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Introduction to the Circles of Art Marketing
My forthcoming book, Circles of Art Marketing, will be released later this year. The excerpt below is from the introduction and outlines our philosophy of art marketing and how it differs greatly from much of what you read online.
The Circles of Art Marketingis a mental model I’ve developed that provides actionable information about how to market art in a holistic, human-centric, non-coercive, online-first way.
I felt obliged to write this book to counteract the proliferation of soulless, spammy, manipulative marketing techniques that are so often taught, utilized, and copied online. I believe that online marketing is nearing a long-overdue pendulum swing away from short term metrics and local maximization techniques (the worst of which include pop ups, email spam, and over zealous and privacy invading data collection) back toward good old fashioned long-term thinking and relating to our customers as human beings. That means maximizing for the long-term, and treating people with dignity and respect.
My marketing philosophy is an inversion of the golden rule: Don’t do unto others as you don’t want them to do unto you. It’s not okay to hate in-your-face pop-ups, and then install them on your own website because a consultant told you that, “they work.” It is not okay to see that most websites are turning into annoying hot garbage and then contribute to the problem yourself. That is an ethical violation (assuming you hate pop-ups yourself).
Marketers (and the people they advise) run their ships aground into the rocks lured by the twin siren songs of attention and engagement, which they see as the currency of the internet. This is why you see adult artists dancing on TikTok like clowns. But those marketers are mistaken. Attention for attention’s sake is worthless. What most marketers either don’t know, or don’t remember, is that the true currency of the internet and, indeed, all marketing is trust. Plug your ears and block out those tempting but hollow siren songs while we look at a more human, a more holistic approach.
Part of our holistic approach is to, in the ethos of art, inspire the world and strive to make our corner of it a better place. More importantly for your marketing, while using annoying techniques like pop-ups juice your metrics in the short-term, they hurt your Reputational Power in the long-term (we’ll cover Reputational Power in Circle III - Your Products), and as creatives, we are in it for the long-term. Never forget that great marketing is much more about creating magic than it is about juicing metrics.
To conceptualize The Circles of Art Marketing, start by envisioning a series of concentric circles with your insatiable creative drive at the very center and the furthest extent of your reach online (and offline) at the very outer edge. Each “ring” as you move closer to the center represents people and marketing channels that are more engaged, more serious, and more likely to purchase your art.
This idea of “Circles of Art Marketing” looks something like figure 1:
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Art is the ultimate expression of the insatiable human hunger to create and it allows humans to send inspiration, energy and subjective knowledge to one another across space and time.
Because of this, the more aligned you are with your soul's true inner fire to create, the more you will master your craft, the higher quality your art will be, and the better this method will work. Your truth and thus your art needs to be like a “black hole” at the center of all these rings creating gravity that draws people inexorably toward the center. The Circles Framework encompasses, holistically, the range of activities you have to master in your art practice. You will notice, throughout the book, I will refer to what you do as an art practice because it is a lifetime commitment. You are never done. You always have to practice and learn more. In this way, in the strictest sense, an art practice is not only a “career” or a “business.” It is more and different. You might make money from it and, it might indeed be what you do with your working hours. But your art practice is something sacred that transcends a business while still being one. And that fact has deep implications, as you will see, for how you must create and how you must market your art in a different manner than the average businessperson would.
As you can see in figure 1 above, there are seven circles in the model with your True Self, The Sovereign Artist, in the very center (symbolized by the fleur-de-lis), and the most public channels you can reach in the outer ring which we have named Awareness. It is no coincidence that in antiquity, the number seven was considered to be the number symbolizing completeness, divine fulfillment, or perfection. So we will take that as a sign that this model is complete…..
More to come….
Thank you for reading this excerpt, if you are interested in joining the waitlist for notification when the book is released, please click the button below:
Creatively,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder
Creativity Fanatic
PS - if you are a paid BoldBrush subscriber, you can get the current PDF version of the Circles of Art Marketing Book by clicking the button below. Please note, the current PDF is an earlier draft and the final book has a different organization, has several more chapters added, and will be edited. However the current PDF has all of the major concepts (though they will be slightly renamed in the final version):
If you are a FASO member (But not a BoldBrush Paid Subscriber), you can get the PDF here.
❤️ FASOLOVES Carla Paine’s oil paintings!
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See More of Carla Paine’s art by clicking here.
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