Skip to main content

How to Market and Sell Your Art Online

The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money ebook
by Chris Guillebeau and Zoë Westhof

E-Book Review by TET

Less than two percent of Bachelor of Arts Graduates in Australia will actually go on to become established artists. At least that's the figure according to an article I recently read in The Adelaide Review by Peter Drew titled, Poor Odds for Arts.

That article is very relevant to this review as it highlights the emergence of Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs). Particularly the idea of young artists not waiting for their big break with a major mainstream gallery but instead, actually getting out there, finding their own audience and making their own success.

Many artists are turning to new media, such as the Internet, to promote and sell their work directly to collectors. Unfortunately this process can be trial and error to find what works.

This is where The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money ebook by Chris Guillebeau and Zoë Westhof steps in by delving into the real world experience of several successful artists, marketing their work online. Showing you what is working for them and giving you some practical advice for how you can get started marketing and selling your own work in similar fashion.

It is NOT a get rich quick by selling your art online product. This ebook is clearly targeted at serious artists who understand that success takes a lot of hard work plus time.

When I bought this product I found the ebook clearly set out and easy to read. With 55 pages and 54 headings (on the contents page) it attempts to cover a lot of ground - some more successfully than others. The whole book is broken into four parts.

The Introduction sets the frame work for why you might take the new media approach with a compelling story about the Twin Myths of Art i.e. the starving artist and the discovered artist who is instantly shot to fame and fortune overnight.

It then goes on to make the case for marketing your art online using the experiences of real artists who were interviewed as part of the research for this book. All of the artists are very credible sources of information who are succeeding with their online endeavors including; Hazel Dooney (Australia), Michael Nobbs (Wales), Leah Piken Kolidas (USA), Sandra Miller (USA), Joseph Szymanski (USA), Dan Duhrkoop (USA) as well as a few others.

Their experiences are referred back to in all sections of the book through quotes from each artist serving to reinforce the books ideas with real world experience.

The second section of the book talks about Strategy and how to envision your online 'studio'. This covers things such as planning your goals, finding your market (or 'people' as it refers to them), creating an action plan, pricing your art and more.

It also describes an 'anti-marketing' approach that is pretty much Chris' own signature marketing strategy and, interestingly enough, one that many of the interviewed artists use as well (though as something they just naturally gravitated and evolved towards rather than a learned technique).

The third section, Tactics, gets down to the nuts and bolts of actually putting yourself and your work on line. It includes a very useful chart that will let you quickly compare a number of popular art related web sites to see which may be right for you. It then goes on to look at each site in just a little more detail explaining the pros and cons of each and suggesting an action plan for how to get started if that site sounds a good match for you.

There's a more detailed look at pricing your art as well as starting your own web site, blog and the benefits of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Finally in the last section called, Putting it All Together, helps you develop a schedule for your work, looks at approaches to getting your work seen and discusses the importance of maintaining an email list.

It also touches on Product launches, Payment gateways and how you could expand you practice once you start seeing some success.

One of the bonus features of Art + Money is that several of the interviews conducted were recorded and are included as MP3 Downloads. There are two versions of the product with the difference being the number of MP3 downloads.

The Starving Artist version will give you the ebook with three interviews whilst the Picasso Version will give you all the interviews as well as a discussion between Chris and Zoë focusing on the eight most important things they learnt.

Personally I went straight for the Picasso version because hearing real, successful artists talk about the business side of their art practice is not only invaluable but inspiring too.

The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money is like a crash course in online art marketing. The ebook is short enough to read in an afternoon which may leave you feeling a little cheated (considering the price) but if online arts marketing is new to you then you'll probably find yourself re-reading much of it again and again.

If this stuff isn't new to you and you've been attempting to market your work online for a while with limited success then you may find more value in the interviews than the ebook - though there is still plenty in the ebook that you may find of interest.

As a product I'd say it does deliver the information you need to make some informed decisions about marketing your art online. Fast tracking your research so you can get on with the actual business of selling your art.

In some areas I felt it could have been more in depth (such as how to maintain your relationships with your 'people' once you've found them) whilst in others it seemed to be a little repetitive (Action Plans for the various web sites).

Like any product of this kind the real value will ultimately be in whether you make use of the information or you store it on your computer somewhere and forget about it.

Personally I've listened to the interviews several times because that's the main reason I bought the product but, since I'm familiar with just about every site mentioned in the ebook and have a presence on many of them, I'm still deciding on how valuable the ebook has been to me.

One thing I do know is that new media has been relatively successful for me already. I've been selling my work online for longer than new media pioneer, Hazel Dooney (I'm just not as driven as she is or as knowledgeable about the art world). In fact I started selling online accidentally, through message board forums. I'd post my work just to show and people would ask if the work was for sale!

Since then the landscape has changed with sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. It's a whole new way of marketing and The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money shows you how.

Read more information and purchase
The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money


Other Unconventional Guides:

* Disclaimer: Please note that I am an affiliate seller of all the Unconventional Guides. Whilst I have tried to remain objective I did become an affiliate because I was impressed with the Art + Money Guide as a product that doesn't overstate its claims.

Comments

  1. Very well explained post. Indeed true many artist are turning to new media such as internet marketing to sell their art. You can also check this post : http://theworkingartist.com/selling-your-art-online

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I  don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

TV Series Review: The Penguin (2024) *No Spoilers*

W hile we wait for an eternity (well an eternity in movie fan years anyway) for The Batman Part 2 , sequel to Matt Reeves acclaimed, The Batman  (2022), we have, what is essentially a direct sequel with  The Penguin , a limited. eight episode, TV Series set within a week or two of the end of the first film. Unfortunately it's a direct sequel to Colin Farrell's Penguin rather than Robert Pattinson's, Bruce Wayne/Batman. Fortunately that's the only real disappointment I have with this series.   Right from the first episode The Penguin establishes itself as a show for grown ups who enjoy actual character development, that hooks you in, is thought provoking, and raises questions that you expect will be answered as the story unfolds. After the events of The Batman, there is something of a power vacuum left in Gotham's crime world that Oswald 'Oz' Cobb a.k.a. The Penguin, sets out to fill using his experience, quick thinking, and his ability to hustle his way into...

Movie Review: The Fall Guy (2024) *Minor Spoilers*

W hen I initially heard they were making a movie version of the TV series, The Fall Guy (1981-86) , I was definitely interested, as a person who tuned in to that series, weekly, when it originally aired. I had intended to see The Fall Guy in the cinema but, for whatever reason, didn't get there, and didn't prioritize seeing the film as the reviews, and more importantly, general information about the movie came out. Specifically, The Fall Guy makes no effort to capture whatever magic it was the TV show had that made it the show it was. A fact that is driven home by the reworked TV series theme song, played over the end credits and behind the scenes footage of stunts in the film, that removes all references to real world actors and replaces iconic line of "I'm the unknown stuntman who made Redford such a star" with the nonsensical "I'm the unknown stuntman who tries to win your heart." - sure... I guess... I mean, the original song is about never gett...

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review,  Memory  is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Movie Opinion: Love Actually (2003) Actually has Aged Just As It Should

S creen Rant ran an article by Bisma Fida , Love Actually: The 8 Storylines That Aged Badly, Ranked  (Published Dec 10, 2021), which obviously was regurgitated into one of my newsfeeds because  Love Actually (2003) is still one of the best Christmas movies ever made, that's why it's still topical in 2024. Bisma, who completely failed to get their profile page pro-nouns in order. Something that should be a priority for anyone commenting on what is accepted by modern audiences, who are all completely comfortable accepting preferred pro-nouns without question, because we're just that enlightened in 2024. F**K Screen Rant Full disclosure, I hate Screen Rant to the point that, if I do click on their click bait titles because I didn't see it was a Screen Rant story, I'll close the browser window almost immediately once I see what it is (which is why I'm not providing any links to their homepage). It's not because I dislike their articles. I would actually like to...