The Transcript

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone, and these are The Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me yet, I am a co-founder and the chief content officer for Copyblogger Media.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Today, I am awfully pleased to be talking with John T. Unger about marketing for more creative outputs because I get a lot of questions from musicians, novelists, painters, cartoonists, about, “This is all fine for dentists and graphic designers, but I don’t see how it applies to me.”

I am chuffed to have you. John, welcome.

John T. Unger: Thank you, Sonia. I’m glad to be here.

Sonia Simone: I want to kick off, for people who don’t know you yet, if you could tell people what you do because you’re not only an artist, but you’re working in a medium that’s not watercolors or it’s not something that people are so familiar with.

John T. Unger: Right. I’m a sculptor primarily, but 10 years ago, on the 30th of May, I came up with the Great Bowl O’ Fire, which is a flame-designed firebowl or fire pit. The stock language here would be, “Sculptural Firebowls handmade by artist John T. Unger are luxury fire features valued for exceptional beauty, craftsmanship, and design.” They’re made from recycled steel.

That really changed my art career trajectory quite a bit. I made the first one. I thought it was a one-off. I thought it was a cool idea. I put it on the Internet. It got picked up on Boing Boing and a bunch of other sites. Now, 10 years later, I’ve shipped almost 1,700 of them to all 50 states and 16 or 17 other countries. I’ve lost track. I may have to go back and get a proper number on that.

How to Deal With the Problem That the World Doesn’t ‘Need’ Your Art

John T. Unger: They really took off. Part of the reason is because they’re really well-made and they’re really beautiful. Part of the reason is because they’re not just sculpture, but they’re also functional. They serve a purpose. The way that I’ve marketed them is a little different than you would fine art.

Sonia Simone: Yeah. To use Godin’s much over-used adjective, they are ‘remarkable.’ People say, “Oh, that’s cool.” It’s kind of art, and it’s kind of function. It’s all of them together.

John T. Unger: Yeah. One of our biggest challenges was, of course, we immediately had a bunch of knockoffs. We’ve spent incredible time and energy and money stopping that, not because we’re worried about losing sales, per se, as much as because customer service is a huge part of what we do.

People who do knockoffs are less concerned with that. They’re often a little more fly-by-night — looking to make a quick buck, not looking to make a global reputation that’s going to stand the test of time. Were it a credible copy, it could be mistaken for my work. If somebody had a bad experience, they would think that they had it with me. That’s why we have a really good copyright lawyer on speed dial.

Sonia Simone: Not really nice, but useful.

John T. Unger: Yeah, we quite like him as well. He’s fun to hang out with and a pleasure to do business with, and very effective. That’s one of those things, though. Part of what has enabled me to make a living in the arts is that I have something that’s very unique and that we keep it that way. Using the Internet and all of that gives us a global platform. I can talk about different segments of that because there’s some interesting stuff.

What can I say? We have a great product, and we really have taken so much time to write clear content for the site, get a good design for the site, and work with other people to improve that. That makes a big difference.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, I agree. Let’s dive into a little nitty-gritty. I’ll kick off with a point I touched on earlier. When you’re in a creative space, people don’t ‘need’ what you have. They don’t need a painting. They don’t need a piece of music. They don’t actually need a pair of $1,200 shoes, either. This is what I think of as the ‘desire sliver’ of the marketing world. Some people sell orthodontia or personal training, and then some people sell things that create desire because they exist. Nobody knew they wanted an iPhone until they saw an iPhone.

John T. Unger: Right.

Sonia Simone: It wasn’t about what it did.

John T. Unger: Although everybody always wanted a tricorder and was just waiting for the iPhone to come.

Sonia Simone: That’s true.

John T. Unger: They wanted it. It just wasn’t there.

Sonia Simone: Yeah. That’s what the artist in a way, an artist with an eye to the audience. Some people are really creating for expression and to find their own search for meaning, and that’s awesome. But we’re talking about people who are looking for an audience, who would like to own your art, and pay you money for it — creating that desire is a big part of it.

The Benefits of Seeing the Business Side of Art as Your ‘Day Job’

John T. Unger: Part of why I got into making art is because, when I was less successful financially, I loved art. I wanted to own art. I couldn’t afford the kind of stuff I wanted, so I made my own versions of that. The more of it I made, the more it piled up, and the more I got good at it. I was working in design until the big dot-com crash, and at that point, I was like, “Instead of learning to do something else sensible, I’m going to do the art thing because that’s what I want to do, and I’ll figure out a way to make it work.”

I know people who went to art school, and they miss it because they don’t have deadlines. What I did was made my deadline “the bills are paid by the end of the month, and I’m doing it with art.” That was my deadline. The other thing I figured out was, prior to that, I was working 30 or 40 hours a week in an office and then another 40 hours a week making art. I was sleeping four hours a night.

If I took those eight hours where I would have had a job and spent all of that time learning and implementing the business and marketing needed to sell the art, I was better off. Really, who wants a day job? In a way, or at least in your audience, I suspect, there are not a lot of people who want a day job.

Sonia Simone: Probably not. They ran away a long time ago.

John T. Unger: Yeah, the thing is, the firebowls effectively became my day job. Then I make other art that I care about or do other projects that I care about in the off hours. I just did this commission that was a 10-foot tall by 16-foot flag, an American flag made out of Budweiser caps. It was a beautiful object.

Sonia Simone: It was a really cool object, yeah.

John T. Unger: It was very cool. That took about four months of my time. The next project I want to do is a bunch of mosaics of 16th-century anatomy drawings in marble because marble happens to come in the same colors as the inside of people. You know? The exact same color palette, which is what makes it work. It’s interesting to me.

Sonia Simone: Interesting.

John T. Unger: But probably not highly marketable.

Sonia Simone: Maybe, right.

John T. Unger: But then again, that show with the plastinated people does really well in museums.

Sonia Simone: That’s right.

The Eternal Question for Artists of Selling Out vs. Making a Living

John T. Unger: Maybe it could be a touring exhibit. I don’t know yet. It’s just something I want to do for me, and the Firebowls. That’s one of the things I would say to artists if they want to make a living in art is it helps if you have something that you can make somewhat useful or that you find a niche that you know you can either reproduce or produce on a schedule to pay the bills. Then do the stuff that might be more experimental in your off hours.

Some people would call that selling out, but then again, when I started, everybody’s like, “Oh, you will never make a living as an artist.” Then when I did, they were like, “Oh, you sold out.” What it really boils down to is I don’t need to make either of those groups of people happy. If they’re not my customers, and even if they might be friends, it’s like, “Hey, that’s your take.” In the meantime, here I am making art for a living, which is what I wanted to do.

When and Why to Actively Seek Out Boredom

John T. Unger: One of the best pieces of advice that I can give to artists, and they’re not necessarily going to like it, is there’s this great Flaubert quote — I can’t remember it — something to the effect of, “Be boring in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.” I should have pulled it up beforehand to quote it properly. But the thing is, I’m not just making art. I’m running a global business. That can take up a lot of your time and get really overwhelming unless you come up with systems for it and get really organized.

The best way to explain it is, shipping these things was very expensive and very difficult in the beginning. They’re 200 pounds. You can’t use FedEx or UPS. You’ve got to use freight, so solving that problem, finding a good partner that gets your stuff where it needs to go reliably and on time affordably solved a huge problem. We’ve changed companies a few times over the years for different reasons. Once I’ve got that problem solved, I don’t have to think about it until there’s a problem. I can keep doing that, that way.

Building a website, one of the most important things I want to say to artists about a website is that a lot of the time I see artists’ websites where the navigation is really funky or unclear. It’s very cute or it’s very you, but it’s not very easy to navigate. I used to do my own design on all my websites. I did all my own code. I don’t anymore. I hire designers.

I hire people who write better code than I do because they can get it done faster. They can get it done better. They can make it easier for people to use. Their job is staying up on new trends on the web. I used to do that, but I don’t have to do that if I pay somebody. It’s expensive, but you don’t have to do it every year. Get it done. Get it really good. Like I said to you earlier, I’m thinking about redoing mine, but the last time I did was 2010 or something. It’s time to make it mobile responsive.

Sonia Simone: Yes, John. Yes it is.

John T. Unger: Because stuff changes.

Sonia Simone: The thing is, getting a designer, it’s a cost, for sure, but there’s a cost associated to somebody leaving your website because they have no idea how to navigate the interpretive dance of your navigation.

John T. Unger: Yeah.

Sonia Simone: That’s not the place for your originality, actually. Web navigation is a place to be really boring and predictable.

John T. Unger: It just really is. It goes back to that quote. Some stuff, get it really basic, get it really clean, and then show your creativity in the places where people want it. There’s a couple of things that are interesting that I’m going to tell you that are counter-intuitive.

The Ever-Evolving Nature of John’s Business

John T. Unger: Early on, back when I started this, back when there were 500 blogs in the world or something, I got a huge surge of traffic for something that I had done — like your basic viral thing, right? It wasn’t the thing I made a living on, and the people who came in to see it weren’t the sort of customers for the stuff that I do for a living. They were just curious. You know what I mean?

Sonia Simone: Yes.

John T. Unger: They came, and they looked, and they left. Out of 100,000 visitors, which was huge back then, nobody left a comment. Nobody bought anything. They all came and looked and left. That’s gratifying, but it doesn’t do anything for my business, right?

Sonia Simone: Right.

John T. Unger: When we promote this flag, I think we’re going to get kind of the same thing. We’re going to get a huge amount of traffic from people who are curious, but who are probably not necessarily our customer base. Even still, that’s worth something, but it doesn’t help your bottom line. Here’s the funny thing. We’re running a six-figure business, and on an average day, I get 100 unique visitors to my website — which is not very many.

Sonia Simone: No, it isn’t. I use you all the time as an example — you don’t need a massive email list if you have the right people on the list.

John T. Unger: Yeah, and what’s interesting is, a few years back, we had a sales rep, and we had somewhere over 100 different online stores reselling our work. It became a full-time job for her to make sure that the sales copy was accurate, the things had the right name on them, the price was correct, etc.

After a few years, I looked, and I was like, “Wow, out of those 100 stores, there are only about six that sell more than one a year, and most of them don’t sell any,” whereas I was selling 250 off of my little site that had no graphic. So we cut it down to the top six. Then a year ago, we cut it down to two. The only places I sell my work now are Frontgate and One Kings Lane.

Sonia Simone: Oh, cool. OK.

John T. Unger: Both of those are great places. They have a great reputation. They have a huge list of customers who go back to them that are not customers I have.

Sonia Simone: Right, right.

John T. Unger: They did a really nice volume for us last year, but in order to sell through those places, I’ve got to give them 50 percent of the retail and then take my expenses out of it, out of my...