Are you an "Artrepreneur"????
You’ve probably seen this very cute take on the word “entrepreneur”—the “solopreneur” or the “artrepreneur”.
There are some very real differences between these words, and if you are a creative trying to make a living selling your art, it’s important to understand what the differences are.
An entrepreneur surveys the market and looks for opportunities to develop a product that can meet a need that can generate revenue. It might be phone cases or perhaps it’s an app to help people chose a restaurant. A successful entrepreneur will survey a vast selection of viable market, look for the opportunities and take action. It’s not about personal preference or voice.
An artrepreneur, however, is leveraging their personal, distinct voice and perspective. They have something personal, intimate, vulnerable and unique to offer the world. They are in it for the LOVE, because it takes a lot of love to pick up the guitar and practice for long enough that someone wants to LISTEN to you play. It takes a lot of LOVE to struggle through learning how to paint in oils until your skill is good enough that you can express your heart. There’s a lot of failure that’s baked into the art process and you need to have grit and resilience.
Entrepreneur:
Takes risks for potential profit
Invests in opportunities that are not personal
Can pivot to other sectors
Needs resources but not (necessarily) time to generate product
Impersonal business decisions
Artrepreneur:
Taking risks for passion and curiosity
Invests in developing their personal voice
To be true to their individuality, pivoting because of market demand is problematic
Takes many year of practice to bring a viable product to an audience
Needs to shift gears to sell and market
In order to be in a position to sell your art, you need to have made a lot of art! In the art world we talk about having a “body of work”. One good photograph, poem, or song does not equal a body of work. Artist with sustainable practices will have multiple iterations of a body of work. A successful body of work will:
Look like it is made by the same person
Have consistent visual elements, such as scale, color, or media
Be constructed in a professional manner (eg: all canvases are well constructed, work is appropriately framed, it is well curated)
The process of selling your personal art is very different than marketing a wingding that you speculate can take the dollar store by a storm. The fact is, it requires a very dramatic mindset shift from the artist, who needs to go from being their own hero, taking risks and making personal and vulnerable art …to focusing on clearly communicating with a potential customer who becomes the new hero.
Most artists can never get over this hump, because the process of making art is hard enough. They want the art to “speak for itself”, or a fairy godmother to orchestrate the sales. But no. We artists need to take responsibility for our own market and communication.
Happily, artpreneurs are uniquely positioned to take advantage of what social media and online marketing can offer, but we need to use creativity in how we communicate to best find our audience and effectively deliver a valuable product or service. We naturally use a lot of creativity in developing our brand, product or service, and we need to use the SAME amount of creativity to dynamically broadcast it in the social media marketplace.
In this free training, Five Pillars to Sell Your Art, I discuss the exact steps I took to grow a large audience and create a meaningful, profitable business at the same time. Hope to see you there!
