In this series of posts that I’m calling “Your Creative Life,” I want to paint a picture of how you can become more everyday creative and how you can sustain a creative life. If this series intrigues you, you might think about becoming a creativity coach. If you’re interested in that, please visit my new certificate and diploma program or read my latest book The Coach’s Way. And come join the Eric Maisel Community!
If you’re an artist looking to make sales, it’s important that you keep in touch with marketplace players, even if you don’t “feel like it.”
With those people with whom you want to maintain a real ongoing relationship—and even if you find them to be unpleasant people—do more than send them the occasional check-in email. Set up a meeting for coffee, even if that eats into a good part of a Saturday afternoon. If they live far away, have a real phone chat. Try to meet them face-to-face at least every so often. As you think about where to take your next vacation, consider going somewhere where you are represented and visiting with your art contacts. Keep them in mind and keep in real touch with them.
Artists often have only a few advocates in the marketplace and really need those advocates to remain on their side supporting their efforts. If everyone wanted our wares, we might be much more cavalier about losing a connection here or there. Since in our actual lives not everyone is clamoring for what we create, we need to maintain and preserve the connections we’ve successfully made so far. Just as it makes good sense to carefully preserve your art, it makes good sense to carefully preserve your art relationships too.
If you have the good fortune to possess many relationships in the arts, then you will want to practice empathy in all of them. If you are lucky enough to be represented in a number of galleries, if you acquire a substantial number of collectors, and if you become known in the wider world, then you have the job of maintaining those many important relationships, bringing some forward as circumstances dictate and letting others temporarily recede, and learning tactics and strategies that allow you to keep in touch with marketplace players and with your audience without pestering them to death.
Begin by identifying in your own mind your most important contacts. These are the folks who matter the most to your art career: the collectors who buy often and/or who buy your largest and most expensive pieces, the owners of the galleries where you sell the most regularly, the one art writer who has taken an ongoing interest in you and done a substantial article on you, and so forth.
There may be no more than a dozen people in this category and you want to treat each one of them individually and as an individual, sending Mark and Mary, your two most loyal collectors, an email about your latest work before you announce your latest work to anyone else, letting Jill the art writer know that a show of yours will be in a church space in Italy and wondering if that might make for an interesting article, and so on. You want to keep these folks in your mind and you want to contact them regularly, even when you have nothing particularly special to announce, to remind them that you are actively working and that you are actively thinking about them.
You might also think of visiting them personally, especially if you have never met them. If your biggest collector lives in Hawaii and you are trying to decide between a beach vacation in the Bahamas and a beach vacation in Hawaii, let the fact that collector Mark resides in Hawaii be the tipping point. Contact him to see if he would like to meet, and, if he says that he would, choose Hawaii over the Bahamas.
If your most important gallery is in Manhattan and you know that you’ll be traveling to the Lake George region of upstate New York, see if you can pencil a visit to the city onto your schedule. You do not need to see people in person all that often if you are maintaining regular contact by other means (like email and phone), but seeing them every once in a while is both smart and personally rewarding.
It would be wise of you to manifest your confidence and go a step further. You might jokingly wonder aloud to collector Mark in Hawaii (who, remember, is on your side, having purchased a number of your paintings) whether he might want to throw you a little party while you’re visiting in Hawaii to introduce you to his collector friends. Similarly, you might ask Frank the gallery owner in New York if he’d like to invite some collectors to have drinks with you and him when you hit the city.
Use opportunities of this sort not only to renew acquaintance with this important person in your life; allow this person to extend your circle of acquaintances while you’re in town. You may well discover that he or she is more than delighted to do so and that you rise in the estimation of these influential people by virtue of your willingness to promote yourself.
It is in your best interests to maintain contact with the large number of people who cross your path. The easiest way to do this is to maintain an email list and to send out periodic announcements, perhaps on a monthly basis. You might maintain one list of collectors, one list of galleries who don’t show you yet but whom you want to approach again and again until they show you, one list of local and nearby folks who would be interested in knowing about your local shows and open studio times, and so on. The larger these lists grow, the better.
Try to spend a little time every day maintaining touch with some segment of the many people “out there” who matter or who might potentially matter to your art career. This is a great way to “practice empathy” in a business context. Today you might contact Jim; tomorrow it might be Mary; the next day it might be someone you don’t know but who you want to know you. The day after that it might be your whole list. If you can’t manage to do this work every day, set aside some real time every few days or at least once a week to think through what contacts you want to make—and to actually make those contacts. Keep in touch: that is an important part of your art life, and people want to hear from you!
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock