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Branding, Marketing, and Sales, Oh My!
Follow the (hopefully) golden-brick road.
It’s one thing to do your art as a hobby. The amateur does art for their edification, and maybe also a small fanbase of friends, family, and craft fair appreciators.
When you turn pro, you now have to consider other matters beyond art for art’s sake. The writer, painter, sculptor, or other type of creator must also take into account matters above and beyond the work they do. It’s no longer just the joy of the making, but sharing that to ever-broadening circles and, oh yeah, making money from it.
This is where a lot of us get tripped up. The ideas of becoming a hack or selling out — because now you’re getting paid — can derail you. When you move away from being just a creative creator into a business, you encounter a lot of new challenges that are often outside your comfort zone.
I’m a writer. Hence, I love to take words and bang them into variable forms. Then I get blogs, books, and series I can share with you.
For many, the ideas of branding, marketing, and sales can produce a lot of anxiety. There is another way to look at this, however. Branding, marketing, and sales are just another creative outlet.
But first, turning pro
Here is where I recommend two books by Steven Pressfield. Whatever stripe of creator you might be, I think these are quintessential reading. First, The War of Art. Second, Turning Pro.
Both of these books help give some new and I think extremely helpful perspective for the artist who is also a business. They each offer a ton of insight into mindset, headspace, and overcoming that agonizing notion trying to keep you from leaving your false comfort zone that Mr. Pressfield calls “Resistance”.
Branding, marketing, and sales often seem like mountains to be overcome. Once you turn pro (which is more a mindset shift than the act of starting to do your work as your vocation), these are matters you can’t ignore or disregard.
Fortunately, they all tie together. Breaking them down individually can help make them less daunting.
So, let’s do that.
Branding, marketing, and sales broken down
We start with Branding. What is your brand? This is a place to get creative.
Your brand is the overarching isness of your creative business. For me, it’s Argent Hedgehog Press and MJ Blehart – Storyteller. I even created cool logos for my website as part of brand recognition.
Under that umbrella are my writing ventures. The different sci-fi novel series I share with the world all fall under Argent Hedgehog Press and MJ Blehart – Storyteller. Argent Hedgehog Press is the larger brand umbrella, as it also covers my nonfiction work published under Murray “MJ” Blehart.
Branding creates a unified identifier from which everything else springs. It also gave me a business identity for tax and legal purposes.
What is marketing? Marketing involves promoting the products within your brand through advertising and promotions. It’s a choice of approach for sharing your work with the world. For example, I recently ran a campaign on Meta for the newest book in my Forgotten Fodder clones, crime, and conspiracy series.
Without marketing, you and your brand are hard to find. Getting sales without marketing strategies is like throwing darts at a board while blindfolded. You might hit the target, but you might also miss completely.
Branding and marketing are the long tail. Sales is the goal. I make no money on my books if they don’t sell. If I don’t have a brand, there’s a lack of identity. Without marketing, there’s a lack of intent and voice. Sales become more challenging in the void without a brand and marketing.
Does that feel a bit overwhelming? Fortunately, this is another outlet for creativity.
The creativity of branding, marketing, and sales
I think just about everyone on the planet knows the brands that are Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike. They’re distinctive with their logos, slogans, color schemes, and overall presentation. They didn’t get there without creativity, however.
Someone dreams up the logos, slogans, brand color scheme, and so on. That’s an aspect of creativity that can be a lot of fun to work with.
Marketing can also take on a seriously creative aspect. It doesn’t require millions of dollars and hundreds of hours to use Canva to create a reel for Instagram. The creative process of making that reel can be a lot of fun. Selecting images, colors, music, and the right text can be invigorating.
Sales even has fun aspects to it. I’ve attended Farpoint, a sci-fi convention in Maryland, for several years now. They invite me to set up a table for an hour at every con, and I get to decorate it and showcase myself and my books. You can attend craft fairs and similar local markets to do sales and meet potential fans, presenting yourself and your work in numerous creative ways.
The ideas of branding, marketing, and sales can seem daunting. But when you look at them as just additional elements of the creative process and being an artist, they can become something more. You get to choose and decide your approach to all things in life, and this is no exception.
Thanks for reading. As I share my creative journey with you every week, please consider this: How are you inspired and empowered to be your own authentic creator, whatever form that takes?
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