Your Art Is Not Lana Turner

Image from Wikipedia

Does your art heal, and can you use that benefit to market it?

The answer is unequivocally yes.

But does this feel skeevy (I love that word) to you? Does talking about what effect your art has in the world, i.e. marketing your art, feel like it demeans the work?

Many artists feel like this. “I should just be able to post images on Instagram/videos on YouTube/music on Spotify and people should just see how awesome it is, and buy it.”

There is a story about how Lana Turner, a famous movie star from the 1940s-80s was discovered while drinking a malt at Schwab’s Drugstore on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles. Some version of this actually happened to her, but hoping to be discovered while not doing anything to make it happen isn’t a successful strategy. 99.9% of all other working actors actually had to take action to find acting work.

Hoping that your work will be discovered without doing anything to help people find it is like buying lottery tickets as a retirement savings strategy. Someone wins that money, but chances are almost 100% that it won’t be you. (Or me!)

My artist/business PhD friend Carol Booton and I talk about this more in our newest video.

Marketing your art requires a shift from “marketing my art is sleazy/used-car-salesman-like/should be unnecessary,” to “marketing my art is how people who need my work can find it.”

Because your work matters it’s worth making this shift.