulême, awarded by la Cité de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image (2012–2016)

teaching

25 years teaching comics, narrative, and professional practice at the university level
Founding chair, Illustration Department, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2016–2024
School of Visual Arts, New York, 2001–2012
California College of Arts, Low-Residency MFA in Comics, 2014–2016
Master Artist, Atlantic Center for the Arts, 2016
Additional: École européenne supérieure de l'image, The Animation Workshop (Denmark), The New School, SAIC, and others