Sarah talks about Art as Business

Tell us about your mar­ket­ing jour­ney. How did you start?

I’ve always instinc­tively known that art was a busi­ness, and that I needed to learn those skills. My first “mar­ket­ing advi­sor” was another entre­pre­neur that I knew, but he worked busi­ness to busi­ness with huge cor­po­ra­tions, so every­thing that he told me just con­fused the heck out of me. Then I paid $1000 for mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants, and I think that just con­fused me even more. We were try­ing to fig­ure out my USP and I won’t even tell you what we came up with. It’s just way too embarrassing.

Hope came in the form of Naomi Dun­ford, from Ittybiz.com. That’s when I started to get it.

When did you dis­cover that you needed to market?

When I was 16, I was already itch­ing to run my own busi­ness and I gave it a shot and failed mis­er­ably. I never really got any­where because I didn’t have any way of get­ting myself out there. I’d fallen for the “Build it and they’ll come” myth. That’s when I real­ized some­thing had to change.

Do you have a mar­ket­ing plan/strategy if so please summarize?

You know, I wish I could say I’d learned my les­son and I’ve got this awe­some, mind blow­ing mar­ket­ing plan, but as of yet I don’t. Or at least, it’s not as strate­gic and cohe­sive as I’d like it to be. It’s more like a work in progress.

How­ever, I do try to do a few things on a reg­u­lar basis – I try to post to my blog a few times a week, I hang out on Twit­ter every cou­ple of days, and I send out a monthly newslet­ter to my mail­ing list, and also when­ever I fin­ish a new piece so that they’re the first to see it.

I’m also work­ing on what you could call my “sales fun­nel” although that word just makes me cringe. What I’m really doing is mak­ing sure that my art is avail­able at lots of dif­fer­ent price points so that it’s acces­si­ble to the most peo­ple pos­si­ble – from cards through to prints, to small pieces & sketches, and then on to full sized orig­i­nal paint­ings and com­mis­sions and portraits.

What is your great­est chal­lenge as an artist/business person?

Hard ques­tion. I think where I strug­gle the most is in valu­ing what I do – I get bogged down by “What’s the point?” and “Nobody wants it!” pretty fre­quently. I’ve learned to ignore it. I think it’s some­thing a lot of artists strug­gle with. And it makes pro­mot­ing my art with a con­certed, cohe­sive effort harder because you just tell your­self that nobody wants it any­ways. It’s sneaky like that, but I’m find­ing ways to com­bat it as I get older.

What do you wish some­one had told you when you started out?

That it was okay to be authen­tic, to want to con­nect with my col­lec­tors and my fans. I thought I had to turn myself into a cor­po­rate drone when I first started read­ing mar­ket­ing books. Even­tu­ally I real­ized that being myself was way more impor­tant and that I’d be a lot hap­pier that way. It’s helped a ton.

What venues do you sell your work?

Mostly online, but start­ing in May I’ll be rep­re­sented by the Pilar Shep­hard Gallery. I’ve had shows in gal­leries before, but I usu­ally do much bet­ter sell­ing online. I think up until recently, I hadn’t found the right gal­leries to work with.

Is there a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket­ing chan­nel you have found use­ful more than others?

I find that the trio of blog, Twit­ter and newslet­ter to be very use­ful. They all feed into each other. I hang out on Twit­ter to meet new peo­ple, pro­mote my blog posts to get new read­ers and even­tu­ally entice them to sign up to my newslet­ter. And of course, the pur­pose of all of my mar­ket­ing is to get more peo­ple to look at my art on my site.

Who buys your work?

Really excel­lent peo­ple. I would say that of course.

They don’t really fit into a defin­able cat­e­gory, but if there’s one uni­fy­ing fea­ture, it’s that they’re all peo­ple search­ing for more in life – they’re either cre­atives in a dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sion (writ­ers, design­ers etc.) or peo­ple who just know that there’s more to life than the rat race. They get my vision and so we con­nect. I con­sider all of my col­lec­tors friends.

How do you keep con­nected with your buyers?

Like I said before, email newslet­ters, the blog and Twit­ter are my main points of con­tact. And some­times I’ll just drop them an email to say hi – ask how they’re enjoy­ing their paint­ing, how life’s going. It’s just nice to keep in touch with them.

About the Author:

Sarah Lacy will be one of our fea­tured artists in the com­ing weeks and she will also be a reg­u­lar con­tributer here on the blog. She is an amaz­ing young artist who drips wis­dom and pas­sion, for life and art, so much that she clearly is an old soul. She is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the energy, self insight and pas­sion we des­per­ately need in the gen­er­a­tion of artists and cre­atives who will replace us.

Sarah makes “art that reminds you to dream, to breathe, to laugh breath­lessly in the rain”, in doing so she hopes help peo­ple learn “to feel again”.

Sarah’s pas­sion and love for what she does has been chal­lenged by the her con­stant com­pan­ion of Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome. As a per­son who knows all to well the chal­lenges of liv­ing with a debil­i­tat­ing chronic dis­ease I was impressed with her courage, open­ness and unwill­ing­ness to sur­ren­der. She has a lot to tell us not only of art but also of life…

You can find Sarah here:

Web site | Twit­ter | Face­book