Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Art Marketing
I discovered anew how bad I am at art marketing! Trying to treat art as a business is something I am struggling with.... All I want to do as an artist is to make art and hope art lovers will just discover my awesome talent and I will be all set for life! Apparently, that's not happening! Since people really don't know I exist I have to make them know about my existence!!And herein comes the need for relentless self promotion! I was part of the City Wide Open Studios in New Haven, CT and learned my lessons well from my studio mate! The sheer variety of art marketing arsenal at her disposal is something to admire! She had brochures, testimonials, tee-shirts, posters, greeting cards and what not!She networked constantly while I lurked in the shadows! She is a good artist and her work do speaks for themselves but she also knows how to market and has a clear business goal, which it seems I don't!!Reading all these business of art books have not taught me as much as this weekend with the artist entrepreneur taught me about self promotion! I might not have enjoyed the open studio event as such but it was a sort of art marketing workshop for me. I am hoping I will be able to apply these tactics soon..... If I am not overcome by my natural inertia and disdain for self promotion!! Will keep you posted how it goes:)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
For lots of free information on the business of art, GYST Ink (Getting Your Sh*t Together) has lots of resources, software and publications on the business side of art. Over 500 pages of information is on our site for free.
ReplyDeleteI also write a column for Huffington Post Arts. You can send me a question and I will answer it.
Hope this helps. And keep it up!
Opps! The link is http://www.gyst-ink.com
ReplyDeleteIshita,
ReplyDeleteI use cafepress for t-shirts and mugs with my logo on there. It's really easy to set up.
It's very hard for me to work a room too. I don't want to intrude on anyone viewing the art. I try to keep reminding myself that other people, if they like my work, will enjoy meeting the artist and might even think it's cool to be able to say they met the artist.
Not to mention, other people love to talk so maybe as a baby step you could just introduce yourself to someone looking at your work as "Hi, I'm the artist, Ishita Bandyo," and then let them lead the conversation. When you become more comfortable with that perhaps then you could start "selling" your work when you talk to people at your shows. I read some where that people walk away from a conversation with higher feelings of "like" if they spent most of the time talking. So the more they talk about themselves the more they will like you and leave with a positive impression of you. I hope that helps.
Hey, I was just downloading a bunch of Alyson's podcasts (for free off Itunes)and there were quite a few I thought you might be interested in.
ReplyDeleteI really like this new background too, very nice.
Thanks Elisha! I am sorry it took me so long to write back! The blog somehow don't send me notification either! What are the podcast? Do you remember?
ReplyDeleteI like the idea about letting people browse before I intrude on them.... Will take me a little while to find that balance of intrusion and actually engaging people!!
ReplyDelete