FEED THE STARVING ARTIST
EPISODE 016: FEED THE STARVING ARTIST
The second in the Craft + Commerce series, this pragmatic episode is an exploration of an important first step in connecting to an audience on our terms, not subject to the algorithm of social media, but the permission of those who love what we do. It’s about connection, and yes, it’s about email, though not the slimy kind. The kind that connects your best audience with your work. The kind they’ll thank you for. The kind that will be instrumental in helping to feed the so-called starving artist.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
I hope you’ll forgive me for starting this episode this way, without even easing you into it, but there's a wonderful novel by Christopher Moore called Sacre Bleue in which, among many other fantastic and absurd moments, the artist Toulouse-Lautrec maintains that the disease syphilis is a myth. Every time it’s mentioned, usually in connection with his womanizing, he replies adamantly, “I don’t believe in syphilis, it’s a myth!” He maintains this disbelief until the end of the novel, at which point someone says, “You mean Sisyphus! Sisyphus is a myth.” Sisyphus, in Greek Mythology, was condemned to roll a large stone uphill everyday, only to have it roll back down, for all eternity. Syphilis, on the other hand, will melt your brain. Knowing what is, and is not a myth, at least in the case of Toulouse Lautrec who did, in fact die from the disease, can be important information.
Among creatives there is no shortage of myths, and by myth I don’t mean something that is untrue, though in these cases that is also the case, I mean it in the classic sense of the word. A myth is a story that we tell ourselves to explain something we don’t understand. The idea of the muses being responsible for inspiring the artist, for example, is a mythic attempt to explain the mysteries of how we get our ideas. Among the more persistent of these myths is that of the starving artist, a story we tell ourselves to make us feel better when no one buys what we make. A story that, when not understood as the myth that it is, can destroy our potential to make both a life and a living from our creative efforts.
I’m David duChemin and this is Episode 16 of A Beautiful Anarchy, and the second in my Craft + Commerce series. Today we’re exploring the feeding of the starving artist. Let’s talk about it.
Music/Intro
In saying that the starving artist is a myth I do not mean to imply that no artists starve. I mean it is not a foregone conclusion. It is not the fate of every artist to toil away in obscurity, only to one day be discovered and make millions of dollars posthumously. A day late and a dollar short, as they say. Of course the history of art is littered with the bones of those who failed to find what some might call success, but so is the history of innovation and business and you don’t hear people talking romantically about the starving tech genius, though I imagine he’s out there if you look hard enough.
For the sake of this conversation I want you to set aside any arguments of how good the art is, or is not. For the next few minutes we’re talking about what it will take to sell that art, that song, that painting or photograph. And before you pull your headphones out of your ears, I’m not talking only about money. Your art can be free forever, but you’ll still have to sell me on it. Give me a reason to listen. You need an audience. Of one, or a thousand, perhaps, but you need an audience. That is how, if you’re going to do it at all, you feed a starving artist.
I am constantly amazed by the slap-shod efforts of creative people to grow an audience. I know not everyone wants to put their work out into the world, the photographer Vivian Maier was one such person, seemingly happy to do what she did for reasons all her own. But most of us, I think, want others to experience what we make, those others collectively become our audience. But there’s another myth we seem too-willing to believe and that’s that our work will magically find its own audience, all without efforts on our part. You’ve got to put it out there. People need to see your art, the same way they need to see a TV commercial, many times before it catches. They need to be exposed to it often. I know it’s a crass comparison. But that’s what we’re competing against. We are competing for attention against advertisements that were made with astonishing budgets and huge media buys. We’re competing against the twenty-something influencer in a bikini on Instagram. We’re competing against millions of voices that are grappling for the attention of our would-be audience. And if you do not share your work constantly and consistently, you don’t have a chance.
But it’s not all or nothing. Personally, the idea of flogging my work 24/7 doesn’t appeal. You have to hustle in a way that is consistent with who you are. I post my work when I have something to say, which if you know me at all, is not infrequently. But it’s hardly a steady stream of “pay attention to me”. I have chosen to share my work, rather than fast, shallow and constant, in a way that is much deeper and much more of a long game. When we talk about getting the attention of people we’re often talking about getting ears and eyeballs on our work. The more the better, it is assumed. But there is another way, and that’s to go deeper. Forget eyeballs. I want hearts.
What people forget in the constant clamour for more followers, which is the conventional way of measuring audience these days, is that the numbers are not only skewed but meaningless and wildly misleading. An audience is not measured by how many people are in the arena, but by how many are actually listening, engaging, and connecting. It is that engagement and connection that I want to nudge you toward because a million so-called followers who will only click “Like" on your Instagram or Facebook post, they aren’t truly listening. You have their attention for seconds and then they move on. And why not? If what we offer is shallow, why should the response of others be anything but the same? Shallow works for some people. A million followers on Instagram might not mean anything in terms of the impact you make, but you might get some ad dollars selling sun tan lotion. And if that is your thing, way to go. Truly. I think it’s great that you’ve figured out how to turn your bikini pics into money. God knows I can’t. People would pay me not to post that shit.
But a body in a bikini is a commodity. And it’ll age. And people will go elsewhere when it does because your audience isn’t coming for you or your opinions or the difference you make in their lives. And what happens when Instagram suddenly goes away? You don’t have an audience. Instagram does. You have numbers, not connections. And when the social platform changes or dies, as these things all do, you’ll be back to square one.
The bikini analogy would be a poor one, if I was talking about art right now. But I’m not talking about art, I’m talking about audience and what I’m trying to push you toward is depth. In a world with so much noise, the thing that gets through is signal. Something to say. And not just something to say, but something deeper, more vital, something that cuts through all the stuff out there that plays it safe and hedges bets and tries to be everything to everyone. If you want to grow an audience, not just numbers, you need to put out the work that is the most authentic, and not-like-anyone-else work that you can. But the trend is to do and be the same. The most loyal audience you will ever get, the people that will connect to you for life, will be the ones to whom you give everything. The ones for whom you routinely open a vein, and bare your soul. Over and over again.
Before you ever get anything from your audience, in the form of loyalty, attention, and yes, perhaps money as they see such value in what you make for them that they pay to have it, before you get any of that, you need to give. You need to be wildly generous. And you need to do it on a platform that you own.
I see so many artists and creators growing their audience on social media and leaving it there. You’ve got to invite them into your house. You’ve got to make them yours. I’m going to get really pragmatic here. This is tight, intentional, strategic stuff. If you don’t have a way to connect with your audience as much as possible on your terms, you will have a tough time offering more of yourself to them in the form of your books, albums, films, or whatever it is from which you hope to make a living.
"But I can sell it on Facebook!”
No you can’t. Not without a lot of money spent on boosted posts and ads because the moment you put a website link into your post on Facebook, the reach plummets so fast you have to look up to the see the bottom. Instagram? Instagram is among the worst conversion tools known to humanity. And it’s all still subject to the algorithm that the Facebook mothership controls. You can’t use social to reliably connect to an audience for the long term.
So what am I saying? I’m saying use social. Put your stuff up on YouTube or Insta, Facebook, Pinterest. Post articles to Medium and LinkedIn if that makes sense for you. That’s how people will get exposed to you. And if you consistently share the deepest, most human, most generous work you can, you will grow a meaningful audience, if not the largest one. And if you interact with people, and use their names, and talk to them like real human beings to whom you can bring value, people that you can serve, whose lives you can make better, you will gain a level of loyalty from those people that others won’t. But until you get them off those platforms and on to your own, you risk losing them. For me that happens with email.
I don’t intend to coach you through the massive world of email marketing. That’s another conversation for a different place. I want to offer the idea that the most intimate place to communicate ideas of substance, the most reliable way to connect to your audience on their terms, and the best place to introduce them to more of your work without the barriers of algorithms and the limits of organic reach, is in a medium that your audience has given you permission to use, and isn’t going away. I want to suggest, in plain talk, that if you want to grow a meaningful audience of people to whom you deeply connect, you need to do so with a medium that allows them to engage with your art on your terms.
It is not enough to grow numbers on social. You must grow and feed your audience. Relentlessly. Deeply. You must connect as if your life depends on it. Look, you might not have a 10,000 or a million followers. There's very little you can do to quickly change that. But even those of you with an audience of 100 can control how deeply you engage with your audience, how much of yourself you give them. I would take 1000 people that will open and read my emails every couple of weeks over a million people who click the like button. Any day of the week I would make that trade because it gives me connection. Remember, it’s not how many people are in the arena, it’s how many people are listening. It’s how many people to whom you are truly connected.
If you are not actively growing a list of people that have asked you to stay in touch with them, tell your stories, share your songs or photographs, or whatever else it is you do that means so much to you, and you don’t have a way to do that on your terms, you are missing out. Email communication gets a bad wrap. And a lot of people use it in a way that’s slimy and manipulative. But that’s about HOW you use it, not THAT you use it. Email is still the single best scalable way to speak directly to people, without the middle man, and to make a difference in their lives with the art that you make. If I were giving out homework, or coaching you personally, and you told me you had any interest in feeding the starving artist with your creative work, I would tell you to begin to build an email list - not so you can spam the shit out of anyone that’ll let you, but so you can deepen the connection, and get past the mere ears and eyeballs that social might give you, and get more directly, and reliably, on your terms, to the hearts and minds that turn meaningless numbers into profound connections.
If you’re like me you’d rather put up a website on which you place your wares in hopes that people will just stumble in and buy them. You’d prefer a passive approach in which you sat in the back of the online shop, or the real one, and did your work, while people purchased it in droves, the details of the sale, the price, and the money changing hands all done by someone else. I’d like this too. I’d also like a unicorn to be there with me, and a leprechaun to spin gold. If there’s any truth to the myth of the starving artist, or any more depth to the story then it’s a cautionary tail for those who believe their art will one day sell itself, that they’ll be discovered without doing everything they can to get noticed, and that their ship will come in, without ever putting their hands to the oars. Commerce is about exchange, it’s not about your art, it’s about the person that buys that art, or gives their time and attention to it. The more deeply you connect to that person, the greater the chance they’ll want more of it. But you’ve got to come out of the back of the shop to do that.
Whether you sell or not, make this the year you begin an email list as a deeper means of connecting and serving and getting your art in front of your audience. There is so much noise out there, and yes, I know people get a ton of email but they still open the ones they’re excited to get. Don’t think of it as a list. It’s an audience. Don’t think of it as email, it’s a connection. And if you sent 12 emails this year that were a gift to the people that received them, emails they look forward to and for which they send you thank you emails in reply, then that’s 12 points of very human connection that you wouldn’t have made otherwise, and if and when you ask them to come to the new exhibit, buy your album, or check out your new limited edition prints, they’ll be far more inclined to do so. And that goes a long way to feeding the starving artist.
Thanks so much for joining me, I’d love to hear whether these Craft + Commerce episodes are valuable to you. If you feel strongly one way or the other why don’t you drop me a quick note to talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com and if you want to see what I mean when I talk about connecting with your audience by email, subscribe to On The Make, the email I send every fourth week when the podcast isn’t being published. Maybe it’ll give you some ideas about how to connect without being slimy and spammy. Just go to ABeautifulAnarchy.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and tell me where to send it. I’ll also send you an eBook called Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back. I’ll be back next week, I hope you’ll join me. Until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0