This is a guest post from Misha Penton.

The Indie Performing Artist

It’s time to reconsider the nonprofit model as the only way to do business in the performing arts. When it comes to performance works, smaller really is better: a smaller enterprise lends itself to hybrid business practices that continue to emerge as artists use their creativity to tackle the business side of making art. Embracing a for-profit model or a hybrid for-profit/non-profit enterprise (like fiscal sponsorship), are viable business options for artists. Funding organizations really do roll their eyes these days, when yet another nonprofit, pops up with its hands out. Reality: no one is gonna pay your tab.

Independence

Remaining independent as a performing artist and forming project-based artist cohorts yields a creative process that is more easily funded and managed – from page to stage – than is possible with traditional institutional models. I’m not sure if we can dump donations altogether, but moving toward a for-profit arts model gives artists more independence from donors and granting institutions, and more time to focus on making art. Unjustified dogma in the non-profit world blames the for-profit sector for being beholden to the whims of their audience. Really? Perhaps those critical of for-profit arts might consider taking a good look at the absurd specificity of many grant guidelines (including their funding time-lines) and the beyond-the-pale hoops they entail, as well as admitting to what goes into coaxing Grandma to fork over a grand for next season. The party line states that traditional fundraising strategies are easier/better/more profitable than experimenting with non-traditional revenue generation. Hmmmm….I question that.

Speedy Feats

Making fast, non-committee decisions is super-effective. It is your Secret Weapon as an independent artist. No, you do not need to have a meeting about a meeting to decide when to have the meeting to pick the colors for the flyer. Get people involved in your process whom you trust to do their brilliant work on and off stage. The world changes daily and there is simply no time to wait for a board to meet twice a year. Nonprofit organizations respond far too slowly to creative needs and cultural shifts.

Community

Audiences are interested in connecting personally with the artists; therefore, collaborate with the same performers and the same creative team consistently (as is reasonable). A performance company is the same as a rock band. People come to see you and connect with you. Put a face and a personality on your company or cohort. No one wants to support some impersonal organization. Build one-on-one relationships with other artists, peers, and audience members. Commit to your personal artistic vision and forget about the “market” or what the audience might “want”. Focus on presenting a polished, minimal, high quality performance. Consider that In Process can be Polished – don’t worry about Finished Product. Open your Process to your audience. Your audience will support you if you have a strong artistic vision and are committed to personally connecting with your community. I promise. Create productions that are made for and funded by a small, personally connected audience. A traditional non-profit arts organization, especially as it grows, simply cannot provide this. This is Secret Weapon #2.

Collaboration

Collaborate with other artists, combine audiences and resources. Create work that can “plug into” other artists’ processes. Don’t worry, many companies don’t want to do this, so expect resistance – but you’ll find that successful artists and progressive thinkers will see this as valuable. Let the rest eat your dust.

Keep your creative life project-based, collaborative, community-minded and artist-centered. And don’t worry too much about longevity. Just do your work. Daily. As crazy-cool-inspirational conductor and speaker, Ben Zander says, “In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.”

A few groovy sites:

Check out The Field, Fractured Atlas and your local arts service organizations for more info on fiscal sponsorship; and peek at James Undercofler’s blog State of the Art, in part, her addresses issues pertaining to arts business models.

The dance ensemble, Momix is probably the best and oldest example of a successful for-profit arts company.

Misha Penton is an opera singer, theater artist, and artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater, a multi-performance arts cohort based in Houston, Texas.

Michael Kaiser runs the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which produces more than 2000 events per year. Kaiser has a million credits and is a recognized expert in the field of Arts Management. This is the whole audio from his Arts in Crisis talk at Portland Center Stage in Portland, Oregon.

Amazingly astute advice for every arts organization and artist who runs their own business.

Interview with Michael Kaiser of the Kennedy Center(audio only) from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.

If you’re not familiar San Francisco Artist John Kraft, then that’s too bad. John is one savvy artist who has done a fantastic job of making his presence on the Web grow.

John and I recently sat down for a chat (he’s a really nice guy), and I wanted to share the recording of the conversation with all of you.

Click to play

Some highlights from the interview:

• John’s favorite way to market his work? Facebook.
• John engages in a LOT of different kinds of marketing. He rattles off at least 15 different ways that he markets his art.
• John’s a former engineer. As such, he has a different way of looking at art marketing – without any of the traditional fears that a lot of artists have. Also, he ‘gets’ a lot of the technical stuff.

Let me know what you think!

Hi I’m Colin and as some of you will be aware I have been helping Cory out as his design intern, jazzing up the look of the site recently, and in return Cory has been helping me in evaluating how I can better market myself as an artist online and has very kindly invited me to share a bit of that process here on the blog.

I was always into art as a child. In high school I excelled at drawing, painting and design and when I went away to university I ultimately decided to study graphic design and alongside that line of study I became an avid photographer and a dab hand with Photoshop.

Cut to 10 years out from graduating and I am realising that the only reason I am trying to live off a career in graphic design is because that’s what I trained to do, not because it’s my passion. I’m good at it but it doesn’t thrill me the way something needs to if you’re going to be successful at it. The things I really love doing are things I’ve been doing all along in my spare time – photography and digital painting. This subliminal assumption that your job is what you trained for always kept me from seriously considering either as anything more than a pastime…until now.

If you asked anyone that knows me, and a whole bunch who hardly know me in fact, what I’m known for it would be photography. I had assiduously refused to shoot weddings for anyone primarily because I knew I needed a half decent DSLR to do it so when I finally purchased a Canon 7D last year that provided the facility for shooting the quality of pictures and HD video I had been longing to work with I started saying yes.

By the start of this year I had three weddings behind me and others planned and I was aware of the need to upgrade my purely recreational online photography persona with a more commercially focused approach. I made a revision to my personal website to describe the photo and video services I was now providing but I didn’t have any broader social networking or online advertising strategy beyond a Facebook page which I found an amazingly effective tool for attracting attention to my work and seeing how the interaction of current fans of my work spawned interaction from new fans etc.

It was around this point I came across Cory’s guest post on IWTYTBR and that theme of ‘The Starving Artist is a Myth’ chimed with everything I had been discovering in my own realisations about my creative life and everything I had been learning from various entrepreneurial experts and resources online. The Abundant Artist aim of helping artists become better at marketing their art in the online environment was exactly what I was looking for and I was really excited to get the opportunity to perform a marketing diagnostic with Cory and then focus and be accountable for hashing out a way forward to market the creative talents I love to employ.

Being a graphic designer you are necessarily something of a jack of all trades. The items you become expert at designing are hugely varied; from logos to product packaging, catalogues to billboards, keychains to vehicle livery. And as a self-employed designer you are usually a generalist with multiple specialisms, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Being such a ‘renaissance man’ I found it hard to constrain myself to focusing on one or two core abilities or niches. I had this crazy flowchart representing all the various pies I had a finger in online and how they interrelated and thankfully by the time Cory had to take it all in, I had a fair idea what my prime loves were, creatively speaking: photography and digital painting. Related areas but requiring distinct commercial approaches.

I had some stuff in place online already in terms of the photography side of things thanks to years of sharing that on Flickr but the digital painting I hadn’t even acknowledged as a thing. It just seemed like a byproduct of the convergence of working with graphic design and photography.

I mapped out steps required to establish these two separate commercial streams and with Cory’s advice broke it down to the components needed. As the photography business was the hot topic at that moment thanks to the wedding buzz we started with that stream and Cory set me the task of setting up the following:

1. A new Facebook Page solely for the wedding photography work

2. A Facebook ad to promote this page

3. An ongoing program of special offers to fans of the page

4. A new website & blog for the photography business fully optimised for SEO, social network sharing etc.

5. An email list sign up on the website

6. A dedicated Twitter account integrated with the website/blog/Facebook pages

7. Google Adwords campaigns to target specific photo services/localities

After a couple of weeks of intensive research and planning and designing and uploading I have reached #6 thus far.

Last week I got the new Facebook page up and running and settled on an ad type that worked best.

I looked at various photographer websites, analysed what worked for the ones I was inspired by and took note and also looked at competitors in my region and niche areas etc. From this research I finally decided where to pitch my prices and what specific services and products I would offer at present.

My unforced, natural light style of photography is (in Scotland at any rate) quite unusual and people come to me primarily because they have seen and loved this look. So I am not pitching myself as a bargain basement solution to service as wide a market as possible. My ideal customer is someone who loves the kind of photos I shoot and is motivated more by that aesthetic love than any other factor. If they aren’t passionate about the images then I don’t want them as clients. I realise in the US this style of candid lifestyle photography is very popular now but in Scotland I face a difficult task in creating a demand for lifestyle type sessions as not only is it unusual for people to hire a photographer for anything other than weddings and the rare family portrait but Scottish people are peculiarly resistant to spending money (despite what the recent credit crisis might suggest).

After looking at various website and blog solutions I signed up for a Wordpress site through Prophoto Blogs and began styling and populating it with content. Being very particular about graphic style this probably took longer than it needed to but hey, that’s my thing. I set up a mailing list with MailChimp and a Twitter account for Colin J. Campbell Photography and I was ready to let people know about it. (Side note: I decided a while back to make a point of including the J for branding purposes in order to gain a degree of differentiation from the gazillions of other Colin Campbells in Google Land.)

The new site and all these linkety doodas can be found at http://www.colinjcampbell.com. I will be populating it with more blog posts over time but there’s enough to cover the bases there just now. Obviously there’s more work to be done, once this is all set up I need to move on to the steps required for the digital painting stream. Marketing is hard work (and we’ll have to wait to see exactly how much it’s worth) but right now I think I need to get outdoors and decompress after an intensive few weeks in front of the computer screen. Thanks a million to Cory for taking the time to look at my situation and give me the focused accountability required to action this undertaking in bite-size steps.

Hopefully I have explained the process clearly but I may have omitted some bits and pieces. If anyone has any questions please fire away.

Lee Reizian Holmes runs a store called Art By Chocolate. That’s right, that beautiful orchid above is actually made from chocolate. Nice, right?

Lee makes a living selling this beautiful, edible artwork. Don’t you want to hear how she does it? Listen to this recording (approx 15 minutes).

Click To Play

Click to play

Matthew Ebel blew me away when I heard what he was doing with his online music sales. He’s becoming a force of nature and a model for how other musicians can support themselves full time without signing a deal with a major label.

MatthewEbel.net is a site where fans can pay a monthly fee to be a part of Ebel’s ongoing music development. His fan base is relatively small, but very loyal and they promote his work like crazy. He gets real-time feedback on his work and thus knows what his audience likes and what they don’t.

Visual artists you should listen to this as well. It’s fairly short (about 20 minutes) and there are plenty of good ideas for you here as well. Enjoy!

I’ve had some really great opportunities to interview a lot of artists over the last six months. I’ve been talking a lot about what I think you need to know when it comes to selling art online. Now I’d like to know – what questions do you have?

Ask your question in the comments below, email me at Cory [at] TheAbundantArtist.com, or on Twitter @agoodhusband. I’ll respond to as many of your questions as I can in upcoming blog posts.

Best question before the weekend is over gets a free 30 minute consultation on how to sell art online (we can talk about your website, email marketing, social media, whatever).

Click to play

Today we’ve got something a little bit different. This is a recording of an interview that I did with Laura Bergman, founder of Bottled Up Designs.

Laura makes jewelry from reclaimed glass. It may be a buzzword to say “upcycled,” but that’s what Laura’s been doing for years. My favorite part: listening to how Laura overcame her mistakes to grow her business, and how she grew her business by picking up the phone to sell her work.

.

Last week I interviewed Ann Rea. Ann has the rare accomplishment of being an artist who went from beginning painter to highly profitable artist in just a year. In this interview, Ann talks about how she did it and how other artists can do the same.

This recording, and other interviews, is available to subscribers of The Abundant Artist email list.

Click to play

Corrinne Robinson is a dancer with Scorpius Dance Theatre and Brand Manager for Mcfarlane Toys – from the creator of one of my all time favorite comic books – Spawn. She is one creative lady.  Just look at those awesome pics!

Tell us about your dance work.

I am a dancer beginning my seventh season with Scorpius Dance Theatre, a contemporary dance company in Phoenix. Founded in 1999 as a non-profit organization, Scorpius combines the motifs of humor, drama, and both organic and technical movement to form a very distinct style of dance. Scorpius is directed by Lisa Starry, and I am one of 15 dancers in the company. In addition to repertory works, Scorpius presents an annual fall production, A Vampire Tale. This show has a full storyline and individual characters all portrayed without words. I really enjoy how Scorpius fuses different types of modern dance and theater elements to make it appealing and crowd friendly.

Where did you study or get your training?

I have been studying dance since the age of five. Growing up I studied at the Dance Center of Colorado Springs. I started with Ballet and Tap, and as I got older I added Jazz, Lyrical, Modern, Pom, Acro and Hip-Hop. I moved to Arizona to attend college at Arizona State University (ASU). I began college as a Business major, but I switched to Fine Arts when I received a full dance scholarship. I ended up leaving ASU to perform in a show, Legends in Concert. It is the original and largest live celebrity tribute show in the world, with an always-evolving cast of legendary superstars. Not many people can say they’ve worked with three different Elvis impersonators! Now that I am older and don’t have the luxury of dance classes every day, I try to keep up my technique by taking adult modern classes at Metropolitan Arts Institute (the home of Scorpius) and the occasional ballet class at Ballet Arizona.

What is your ‘day job?’

My day job is Brand Manager for McFarlane Toys. The company was established in 1994 to manufacture and sell action figures based on founder Todd McFarlane’s comic book character Spawn. We have since expanded into licensed products to become one of the premiere action figure producers. We have produced toys for properties such as Spawn, Halo, The Simpsons, Shrek, The Matrix, NFL, MLB, NBA, and many more. As Brand Manager, I get to interact daily with nearly every department in the company to make sure each project stays on track. I work specifically with our licensed product, managing the communication and approvals from concept through to the retail shelf. We have a new product called Odd Pods that is just hitting stores. Odd Pods are cute little pod shaped toys that pop apart and have interchangeable pieces. This product took quite awhile to develop, so I am excited to see how the public reacts!

How does this job compliment your art and other creative endeavors?

Although I have a “business” position at McFarlane Toys, I really enjoy working in the creative environment the company promotes. I get to work with comic artists, concept artists, sculptors and painters who are all very talented. Seeing the different artists pour their hearts into each project motivates me to push myself to improve my art in my off time.

What is one thing about your current career that you didn’t anticipate when you were younger? How did your career evolve in ways you didn’t expect?

I thought I would make my living at dance, not in an office, but it ended up being the other way around. I definitely never dreamed I’d make my living playing with toys! I started at McFarlane Toys as the receptionist and worked my way up through many different positions. Actually, working in the different fields (PR, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service) gave me a very different perspective than just picking a major in college. Getting to know each department also helped me advance within the company. I work closely with the executives, and I know who to go to for each project; this saves the company time and resources.

If you could give other artists advice about money or getting started in their career, what would you say?

You don’t have to make a living strictly with your art. If you have a passion for something, you will find a way to fit it into your life in a way that it will continue to evolve. Be willing to try different avenues. Think of ways to combine art into your daily life: working in an art-related field, volunteering for local non-profits or teaching others. And most of all – work hard. You won’t get far in art or business without a strong work ethic!