The Transcript

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, a 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 RainmakerPlatform.com.

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.

This week, I am picking up again my conversation with John T. Unger about marketing for creative products and creative individuals.

Let’s dive back into that conversation.

John on the Value of Lasting Art, Life without Hacks, and Creating for the Future

Sonia Simone: We tell different kinds of stories, but there is that big story piece of the brain that is always hungry. Maybe more so now that we are in a Home Depot world, that we are in a world of mass story, mass production, that there is a longing. I think that is a big part of what artists do sell, is a longing for a recording artist that’s not auto-tuned and a sculpture that’s made by somebody’s hands.

John T. Unger: Yeah, again, I’ve got people who are like, “But I could go buy a fire pit at Home Depot for $100.” I’m like, “You absolutely can. Not this, though.”

Sonia Simone: Right. Yeah.

John T. Unger: It’s only going to last for a year or two. Over a couple of decades, you’ll have spent as much as you would if you buy this. It’s funny because I only just learned what auto-tune was actually a few days ago, and I was so freaking appalled. I thought it was something slightly different. I spent the whole next morning thinking, as much as digital media has made it possible for me to make a living in a way that would have been a lot harder to do if I was shackled to a local economy in a gallery system.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

John T. Unger: As much as that’s the case, I very much have a longing for a time when everything was analog, and if you wanted to make something, you had to be good at something to do it.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

John T. Unger: I’m learning piano right now, and there is just no freaking way to cheat.

Sonia Simone: Right, right. There’s no hack.

John T. Unger: I’m trying to play Professor Longhair tunes that are really complicated a year after starting, and of course, it’s incredibly frustrating. You should probably play for 10 years first, but that’s not how I do things. It’s frustrating, but there’s no way to cheat. You just have to keep banging your hands on the keys until you get the right sound.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

John T. Unger: There’s something about that that’s so much more satisfying and real. I mean, the piano I play is a digital keyboard.

Sonia Simone: That’s the great paradox.

John T. Unger: Yeah.

Sonia Simone: We’re all using all these. The whole ‘maker’ culture is all very digitally connected to one another. So you go to a place and you make a thing out of wood with a tool, then you connect with your friend who lives in Norway or Kuala Lumpur, and you send him a picture of it digitally.
It’s cool.

John T. Unger: It’s interesting. I think you just have to find your balance with that sort of stuff.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, I agree.

John T. Unger: I’ve been pulling back a lot more from social media these days because I’m like, “Instead of looking at what’s viral today, I might rather read a book. Or look at a piece of art that’s 5,000 years old and think about that.” I think there’s a place to be more grounded in the physical.

I guess I’ve just been thinking a lot about the difference between something that goes viral for a couple of days and is seen millions of times versus something like a mosaic from Pompeii, which has been seen more times than that by now and will still be here tomorrow. I think a lot about creating for the future, making things that will last and will still speak to people about something that’s a deeper story than this week’s obsession or outrage or celebrity.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, I realized a little while ago, and I put it into a podcast, that outrage is like the meth of the Internet. It’s really cheap. It’s really readily available. It’s really toxic. But it’s got a lot of energy attached to it.

John T. Unger: Yeah, it does. I believe I Retweeted that when you said it. I thought that was a really analogy. It’s just funny because it’s so pervasive right now. That’s really where I’m like, “Okay, maybe I need to step away from today’s topic of outrage and just really think about things that matter more and pursue those things.” Or, maybe just a longer term view of, “Okay, if what you’re mad about is actually a problem, what could you do about it long term?”

Sonia Simone: Right. That’s the thing. There are things that are bona fide outrageous that I think is absolutely worth standing up and talking about, but it gets lost in the sea of people angry at each other about what kind of carbs they eat and stuff like that. Could we get some kind of recognition that some things matter more than others? I think that’s Internet heresy, though.

John T. Unger: I think it’s a good grounding for making work that will sell, as I was talking about. Well, let me reverse that. The stuff that sells for gazillions of dollars in auctions right now is very of the moment and very fashionable. But there’s no guarantee that it’s really going to matter down the road, right?

Sonia Simone: Yep.

Surviving Your Story as an Artist

John T. Unger: We don’t know yet. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. We don’t know. But at the same time, things like a Picasso or Van Gogh or whatever, those are going to stick around. Unlikely they’ll go too far out of fashion for reasons that are deeper than just an idea or a fashion.

Sonia Simone: Yeah. In a lot of ways, they survived their stories. They were accompanied by a story about where art was going, what was new, what was old-fashioned. That’s great and good, but both of those artists really transcended and outlived the stories that were being told about what art was supposed to be in that period. Of course, poor old Van Gogh never got to really enjoy any of it, but Picasso did.

John T. Unger: Picasso did okay.

Sonia Simone: And, frankly, probably worked it beautifully.

John T. Unger: Oh yeah. He was a consummate salesman, really. It’s like, prior to him, I don’t think anybody had made money on that scale with art except maybe Michelangelo.

Sonia Simone: Who was another very smart businessman.

John T. Unger: Yeah. He was — and a very inventive person who had more going than just the ability to paint or sculpt.

Sonia Simone: Yep. Let me talk a little bit about — and I’m not saying maybe these would be things that don’t ever work for anyone — but have you tried some things to market your art that just didn’t fit? They were not good for you?

Finding the Right Fit to Market Your Art (and John’s Journey to Get There)

John T. Unger: Dozens of times. I remember when we first had our first big copy catalog of firebowls. They were like “Well, if you’re so creative of an artist, why don’t you make something else then?” That’s a valid question, except that I’ve made thousands of other things and a lot of them sold, but none of them in quantity. A lot of them were one-offs. Some of them were series.

I used to make masks out of shovel blades, because it fit. It’s face-shaped. People really liked those, but about the most you could expect to sell them for was $75.00 or $100.00. In a lot of ways, they were harder to do than the firebowls from a commercial perspective. When I was doing it because they were fun to make, they were great. To do them as a business thing, is not so good.

Years ago I invented a mood ring that, instead of telling you what mood you were in, it had little emoticons in it. You would swap them out to tell people what mood you were in. It was a brilliant idea.
We had them made out of surgical stainless. They had like a cap that screwed on and off with a glass face — they were beautiful. But to make a profit on them, we had to sell them for $80, and it turned out what they appealed to was kids, not the 20- or 30-somethings that used the Internet like I thought they would.

Sonia Simone: Right.

John T. Unger: And nobody’s going to buy an $80 ring for a kid.

Sonia Simone: Hopefully, right.

John T. Unger: There’s so many things where I’ve tried to design another repeatable product or the flatpack firebowl. I spent $30,000 developing that, and I’ve sold two — so a big net loss. The stability of the firebowls allows me to have the cash to experiment about once a year with something different. But nothing else has really quite been as steady for me as that. Some other experiments were with advertising that really didn’t do anything or …

Sonia Simone: Did you ever do much with a gallery model? Outside of like a site like One Kings Lane, did you ever have your work in a gallery?

The 3 Levels of the Gallery Model (and Why Galleries Aren’t Always a Good Choice)

John T. Unger: Oh yeah. When I started out, that was the only market there was.

Sonia Simone: Right, exactly.

John T. Unger: Actually, really interesting thing I thought of years ago that I like to point out — in the gallery model, right? There are about three different levels. You could be showing work in your studio and be the gallery, and you’re going to get a handful of people come by — but the only work for sale is you.

Or you could put it in a local gallery or a regional gallery, and you’ll get a lot more traffic. It’s people coming to look to buy art, but there are other artists selling there, too. Also, there’s a commission fee. Or you can put it in a gallery district, like SoHo or River North in Chicago or whatever. Now there are a lot of galleries with a whole lot more artists. But it’s a destination, so way more people come. Hypothetically, you’ll do better, but way more competition.

The Internet is exactly the reverse. I make the bulk of my sales through my site where people come looking for me. I make a good number of sales on One Kings Lane or Frontgate, but there’s way more products to buy. They don’t sell as much as my stuff.

Then you’ve got Etsy, where I sell fewer things, but way more people come to Etsy looking for art but I’m lost in the …

The bricks and mortar thing, in the art market, in my opinion, sort of the exact opposite of the Internet. Now that we live in upstate New York, I would like to get more work into the galleries here.

I quit doing it because usually stuff is on consignment. If I sell everything myself, then nothing ships until it’s paid for. I only keep one set of books. People buy it. I make it. When things are on consignment, now I have to keep track of where it all is and whether or not it had sold. That just felt like too much work.

But now that we live in an area where there are a lot of really good galleries, I think it would be work that’s worth doing — where I was not so much in Michigan or when I had to drive to Chicago six hours away to put stuff in a gallery. Maybe in a 50-mile radius we’ll do that.

The last bunch of years I’ve been telling galleries that I won’t do consignment, but if you purchase a minimum order, I’ll give you your discount. I might do consignment again, but only locally. It just doesn’t make sense to spend $200-$300 to ship stuff with no guarantee.

I had a couple of experiences, too, in the early days where good galleries where I had sold work, who had work of mine in stock, closed and never got the work back to me. All of a sudden I’m out thousands of dollars worth of inventory, and I never did recover any of that. It was especially hurtful because the gallery in the instance I’m thinking most about was actually a good friend. And I’m just like, “What the hell?” I mean, “Obviously, your gallery closed. You’re going through some transition and stuff but where’s the … ”

Sonia Simone: Where’s my stuff?

John T. Unger: “Where’s my stuff, and what happened to our trust here?”

The Advantages of an Art Gallery vs. the Gamble of Going Solo as an Artist

John T. Unger: There are a lot of advantages. They’ve got better real estate than you do probably. They’ve got better lighting than you probably do. They’ve got staff.

Sonia Simone: They’ve got great sales people.

John T. Unger: They’ve got press releases.

Sonia Simone: If you’ve got a good gallery, they have some master sales people who, in a lot of cases, can articulate what’s amazing about you maybe better than you can in a lot of cases.

John T. Unger: For a lot of artists, definitely, right. Then you’ve got people like me who just sweat a paragraph for a year until it’s right, then memorize it. Sure, they’re taking 30 or 50 percent, but that’s covering the costs to do all this stuff you don’t want to do.

If you’re going to do what I did and go solo, then you’ve got to do all that work they were doing. It’s a lot of work. And you’ve got to gamble your money on things like advertising and site design — because it is a gamble in an inverse proportion to how much time you put in and work you actually do. The more work you do, the less of a gamble it is.

Sonia Simone: But then you’re gambling your time.

John T. Unger: Yeah. Gambling time and money. What we’ve done for a long time is we’ve always had a balance where my main income comes from retail over the web. But we had other...