Hey Coco: How do I market my work?
Advice on building a creative universe & setting a 2030 vision.
“Is there a way to get an audience that doesn’t involve self-promotion?”
Hey Coco,
How do I market my work? I hate it actually. I want to make my work and focus on the creative, but everything has turned into content. I know this sounds dramatic, but it makes me sick. I’m supposed to post on social media and start an email list yada yada but it all feels insincere. Is there a way to get an audience that doesn’t involve self-promotion? (I’m an artist/illustrator.)
Please tell me how to do this without hating myself!
Bothered by Marketing
Hi Bothered,
Good news and bad news.
First the bad. No, there’s no way to get an audience without some kind of marketing. Marketing is not a “nice to have”. You, in fact, have to have it.
BUT here comes the good news…
The way you’re thinking about marketing sounds, honestly?, pretty outdated. Let me explain:
You don’t need a brand identity.
You don’t need to churn out content.
You definitely do NOT need to self-promote.
Instead, to market your art, you need to develop your art’s universe. Which is decidedly more fun than marketing.
Marketing-Induced Ennui & Angst
I’m going to give you a couple of tips on marketing through a universe, but before I do, I want to address the psychological elephant in the room: why do you hate marketing so much?
Marketing, as a concept, is just not that deep. So why hate it? I’m guessing it could have something to do with what you found on the first page of Google when you searched “how to market my art”. If this is true, I implore you to stop googling. There’s nothing very valuable on the first page of Google (literally and metaphorically).
Or maybe you’re watching other people market on the internet and thinking you either have to adopt the Bro Mindset or the Coercive Mindset or the Girlboss Mindset, or some other mindset that feels decidedly wrong and you Just! Don’t! Wanna! Do it!
Rest easy:
Marketing isn’t successful when you follow a series of prescribed steps.
It’s successful when you tell a story.
You say you know you’re supposed to post on social media and grow an email list — but those are just how you deliver your story.
Simply posting on social media isn’t marketing.
Being on social media or having an email list is like having a landline for your brick and mortar store. It’s not why people will come through the door. It’s simply how they know your doors are open.
So why the disgust?!
I’m lol’ing over here because I do honestly get it.
Everything is commodified these days, even our downtime. We turn our quiet real life moments into content in the hopes it goes viral.
We are angling on everything.
So to do that for your art feels like betrayal. It’s a sacred thing to be able to open the channel and make something beautiful. I get that and feel the same way.
And also, I believe there is always a triangulation between art, artist, and audience. And it’s only through that triangulation that we figure out WHAT our art is saying and doing and how it’s impacting the culture.
If you don’t share your art with an audience and allow them to have their own response to it, in my humble opinion, you’ll never know how far your art can go.
Take the street photographer Vivian Maier for example, whose work was only discovered after her death. Some of her negatives weren’t even developed when they were found.
But eventually, when her photos were posthumously discovered and could be attributed back to her, an audience got to see her art. She’s now one of the most renowned American street photographers. That happened when the audience came into the equation.
There’s a lot more to say about that, but let’s get to some tactical points, shall we?
1. Create a Universe, Not an Identity
Artists, creatives, thinkers, and people who are generally online, harp on this thing called “brand identity”. But to me, that’s a little naval-gazey.
Again, art is about triangulation, right? Instead of creating an identity that’s ABOUT YOU THE ARTIST, create a universe that’s FOR THEM THE AUDIENCE.
A creative universe offers a whole bunch of portals and pathways into your work. Sure, it’s marketing, but more accurately: it’s world-building.
A creative universe offers multiple portals for audiences to enter. Portals, or touch points, could be things like:
merch
writing
media
events
community experiences
collabs
You don’t have to do everything. You definitely don’t have to do everything all at once. You could also come up with a completely different list of portals that works specifically for your art and your audience base. This is by no means definitive. But what I want you to think about is the universe your art lives in.
It’s not about the brand identity you’re selling. It’s about the world you’re creating.
Because when you create a universe (instead of simply saying “hey look at my art!) you’re inviting an audience into a space you built for them. And that’s a fully different experience than marketing your work. It’s anti-marketing.
It’s simply inviting folks to your party.
2. Riff Off Other Mediums
When you stay insulated in your own medium’s ecosystem, you start to sounds like everyone else.
This used to happen a lot to me when I was doing musical theatre. I’d pick up on whatever the current attitude was toward this Broadway show or that Broadway show; who the hot choreographer of the moment was; what song was the best to sing in the room; and you know what happened? I presented myself like everyone else.
And more unfortunate than that — I started thinking like everyone else.
The echo chamber makes it hard to differentiate your perspective from mass perspective.
My suggestion is to go outside the artist/illustrator realm and look at how other types of artists are marketing their work. Check out musicians, photographers, filmmakers, writers. Look at whole industries like publishing. Look at whole subcultures like stand up comics actively on the road. Notice the movies you scroll past or choose to watch. Do whatever you can to get outside of your niche and see how the marketing over there speaks to you or turns you off. Let yourself be inspired by people working in a whole other field.
3. Set Your 2030 Vision
Look, this part sounds annoying, and I get that. But really what I mean when I say set your vision is: what do you want Bothered? Like truly? What is it you want? Marketing, self-promoting, advertising, whatever you want to call it doesn’t matter much in and of itself. To what end are you getting the word out?
Psychologically, answering this will help you care about promoting your work. It will create an emotional connection between you and building an audience around your illustrations and art.
Tactically, answering this will help you know what steps to take and what to leave. You do not have to do everything. There are endless promotional opportunities, but not all of them are right for the vision you have. If you want to sell 20 bespoke art installations by 2030, your vision will dictate one set of marketing actions. If you want to change the cultural conversation around art and the environment, your vision will dictate a different set of marketing actions.
You won’t know how to market until you know what the point is.
There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave you with this — in my career, the times I haven’t wanted to market my work were the times I was scared of how it would be received.
But I’ve gotten bad press. I’ve gotten crickets. And what I can tell you is, it won’t kill you. It’ll sometimes be super helpful.
You can never control how you will be perceived. You can’t control how your audience will or won’t act.
But you can control your story. You can build the world you want to see.
I hope you’ll try.
xx,
coco