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How NOT To Be A Starving Artist { The 3 crucial tips that will help you sell your Art}

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Being a starving artist sounds delightfully romantic, I know, but if you’ve ever actually been there you know that cold clenching feeling that makes you wonder if you shouldn’t have listened to your parents and studied engineering. Fortunately that doesn’t have to be the solution. If you aren’t making any money as an artist then you can usually solve it by addressing the following common problems.

You Aren’t Selling Yourself

Artists are often artists because they don’t want to talk to other people. Unfortunately, that’s simply not how it works. A freelance artist is a small business, and that means marketing. Putting your art on ebay or Etsy isn’t going to generate a lot of interest compared to real, hands on marketing. Go to local events to display your work, talk to small business owners (bar and restaurant owners specifically) and get them to post your work on their walls. If there are no events in your area, you can start your own (gasp!). It’s actually not as crazy as it sounds, simply round up a few other artists in your area, research cheap (or free) possible venues. Any place with a dance floor has enough room to work with, and business owners will be happy to accommodate you if you can convince them that you can bring in business.

Your Art Isn’t Original Enough

If you find you’re already doing all of the marketing that you could be it’s time to turn around and look at your work. Are you being original? Can a potential customer go elsewhere and find something in the same style, with similar content? What’s your own response to it? Does it make you sad, amused, or terrified? If you don’t have much of a response to your own work, then the odds are good that no one else does either. You have a chance to say something in a way that no one has ever said it before, it’s a shame to waste that chance.

If you used to do fairly well, but just can’t get past a creative block that has you doing essentially the same thing over and over again, resulting in a boring, one sided portfolio, you can check out another post that I wrote on dealing with that issue

Your Prices Are Wrong

What if you’re working all the time, and your art is selling, but you’re barely making ends meet? Clients are constantly hounding you and reminding you that they can find someone else to do the same work more cheaply, or try to get you to rework or modify work repeatedly. This one is as simple as it sounds. Raise your prices, perhaps even double them. Your work costs whatever you charge, period. If you don’t think it’s worth more, go back and read the earlier paragraph. You don’t want people buying your work just because it’s the cheapest around; you want them to buy it because they love your work. People being bullied and cowed into working for criminally low prices are the biggest reason that new artists so often find themselves in huge financial trouble, and the answer is simply to unapologetically charge what you’re worth.

ed-stuartEdward Stuart is an art and decoration enthusiast as well as an online publisher for Canvas Art. He frequently blogs on the topics of art, art history, design, and home decor.

 

This post was written by a guest writer. if you would like to write a guest post for us please get in contact with your topic ideas.

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We Need Your Opinion – Enterprising Artist’s Survey

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Opportunities for artists have changed radically over the last 10 years or so.

Widespread use of the internet has begun a process of democratisation of the artworld as never before. New opportunities have been tempered by new challenges. It is a huge sea-change which has altered the art landscape forever. More and more artists are finding that it IS possible to make a living from their creativity. You no LONGER have to starve for your art…

What is less clear is that how do we fit into this new landscape as artists?

HOW are people doing? WHAT are they doing? WHERE are they going? Just HOW is it all panning out for YOU?

Introducing The Enterprising Artists Survey.

To get a little more of an idea, Artonomy has partnered with www.rightbrainrockstar.com to create The Enterprising Artists Survey.

Your opinion and experience counts…

We need YOUR EXPERIENCE to understand what is going on.

In return for 10 minutes of your time filling out the survey, you will be emailed the summarized results and get a more detailed picture of today’s entrepreneurial art landscape.

So please help us  by completing the survey here

Thank You

Artonomy & Right Brain Rockstar

 

 

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Artists & Twitter. Just what IS the point?

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As an artist you are always being told you need to get on Twitter. Every blog, every news item, every art newsletter you read tells you to do it. So you jump in and join. You start tweeting, a bit about your work, a bit about your blog. You do it religiously for a couple of weeks, get some followers, start to enjoy it AND THEN… you have THE TWITTER CONFIDENCE CRISIS.

It suddenly it hits you. What on earth is the point of all this tweeting, Rting, @ing and DMing? Has the world gone mad? Isn’t Twitter is just some kind of superannuated monster timesinking water cooler discussion about crap? Just what on earth is the point exactly?

Many artists never get over this hump and their tweets fade off into the ether never to return. They mark it down as some huge waste of time with no clear value.

So… I started thinking about Twitter and its uses and how it helps me as an artist. I thought it might be useful to see how I use it and the value I get from it. The value isn’t always direct and obvious, but there is a lot of it hidden away in there.

I use Twitter to:

Think Global

Being an artist who lives on top of a moor in deepest wildest Yorkshire it would be very easy to lose touch with what is going on in the rest of the art world and become isolated . Thankfully via the power of Twitter I can spend a 15 minute lunch break perusing the offerings of New York galleries or art events in Copenhagen. Twitter is a brilliant way to keep up with art news across the globe. What’s not to love?

Act Local

I find that some of the biggest success I have with Twitter {especially sales wise} is when I use it at a local level. It’s easy to search and find people on Twitter who live in your local town, county or state. Relationships that you start on Twitter often translate into real life and may become people who will visit your gallery events or open studios. I have found that this can often lead indirectly to sales of your work. I have met some lovely people this way who I would never have met under normal circumstances.

Publicise events

Following on from the point above, Twitter allows me to search for people interested in art in any area where I am exhibiting. I can then tell them about my upcoming event, preview the work and get them interested and involved in what is going on. It’s a great way to increase the audience of people who might like your work. On the opening day of an event I can send reminders that the show is open via Twitter. All more immediate and likely to be seen than e-mail.

Discover galleries who may like my work.

By following a gallery I can get a feel for their personality and the kind of work they might be interested in. I can keep track of galleries and events in my local area or further afield who might be a good match for my work.

Network with other artists.

Twitter is a great way to get in touch and see what other artists are working on. A great source of inspiration and camaraderie. Seeing others work also inspires you to keep your own work fresh.

Build my mailing list

Whenever I post a blog entry on Twitter it usually results in a few signups to my mailing list. In turn this offers me the opportunity to tell people who may be interested about any future work they might like.

Drive traffic to my latest blog posts

Whenever I write a new post on my site I link to it from Twitter. This drives quite a lot of traffic and helps to get people more involved in what I do.

Get people interested and involved in my work as it progresses.

Posting ideas and images of preparatory sketches involves people in the work from the start and builds interest. By the time a piece is ready for an exhibition there may already be people interested in coming to see. It’s also great to get feedback as the piece progresses.

And last but not least

Indirect sales

Twitter is not a good medium for direct sales. Don’t expect people to come along and just buy your work straight off there and then. However, Twitter should be seen as some kind of slow burning network system where something will come of it down the line. Someone may discover your work on Twitter, come to a gallery show, join your mailing list and then buy something 6 months down the line. I find this is how I get the most sales through Twitter

So, Twitter does definitely have a point and a great deal of value but it can be a little hidden at first. Still waters run deep and all that. Make sure you get over the Twitter hump and plumb the depths of its possibilities.

How do you find Twitter helps you as an artist? I would love to hear your experiences and how you use it. Please share your experiences in the comments

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10 Crucial Reasons Why Every Artist Needs Their Own Hub Website

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Painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, crafters, photographers, designers, illustrators…the internet is a mass of opportunities for artists and creative folk to sell artwork and creativity online.

There are so many great sites where you can upload your art and sell it, either direct online or as part of a print-on-demand service, where a copy of your original artwork is printed as a high quality Giclée at the size and format requested by the purchaser.

Sites like Redbubble, Zazzle, Etsy, & iStock all allow you to spread the word about your work. Your creativity can be winging its way to a buyer on the other side of the world. Networking sites like Flickr, & Twitter & Facebook allow you to connect and build contacts, discussing, sharing and collaborating with like minded people everywhere.

So why on earth would you bother setting up your own website when all these great free services are available?…

When I speak to artists setting up creative businesses on the web, I always recommend that you set up a central hub website which sits at the very centre of everything you do online and is linked to all the other free sites you use.

Your hub website is your portfolio and the central connecting point around which all your other free website presences rotate. It is the sun whilst your other free web presences are the planets in orbit around it. It is your home at the centre of your little online solar system and the focus of all your efforts. It pulls all the other elements of your online world together rather than letting them spin off into space.

There are lots of very good reasons for setting up your own hub artists website. Here are just 10 of them:

  • Professionalism

    Owning your own hub website looks more professional. You can control every aspect of it and ensure that it looks exactly how you want it to look. You aren’t reliant on someone else’s template designs or constrained by their rules. Great when you are a control freak like me.

  • Build your own brand

    You can use the design of your site to build a personal brand around yourself and your work, which makes you more recognisable online and makes your work more likely to sell.

  • Customise your domain

    You can register and use your own domain name [i.e. www.yourname.com] and have a custom email address related to that too. No more hotmail addresses or hard to remember emails.

  • Stand out in the crowd

    Your hub website only features a gallery of YOUR work so you won’t get lost amongst zillions of other artists, a big problem on large showcase or shop sites. Having your own site can help you stand out in the crowd.

  • Focus

    Having your own hub website gives you a FOCUS for all your marketing and search engine optimisation efforts. You can drive traffic to your own website more successfully than to a collection of satellite sites. This central site then links to all the other sites you use but you only have to focus your promotion efforts on your hub website. Your promotion efforts, focussed on this one site, will build up over time to great results.

  • Build your list of people who love your work

    You can build your own mailing list of people who are all interested in your work and ready to buy it when you release a new piece. This is a great way to steadily build interest in what you do. This list is yours to keep and build.

  • Freedom

    If you decide to stop selling or showing your work on a satellite website you can easily do so and you won’t lose your client list or the advantage of all the promotion you have done. It will all still point to your hub website. You are free to change shops or galleries as often as you like with no problems.

  • Offline opportunities

    You can concentrate on promoting the site offline. If you get promotional items printed up advertising your site and work, you need to make sure the web address you are printing is going to stay the same over time. With your own website and custom domain name you can keep on promoting your work in the real world, at exhibitions and art fairs. This way you can capture sales after the event has finished too.

  • No commission

    You don’t pay commission. Anything you sell through your own site is commission free. [Although you will have to pay a small fee to the company who handles your payments i.e. Paypal].

  • Endless possibilities

    You can keep adding satellite websites to your little solar system and increasing the traffic to your hub website to increase your chance of sales. You aren’t tied to any one satellite site.

Setting up your own website may take a little more time and organisation but if you are serious about selling artwork online or setting up a creative business it is a crucial step that will pay dividends in the long run.

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