Thursday, October 31, 2013

promotional considerations

My friend Kathleen is a writer, and she just launched a blog called Suburban Scrawl (http://kathleenpowersvermaelen.blogspot.com/). I bring this up because although she created this blog in March 2012, her first post was yesterday. Did I mention she's a writer? I am not a writer, and yet I've been blogging for a few years now. Yes, I haven't been doing it as regularly as I probably ought to, but I am doing it. Why am I doing it? What business do I have even having a blog? I'm an artist. I'm a painter. I love my acrylics and I love the feeling of dipping my brush into a freshly-squeezed dollop of paint. I play around with mixed media and sometimes even oil pastels. I like to use magnetic poetry and Scrabble tiles in my mixed media pieces, and I occasionally use words in my paintings, but that's it. Words are not my medium of choice. Frequently, when I have to write about my work, the words "if I were a writer, I wouldn't be a painter" pop out of my mouth. So, when I hear about a writer friend feeling weird about blogging, a small part of me is confused...but a bigger part of me gets it.

Putting yourself out there is hard, no matter how you're doing it: painting, drawing, sculpture, music, acting, writing, whatever. If you're doing it right, you're exposing a part of your soul to the world. That's scary. Another friend of mine gave me some advice a few months ago. She said, "You need to shout from the mountaintops if you're going to go to the next level." Since then, I've tried to blog more regularly, I post more and more on Facebook, and I joined Twitter about a month ago (www.twitter.com: @ArtByMariaCU, if you're interested). "Promote, promote, promote," everyone says. Am I annoying people? Is anyone even reading what I'm writing? Who knows? I suppose what it comes down to is the simple fact that you have to get yourself "out there," and you kind of have to do it through any and all means necessary. The more you do it, and the more ways you do it, the more you increase your chances of someone seeing your work and being moved by it. Promoting doesn't exactly feel natural to me, but it has to be done, and no one is going to do it for me.

There is a blog I follow called Danger Diary (http://dangerdame.com/). I really like the way Veronica Varlow writes and I find her messages uplifting. She makes me smile, even though she is a complete stranger. Here is a perfect example of someone who knows how to promote herself and who is making her dreams come true through a combination of hard work and connecting with others. She has a Kickstarter campaign going to finance her film, "Revolver"(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/veronicavarlow/revolver-a-road-trip-romance-in-exile-feature-film?ref=home_location), and she is halfway to her goal. How amazing! This is the kind of thing I need to keep in mind whenever I'm blogging or posting or tweeting or whatever: put it out there, or else no one will know what you're up to. It's as simple as that.

So, be kind to the artists you encounter in your life. Don't just delete their emails or scroll absently over their posts. Know that the promotional side of things might feel weird, foreign, or even downright scary to them. Smile and know that they're just trying to make the world a little nicer by sharing their work.




2 comments:

Kath said...

Amen to this! It's hard to put yourself out there. Do some people live for the drama of it? Sure they do--but I know far more artists who struggle with self-promotion than artists who love it. Thanks for letting me know that I'm not alone in this!

Janet said...

Nice post, Maria. I couldn't agree more. For two years I've been doggedly "beating my own drum" and hoping I have not gone overboard and made people sick of hearing about me and my work. It's a risk you take, no matter what field you are in. But the upside is this: I've gone from just a few hits on my website 18 months ago, to over 1200 per month on a regular basis. And it continues to grow. So be committed, and just do it. Janet Glatz