Selling Your Art Is Your Duty! – A Passionate Plea From The Heart…
A few weeks back I received an intriguing email from Martin Stellar. He had a particular {and traumatic} life experience to draw on which had taught him a very important lesson about art marketing. I will leave him to share this vitally important lesson with you in this guest post. Thanks Martin…
If you signed up to Helen’s ebook series (which you totally should), you’ll have read about the elephant in the room: That strange aversion to selling that so many artisans and creatives live with.
I agree with Helen’s teaching: She says that we needn’t feel anything negative when it comes to selling or marketing our art, but I want to make an even stronger point:
As an artist, it’s not enough to just accept sales, selling and marketing as a necessary part of the artist’s life.
You need to understand that selling your art is your moral and ethical duty.
Yep, I really said that.
And I have a good reason for it too:
As an artist, you owe it to the world to get mighty comfortable with marketing and selling, and to get at least moderately good at it.
Because you make a difference. You make the world a more beautiful place.
Your work, your daily toil and your innermost creativity: all of that conspires to bring more beauty to the world, one print; one canvass or one photo at a time.
If you’re an artist, you believe in the art you create (no matter how deep down that may be, hidden by a public mask of insecurity).
If you didn’t believe in your art, you wouldn’t live how you live and make what you make.
And if you believe in your art, you owe it to the world to sell as much of it as you possibly can.
Sidenote: My editor tells me I should talk about sharing your art, instead of selling – she makes a good point, but I believe selling is the single best way to share your art.
Anyway: If your art can improve a house, a room, a face or a street… bring something beautiful or meaningful into the world… Then OF COURSE you should sell it. Tons of it, if you can.
All this is of course a generously grandiloquent way to look at things.
After all, we don’t all create deeply inspired one-off pieces
I can understand that if your business is, say, selling printed t-shirts of your own design, you might not feel that you contribute as much as someone who creates unique life-size sculptures.
But think again.
Your t-shirts also add to the total.
People buy them because it gives them pleasure, they enjoy owning and wearing them, they like to be seen wearing them and so on.
I’d say that with each t-shirt sold, you just added a bit of happiness or enjoyment to someone’s life. Right? Right.
It really makes no difference what you make, how many, how big they are, how much they cost.
If you consider yourself an artist that inherently means that you make things that are meant to enhance the world
Now tell me, don’t you think this not only justifies and necessitates, but even obliges you as an artist to find as many people as you can who will buy what you make?
Should it not be your mission to make people’s lives a bit better with your art, as often as you can?
I’d say so.
It’s your duty to sell (read: share) your art.
You make the world better, more meaningful and more beautiful. Each time you create, you do the world a favour.
Each time you sell, doubly so.
What do I know?
Now, you might wonder where I get the nerve to come at you with all this high-faluting pomp and circumstance.
After all, I’m not even an artist myself. I couldn’t draw a stick-figure to save my life.
No, my genetic makeup is similar, but not quite the same: I’m what’s known as an artisan.
Specifically, I’m a bespoke tailor. Or used to be, before I became a marketing writer.
It’s a long story, but the short of it is that I used to have my own tailoring company, in which I myself created high end bespoke suits, fully handmade.
For a while I ran a blog and I ranked nicely on Google, just below Savile Row tailors, and I was getting a decent reputation on several forums.
Prices were also up there with Savile Row, and I was getting some sales.
At some point my father passed away, and I ended up with a sizeable inheritance that I decided to invest in my business.
Things looked like I was set for success.
But all that money, (all 120,000 pounds of it. Ouch.), I lost over the course of five years.
Here’s why my tailoring business tanked, forcing me to change careers:
I refused to really come to terms with the (very high) intrinsic value of what I created with my own two hands
Until the end, when I ran that company into the ground, I always approached the marketing and sales of it all as if it were a necessary evil.
And the only reason for that, I realise now, is that I didn’t value my stuff the way I should have.
The way you should value your stuff. Which I’m guessing you might not really do, just like me, back then.
And you may take all this as literally as you like (hint: the more literally you take it, the more your sales will soar).
You see, aside from the fact that creating a suit is in itself creating a piece of art (provided you do it by hand like bespoke tailors ought to), there is the value to the customer, and in that sense art and artisanry are very similar.
In both situations, the value to the customer sort of has no limits
You would be amazed by what people are willing to pay. Trust me, I’m a marketer (these days), and I know exactly how much the right people are willing to pay for art.
Or for my suits for that matter. Because that was the amazing thing I discovered: You can charge literally anything you want, and you’ll have people buying it.
It gets even better: the higher your prices, the more eager people will be to buy
That’s something I hope Helen will allow me to explain at a later point. Provided of course that she’d like to have me tell more of the story of how a young tailor had a chance and blew it.
For now, I just really want to hope that you see my point, because you so much deserve to live with the confident (and slighty bold) attitude I’ve been describing.
What you do makes a difference. Make it happen more, make a bigger difference.
Even if it’s one printed mug at a time.
You’re an artist
It’s your nature to create beauty
You’re an artist
It’s your duty to sell the beauty you create
Martin Stellar is technically a copywriter and marketing consultant, but really he’s one of those people who can’t help trying to motivate and inspire people, given half a chance. He blogs at www.martinstellar.com, where much motivating and inspiring takes place, and he’s usually good fun on twitter.
