bowerbird's advice for you as an artist (take it or leave it) by bowerbird intelligentleman http://zenmagiclove.com/artist/advice.zml copyright 2013 bowerbird intelligentleman table of contents bowerbird's advice for you as an artist table of contents preface -- take it or leave it chapter 1 -- you are an artist, your life is art chapter 2 -- you can keep your art to yourself chapter 3 -- you can decide to share your art chapter 4 -- sharing your art with the world chapter 5 -- deciding instead to sell your art chapter 6 -- setting your price is very complex chapter 7 -- the internet makes it easy to share chapter 8 -- i will concentrate here on e-books chapter 9 -- you simply must use both channels chapter 10 -- using only one channel is half-assed chapter 11 -- blogs are half-assed, and so is facebook chapter 12 -- if art isn't on the web, it's invisible chapter 13 -- thirteen is not an unlucky number chapter 14 -- who'd buy something they get for free? chapter 15 -- still here? and still willing to hear? chapter 16 -- people pay to support things they love chapter 17 -- to be continued... preface take it or leave it this is my advice for you, as an artist, here in 2013. you can take it or leave it, it makes no difference to me. chapter 1 you are an artist, your life is art you are an artist. your life is your art. live it. make it. chapter 2 you can keep your art to yourself you can keep your art to yourself. it can be private to you, and you alone. you don't have to share it. you don't have to promote it. you don't have to put it online. you don't have to try to create a mystique about it. you don't have to sell it. you don't have to listen to people who tell you that you have to do all of those things. it's your life, and your art, and you can do whatever you want with it. which means you can wrap it in tissue-paper and put it in a shoe-box that you hide in the back-corner of your bottom-drawer. chapter 3 you can decide to share your art you can also share your art, if you want to. if you _do_ decide to share your art with the world, have fun doing it. don't turn it into a job. it's fine if you make money doing it, but if you feel like you _have_to_ make money from it, it's gonna feel like a job, and that might kill the fun. if you turn your art into a job, it could very well become drudgery, and drudgery is the enemy of art and creativity. so don't turn your art into a job. have fun with it. be happy. chapter 4 sharing your art with the world if you want to share your art with the world, you're in luck. thanks to the internet, it's never been easier -- in the history of the world -- for you to share your art with the world. the artists from the past would have _loved_ to have had this kind of an advantage. it would have changed their lives in _huge_and_positive_ ways, and made their work so much simpler. in order to make their art, they had to find patrons, or make money for middlemen, or sacrifice themselves to poverty, or suffer in a multitude of other ways. you, on the other hand, are immensely lucky, simply by virtue of the date of your birth. be thankful for your good fortune. be extremely thankful. chapter 5 deciding instead to sell your art i talk about "sharing" your art, as if you are giving it freely to the world. let me be clear that if you want to _sell_ your work instead, that's your right, and i uphold it. i feel that it is necessary for me to warn you that this decision will transform you from a "pure" artist into a _business_person_, and that's not always the best hybridization for an artist. but that's your decision to make, and you don't have to answer to me or to anyone else. you just have to answer to yourself. maybe you're the type of person for whom running a business is fun. that would make you a rare type of artist, to be sure, but it's perfectly ok to be "a rare type of artist". so if you think running a business is fun, and you want to create a business selling your art, have at it. even if you don't turn your art into a business, you should treat it as though it _has_value._ because it does. and, of course, if you create a business out of your art, then you have already made the decision that it has value. good for you. chapter 6 setting your price is very complex if you do decide to sell your self, and your art, you need to decide on a price. there are a lot of complexities in this decision. i will postpone my discussion of them until later, because they get quite messy. but i wanted to mention that issue right now, because the difficulty of "setting a price" can make it easier for you to make the decision to forego the business approach, and instead simply "share" your self, and your art, _freely_ with the world. and -- i am totally convinced -- if you make that decision to gift the world with your art, you might find yourself out on the front-lines, leading a revolution that will rescue human beings from extinction. which is the reason why i am writing this. but again, if you decide to sell, rather than share, know that i support you in that decision. chapter 7 the internet makes it easy to share like i said, the internet makes it very easy for you to share your art with the world. this is especially true if you make art that can be expressed digitally, like words or pictures or audio or video. the internet has already become quite adept at passing around those things. but even if you are a sculptor who works in bronze, or some other _physical_ entity, the internet can help you find and nurture your audience. and i'll discuss the special issues that pertain to such "physical" artists later in this article. but for now, i'm gonna focus on art that can be easily expressed digitally. chapter 8 i will concentrate here on e-books i'm going to focus on books. indeed, i'm going to concentrate specifically on _electronic-books_. one reason is because i've done a lot of research on e-books, and spent a lot of time coding programs related to e-books, so i can leverage that expertise. but the other reason is that e-books can serve as the vehicle which helps you to "package" a number of pieces of your digital art -- text, pictures, audio, video, etc. -- into a convenient download. a "download package" is a cool thing. chapter 9 you simply must use both channels implicit in my last point is this directive: you should put your art on the internet _and_simultaneously_ make it available to people in the form of "download packages". that way, people will have _your_ art saved on _their_ machine. ?? mount your art online _and_simultaneously_ make it downloadable. chapter 10 using only one channel is half-assed that last point is important enough that i'm going to reinforce it by repeating it. it's not enough to do one or the other, online or downloadable. one without the other is half-assed, or actually even _less_ than half-assed. in order to get the full effect, you have to do _both_. the two provide a _synergy_ for each other that boosts the strength of both. chapter 11 blogs are half-assed, and so is facebook make sure you own your own art. in other words, if you put your art (text, graphics, whatever) up on the web, but that's all you did, that is _not_enough_. maybe you think that writing your blog is sufficient. wrong. there's no easy way for your audience to download it completely, in one coherent package, such that they will continue to have it even if the internet goes away in a poof. your blog will be gone. your art will disappear. do you really think wordpress will last forever? it won't. do you really think facebook is immortal? it's not. it will fade away the same way myspace faded away. until one day some corporation will say "it no longer pays" and take it away. but if your work lives on the hard-disks of thousands of your fans, your art won't have to die. it will live to see another day. it's not enough to put your art on the web. it needs to exist offline as well. as the saying goes, "lots of copies keeps stuff safe" -- or "lockss". chapter 12 if art isn't on the web, it's invisible likewise, the problem exists in the opposite direction as well. if your art exists offline, but cannot be visited online, you lose the synergy. your art becomes invisible. there are a bunch of self-published writers who are now selling their books on amazon. (and other e-bookstores too, but mostly amazon.) that's great. i think it's wonderful that these writers can get paid. amazon has truly created a revolution (and it was amazon, all by itself, who started this revolution) in the way that writers can connect so easily with amazon's audience, and the 30% that amazon collects is a bargain-price for this match-making between a writer and complete strangers. but the fact that these books are _only_ available as downloadable objects, and _not_also_ as text which gains the benefits of being exposed out on the open web, means that the art contained within them is not being experienced nearly as widely as it can be, as it _should_ be. chapter 13 thirteen is not an unlucky number thirteen is not an unlucky number. at least that's what people try to tell me. chapter 14 who'd buy something they get for free? now, if you're one of those self-published authors who is selling your e-book, you're going to ask me this: "if i mount my book on the web, where anyone and everyone can read it for free, why would someone actually bother to go to a bookstore and pay money for it?" and although i have some possible answers, my initial assumption is that those self-published authors wouldn't find my possible answers to be all that convincing. so let me just surrender and give this as my first reply: "they won't go buy your book; they will read it on the web for free; so you can't hope to sell any copies; so if your sole aim is to sell those copies, you can just stop reading this right now." so you are welcome to stop reading now, if you want. because if that's what your world-view is, then i probably won't be able to convince you otherwise, because you probably don't want to be convinced otherwise. so just walk away, and continue doing whatever you were doing. chapter 15 still here? and still willing to hear? so, are you still here?, still willing to hear?, and continuing to read? ok, good. chapter 16 people pay to support things they love again, my focus is on books. so let's talk about books for a bit. chapter 17 to be continued...