054 - Marketing: A Dirty Word For Creatives

Marketing can be a bit of a dirty word for artists. But not doing it leaves your work in the dark

Image by William Felker

Marketing can be a bit of a dirty word for artists. But not doing it leaves your work in the dark

Welcome to the Editor’s Journal; A daily thought on writing, the creative process, art, work, the world and how it all goes together. Every morning I rise early, I sit here in the quiet of my kitchen and I write whatever’s prominent. There’s no clever headlines and no script, just open and honest thoughts. I hope you enjoy the read. If you like this article please offer some love by hitting the 👏 cheers!

Marketing can be a challenge for us creatives. Many of us see it as a necessary evil and most of the time we steer away from it for all kinds of strange and wonderful reasons.

We got some beliefs set up in our minds about artist’s integrity. The business side of art is something many of us mistrust and to embrace it is to sell out.

The truth of things is that marketing is just a word that represents the process of sharing what we make with the world and getting our work under the noses of people that matter.

The Creativity Coin

This sharing of our work is the flip side of the creativity coin. On one side we create. We enter the solitude for long periods, go deep into our minds and draw on creative inspiration.

This is our own world of imagination and dreams. It’s the place where all the greatest, and the worst things, that were ever created have been born. All technology, art, systems of education and enterprise that are commonplace today come out of this place.

The other side of the coin involves other people. This is where followers, agents, art galleries and various channels of distribution come into play. We share our work with them because they have a broader network. They can get our stuff to more people than we can on our own.

This is marketing.

Whether we market our stuff and build an audience ourselves through the power of the internet or we engage others to do it for us, marketing is necessary for the creative process to find completion.

I’ve written about this many times. The creative process is only complete when we share our work with the world. Keeping it on a shelf in the studio gathering dust is leaving the work unfinished.

Of course we can die and leave it all to be discovered later by others, but that’s no good to you and me now. Creativity is the making and sharing of ideas and inspiration, experiencing the joy others feel when they see and share in our work.

That’s what creativity is. To me at least.

Sure, you can sterilise it. Define it like psychologists do, but that’s a little short sighted. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, PhD, of the University of California says;

“You can’t be creative unless you come up with something that hasn’t been done before. The idea also has to work, or be adaptive or be functional in some way; it has to meet some criteria of usefulness.”

The statement has truth to it, but it’s only a thin slice of what constitutes creativity. Everything has been done before, we’ve simply to find a new way of doing it according to our own inspiration.

It doesn’t need to be useful in the practical sense either. It just needs to evoke emotion and appreciation from other people. Be careful here though… we can’t force this to happen, it has to be of itself.

Building Your Audience

Every creative needs an audience.

Sure, the idea of the creative genius, isolated, reclusive in her studio, hiding from the cruel and fucked up world is a romantic one. But it’s just an idea.

Go ahead and be that person if that’s what you want, but you deserve more. Your work deserves to be with people who can share in it with you. To be the isolated artist alone in his studio forever is to be practically dead.

For any human being to be completely isolated from everyone else is to be dead. There’s no growth in that, not to mention greater risk of development of cognitive dysfunction and mental illness.

Get your work out into the world, build an audience of people who love and enjoy your work and you’ll always have money in your pocket to live and enjoy the finer things.

The life of the creative is not supposed to be a hard one. We’re not supposed to be broke and begging for change. We’re supposed to receive as much financial reward for our work as we can allow.

Change Your Mind About It.

If you believe the struggling artist story then that’s what you’ll get. You can’t think negative thoughts about money and commercial success and expect to make money - it just doesn’t work like that.

Keep banging on about how shit the world is and how greedy people with money are and you’ll never have any - I guarantee it.

Think differently.

Go build an audience. Get your work out into the world, market it and get a good price while you’re at it. Money is just a symbol of our inner conversation, just like out art is, and just like art we get to sculpt the picture.

Change your mind about it.

I Made This Check It Out

I’m a creative person. I call myself a digital creative because online is the main place I show my work. I write and I draw and I make stuff I’m inspired to make.

I also love technology so to make stuff online is perfect for me. I like pulling things apart and seeing how they work, I’ve done it since I was a kid.

So I made this thing called Seolar: (yeah the colon is part of the name). It’s a site dedicated to bringing you tutorials and how-to articles to help you build your audience online.

You need to have a willingness to get your hands dirty of course, however, there’s no greater opportunity in history for artists and creative people to get their stuff out to the world than there is today.

The internet is where it’s at and you can make it work for you. I can help you get started.

Learn To Build Your Audience

Every week I publish several tutorials that help you get to grips with marketing tools like MailChimp, Sumo, ThriveThemes and others. I’ll show you how to use these tools to their very best on your WordPress website.

Here’s a couple articles you can check out;

How To Avoid Spam Filters When Sending Emails From Mailchimp [Video Tutorial]
The spam folder is the killer of many a great email. Here’s how to avoid it.seolar.com

The 7 Deadly Sins Of Email Marketing
Are you making these fundamental email marketing errors?seolar.com

I can help you market and get your work out to the world under your own steam. If you’d like to get FREE weekly articles to help you build your audience, then get on board here.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

If you like this article please offer some love by hitting the 👏 cheers!

Like More of This Kind of Thing?

Howdy, I’m Larry, Writer & Artist. Thanks for taking the time to read my stuff. I write about creativity, art and work and how it all goes together. When I’m not doing that I draw charcoal photorealistic portraits of people I respect and admire. If that’s your bag you can Sign-up To Sunday Letters Here.