The feast or famine cycle is the bane of every creative business and every creative entrepreneur I know. “Feast or famine cycle” refers to the stomach-dropping ride that you experience when your business flip flops from months with so much work you can’t handle it and stress out like crazy (even if the resulting payday is pretty nice) – these are the feast months – and then careens down into months where your schedule is empty and you feel like you’re never going to work again and you’re terrified that your career is over and you have no idea how you’re going to pay any of your bills because you aren’t doing any work, which means you aren’t making any money – these are the famine months. And I’ll bet that, as you were listening to me these last 45 seconds, you were able to think back to months you’ve had in the past year or so that were both famine months and feast months. Riding the feast or famine roller coaster is common enough to be almost universal among creative entrepreneurs. And it is terrifying. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to spend your creative life on that roller coaster. You can get off. And getting off starts when you intentionally market for feast, not famine.

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Hello, thriving artists, and welcome to the Starving Artist No More podcast! I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Araya. I’m an artist, musician, and storyteller, and I’m also the founder of Starving Artist No More, a creative entrepreneurship community that is all about helping artists and creatives just like you build businesses that fulfill them and sustain them, giving them what they need personally, creatively, and financially. I’m so excited you’re here with me today.

Before we get to the main topic of today’s podcast episode, marketing for feast, not famine, I have to mention that I have a free resource available on my website that goes perfectly with today’s discussion. Yes, getting out of the feast or famine cycle is dependent on your marketing activities, which is what we’re going to talk about today, but just marketing isn’t enough by itself. You also have to manage your finances well if you truly want to escape the feast or famine roller coaster. And that’s where this free guide comes in.

It’s titled, “Say Goodbye to Feast or Famine: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs,” and it will walk you through the process of setting your finances up in a way that you will have consistent, reliable income over the long term. I know that might feel like an impossible dream to you right now. Most of the creative entrepreneurs I work with really struggle with the financial side of things. But it is not impossible. You can get control and even mastery over your business finances, and I really believe this guide can help you get there. Just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form to have the guide delivered to your email inbox.

Combined with marketing for feast, which is what we’re going to talk about today, working on your finances like this guide suggests will help you say goodbye to the feast or famine cycle once and for all! Again, just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com and fill out the contact form.

Ok, so now that you know about that free guide, it’s time to get started with the main topic of today’s discussion: marketing for feast, not famine. And before we even get into what exactly I mean when I say that, I feel like I need to address the elephant in the room. Yes, you need to market yourself and your work.

There – I said it! Part of your duty, your responsibility, as an artist, is to market yourself and your work.

Aaaaand, right now, some of you are probably reaching for the pause button in your podcast player, or even trying to figure out how to unsubscribe. In the creative and artistic world, “marketing” has become a dirty word. I have no doubt that some of you, maybe even all of you, listening to this episode are feeling some deep, instinctive objections to the thought that marketing yourself and your work is something that you need to do.

But it is. Marketing is absolutely essential for you, a fabulous artist who is dedicated to your craft and who is devoted to a life of creativity and creative expression. Marketing is part of your creative work.

When you let others know about your work and your business, which is really all that marketing is – telling others about the artistic services you offer, you are ensuring that your work gets to the people who would benefit from it the most. Note that I didn’t say “enjoy” or “like” your work. I fully recognize that not all art makes others feel comfortable. A lot of very important art is designed to stir a reaction in the audience, and that reaction isn’t always positive. But your work does have value, and it does benefit others. And no one will ever know about it unless you market it.

Painter Irwin Greenberg said, “If what you have to say is from your deepest feelings, you'll find an audience that responds.” And in many respects, he is right. Anything you create that is truly a representation of your deepest truth and emotions will absolutely speak to an audience in a deep and meaningful way.

But if you don’t ever let people know that your art exists, that audience that would otherwise respond to your work will never have the opportunity to do so. I would amend Greenburg’s statement by saying that “If what you have to say is from your deepest feelings, you'll find an audience that responds, once you let that audience know that you and your work exist.” By marketing your work, you’re giving your audience the chance to be deeply moved by your work, and to respond to it.

When you share your work with others, which, again, is really all that marketing is, you are allowing your work to be made whole. The renowned photographer Ansel Adams once said, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” And this is true for every kind of art imaginable. In the art museum, there are two people: the painter and the viewer. In the concert hall at a music performance, there are three people: the composer, the performer, and the listener. In the playhouse, there are three people: the playwright, the actor, and the audience member. In the audiobooks that I narrate, there are also three people: the author, me the narrator, and the listener. Whether you think of your art as one that involves two people or three people, the final observer and consumer of your work – the final person involved in the work – is always someone in the audience. Without the audience, your work has no life. With audience, your work can touch others and do what it was always meant to do: benefit others in some way.

If marketing is so important to the life of a creative and so vital to making our work whole, then why do so many artists instinctively feel that marketing their work is a terrible thing, that it is beneath them, and that it is something that they could never, should never, would never ever, do?

That comes from the old “starving artist” myth that I speak against so often. Society’s view of what it means to be an artist is wrong and hurtful and doesn’t serve artists or their audience, but it is still part of the prevailing cultural mores. The stereotype of the lone artist toiling away in a cluttered studio, working as a waiter to pay the bills while jumping at unpaid “opportunities” that promise “exposure,” never actually making a dime from their deep, thoughtful, creative work, is a stereotype that just refuses to die. And that stereotype describes an artist who would never “sell out” or worry about being “commercial” with their work, because all that matters to that starving artist is the creation of the work. That artist doesn’t care about eating or paying the rent – after all, they’re starving – and that artist would never dare to try to market their work.

What that stereotype misses is how our creative work is made whole by the interaction between the work and the audience. A playwright doesn’t write his work hoping that it’s never performed. A playwright writes his plays so that they can be performed on the stage. And when an audience is in the auditorium and laughs at the laugh lines and cries at all the appropriate spots, that’s when the work comes to life. When our work interacts with an audience, it becomes whole and complete in a way that is not possible if our work is buried in a drawer and never sees the light of day.

Because our culture tells us that this is what it means to be an artist from our very earliest days, that stereotype is hard to banish. It’s hard to change our mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance. It’s hard to overcome the cultural assertion that being an artist means that we must starve.

But it is possible to. You can shift your mindset and allow yourself to embrace the truth that marketing your work is about sharing yourself and your work with the people who will benefit the most from it. Marketing is not beneath you. It is an outgrowth of your creativity.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that marketing is a good thing and that it doesn’t constitute “selling out.” And if I have, where do you go from there? If you’re willing to accept that marketing your work is something that you do in service of making your work whole and complete by its interaction with an audience, how do you do it?

The specifics of how you market your work will vary depending on your specific creative industry. Artisans making custom leather handbags and selling directly to consumers will market their work differently than graphic designers working with businesses, and will market their work differently than film actors, and will market their work differently than actors working in the audiobook narration industry. The strategy behind the exact to-dos on your marketing list are specific to you and your creative industry, so I can’t make any sweeping statements about what those strategies are. But I can tell you that the first place you should look as you’re determining your marketing strategy is examining how you’ve gotten work in the past.

Unless you are completely new to your creative business, you have a history of getting work. How did that work come to you? What contacts in your industry helped you get that work? Where did you go and what did you do to get the projects you’ve already completed, or that you’re working on right now?

If you’re an artisan creating custom beaded jewelry for customers who come to you online, maybe you got a rush of work a few months ago after you tweaked the SEO on your website. Perhaps you’re listing your work in an online marketplace like Etsy, and you got a bunch of orders when you adjusted the keywords in your item listings. Or maybe you’re an actor, and you finally started getting cast for roles after you connected with a few key casting directors in your geographic location. Maybe you’re a freelance musician, and you booked a summer full of wedding gigs after you participated in a local wedding showcase event.

Whatever your creative industry, look at your own work history. Be a detective. Look back through your records, whether those are email archives or order receipts, and figure out how every single project you’ve gotten so far came your way. Count the number of different ways that work comes to you. Perhaps some projects come through direct reach-outs to past clients, a few come through advertising of some form, and some come through nurturing your relationship with key industry contacts who haven’t hired you yet but who you hope to work with at some point. Again, whatever your industry, and however you’ve gotten work in the past, review your own business history and determine how you’ve gotten that work in the past.

Then take that detective work a step further: figure out how you were hired for your favorite, most fulfilling, and best paying projects. These kinds of projects are what I call your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot, and I go into way more detail about how to figure out exactly what projects are in your Sweet Spot back in Episode 7 of this podcast, so if you’re interested in learning more about how to find your Sweet Spot, you should listen back to that episode. But for now, just look at your past project list and highlight or somehow make note of the projects you liked the best. And then follow that to examining how those projects came to you. That tells you exactly what kind of marketing you need to be doing going forward.

The first time I took the time to figure out my own Creative & Financial Sweet Spot within my audiobook narration business, I realized that my most favorite projects, the ones that lit me up inside and that paid me really well, all came from one of four specific audiobook casting directors. And it was suddenly very clear to me that staying current on my reach-outs to those four people, making sure I was staying on their radar as they were making their casting decisions (in a respectful and courteous manner, of course), was my marketing priority number one. These four people seemed to get me and my work, and they instinctively understood which projects were best suited for me. So developing my relationships with them was where I needed to put my marketing focus.

Your results might not be as clear cut as mine were, or they might turn out to be even more obvious. But either way, I know that you will learn an immense amount about the inner workings of your business by going through this exercise. Taking the time to go project by project through your work for the past 9-12 months, and prioritizing the best projects as you do so, will give you invaluable guidance about how to move forward.

However, if you’re listening to this and either you don’t yet have a creative business, so you don’t have a history of past projects you can refer to, or you have been doing work you don’t like and that didn’t pay you well, meaning you don’t have any “favorite projects” to look into, then looking back at your project history won’t help you much. Instead, it’s time to look to your peers, colleagues, and mentors. Compare yourself to your colleagues, not in a jealous way or in a “comparisonitis” way, but in an “I want to learn from you” way.

The same way that I just suggested you be a detective into the history of your own business, be a detective in what has worked for your chosen peer or colleague, or even a group of your peers or colleagues. If you know one of your peers well enough to approach them about it, volunteer to pay for an hour of their time and ask them to go through their recent projects with you and share with you how they landed each project.

If you don’t have a relationship with the people you’ve chosen to study, again, approach it like a detective. Look into the publicly available information, from online bios to social media posts and everything in between, and see if you can deduce how work came their way. Trace the threads back: they talked about this project in this way on this platform, and then they got this next project that was related in this way. Study what you can find about their path through your creative industry, with an eye to what you can learn from what has worked for them.

If you take this approach to figuring out what marketing strategy is right for you, I do have one word of caution: don’t let yourself get sucked into comparisonitis. Don’t give in to the green-eyed monster of jealousy and competition and envy. Make sure you’re approaching your review of your peers’ careers with a mindset of curiosity and with a framework of wanting to learn, not from a framework of coveting exactly what your peers have. Remember, you’re a detective. You’re wanting to learn how they got where they are so that you can get where you want to be. You aren’t wanting to be them. Curiosity, not envy and not judgement. Be curious.

If reaching out to peers and colleagues, or studying their careers from afar, doesn’t give you what you need, it’s time to turn to mentors and coaches. I am confident that you have at least one person, and likely several people, in your life who are working in your creative field and who are further along the creative entrepreneurship journey than you are. In fact, you might already have a formalized mentorship or coaching relationship with them. If not, reach out and ask if they would be willing to mentor you in the “how to get work in our industry” side of your business. Get their advice and guidance. They already know you, they know your work, and they know your specific creative industry. They can give you the exact advice you need and help you develop the right strategy for you so that your work is able to reach the audience of people that you’re creating it for.

Once you’ve got your marketing strategy set, once you know how to bring clients to your metaphorical doorstep, it’s time to put that strategy into action, and this is where it gets really hard. Taking action on your marketing strategy must be a consistent thing. If you’re not consistent with your marketing work, your project schedule will not be consistently filled. In other words, the consistency of the flow of work coming into your business is equal to the consistency of the flow of marketing out of your business.

This is where so many creative entrepreneurs I work with lose the thread. When I talk with artist business owners, they’re usually willing to acknowledge that marketing is absolutely vital to their business. They’re willing to let go of the “starving artist” mindset and accept that marketing is something they need to do. And they’re even willing to develop the strategy of who they need to market to, how that marketing work needs to be done, and how often it needs to happen. Once they sit down and really do the thought work to figure it out, the strategy part is usually pretty easy to develop. But when it comes to taking action, they just stop. They either don’t do it at all, or they don’t do it consistently, and so they see no results.

The first tendency, to not do the marketing action at all, is really related back to the mindset piece. When a creative entrepreneur I’m coaching does mindset work and develops a strategy but then can’t take action, the culprit is usually that they need to do more work to adjust their mindset. Their mental model still contains some vestiges of the old “fear of selling out” mentality, and they just get this “ick” feeling deep in the pit of their stomach when they try to do the marketing work. So they don’t do it. They do some mindset work, but not quite enough, and then their marketing strategy languishes in a drawer of their desk, or in a folder on their laptop, never reviewed, never opened, never implemented.

If that’s you, do more work to adjust your mindset. When you hear yourself telling yourself things like “real artists don’t have to market” or “marketing my work means I’m selling out and not a real artist anymore,” make yourself STOP. Those stories you’re telling yourself are lies, and they are actively harming you and your work. They are keeping you from achieving your dreams. Change those stories. Repeatedly tell yourself that your work has value, meaning other people will find it valuable once they know about it. Internally say to yourself that telling others about your work, aka marketing, is what allows your work to become whole and complete, through the process of interacting with and being absorbed by the audience of people who will most benefit from it. Tell yourself these true stories over and over again. Drown out the harmful mindset lies. Help yourself feel good about taking action to market your work. If you find yourself not taking action at all to implement your marketing strategy, go back and work on your mindset around marketing.

The other common problem I see creative entrepreneurs struggle with is lack of consistency. Like I said a moment ago, the consistency of the flow of work coming into your business is equal to the consistency of the flow of marketing out of your business. And this is where you can finally get rid of the feast or famine. When you’re consistently marketing your work, and doing it following an effective and efficient marketing strategy, you won’t have famine months, because the work will be coming in with equal consistency to the marketing work you’re putting out. But so many artists only market in the famine. When those “empty schedule” months hit, they frantically market to anyone and everyone – doesn’t matter if this is a marketing strategy that has brought them good or bad work in the past. If they have any hope of getting work by doing things X, Y, and Z, then they do X, Y, and Z. And then, as a result of all that marketing work, their schedule fills up, and then fills up to the point of overflowing and overwhelming. So they stop marketing. After all, they have work. Why would they reach out to get more work if they already have more work than they can handle? But then the schedule starts to thin out, and the flow of work dies down, and then their schedule is completely empty, and they’re back to famine. It’s time to panic again, and time to slam on the gas on the marketing to bring in more work.

If you are not marketing consistently, then you are marketing for the feast or famine cycle. If you are not marketing all the time, you are guaranteed to have famine in your work. The shortest, most simple, answer as to how to market for feast, not famine, is to market consistently. If you’re doing marketing work regularly, in good times and bad, then your feast or famine roller coaster will eventually start to more closely resemble gently rolling hills. And let me tell you, a gently rolling hill is much more pleasant than a terror-inducing roller coaster.

Before we leave this topic for today, I do have one other reality I must acknowledge: sometimes doing everything I’ve laid out in this episode isn’t enough. Sometimes you’ve done the mindset work and embraced marketing as a valuable part of who you are and what you do as an artist, and you’ve done the self-examination and the peer evaluation to identify the most effective marketing strategies for you and your business, and you’ve put it all into consistent action, and work still doesn’t come. What do you do then? Where do you go?

I have two pieces of advice. First, give it time. I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear. No one wants to hear that they need to wait to have a consistent income and a consistently full project schedule, especially when there are bills to be paid NOW and food that needs to be purchased for you and your family to eat NOW. But unfortunately, waiting is sometimes the best – the only – option. The state of your business, and especially the state of your project calendar, is a direct result of the marketing work that you were doing three to nine months ago, at a minimum. If you were in a feast peak in your business four months ago, and if you stopped doing all of your marketing work as a result of that overwhelming glut of work, then it’s no surprise at all that the consistent marketing work you’ve been doing for the past six weeks hasn’t yet paid off. Always, the marketing work that you are doing in your business is work that will pay off a minimum of three months from now, and more often six to nine months from now. You have to give your new, consistent marketing strategy time to work. These things are not immediate. Marketing today will not instantly bring in paying work tomorrow. You have to give it time.

In the business world, there is a concept called the “The Rule of Seven.” It was developed years ago by Dr. Jeffrey Lant, a marketing expert, and it says that in order to penetrate the buyer's consciousness and to make significant penetration in a given market, you have to contact the prospect a minimum of seven times within a set period, usually 18 months. In simpler, more layman’s terms, people must be exposed to something a minimum of seven times over a long period of time before they’ll consider buying it.

What this means for you and your creative business is that you have to do your marketing work consistently, over and over again, for several months before you’ll start to see the results of that work. You have to give your marketing contacts time to get those “seven touches” with you and your work. You have to give it time. When you feel like you’re marketing and marketing and marketing and not seeing any results, just know that these things take time, and the results will come.

That said, if you’re doing this marketing work for months and months and months on end and still not getting anywhere, it’s time to reevaluate the specific marketing strategy you’re using to get work. Yes, you need to give the marketing time to bear results, but as the old saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If you’ve been following your chosen marketing strategy for nine months or more and haven’t seen any fruits from that labor, it’s time to pick a different strategy. Go back to your own career and play detective. Reach out to your colleagues for advice on what has worked for them. And perhaps most importantly for this particular situation, get the advice and guidance of a mentor or coach. If what you’re doing isn’t working, and if you already have done the thought work to develop your initial marketing strategy, the one that isn’t working, then it’s time to get more help. The right marketing strategy for you and your creative work is out there. You just need to find it.

Creative businesses do always have some level of ups and downs. That’s part of the nature of how an artistic business is structured. Frankly, it’s part of the nature of how any small business functions. Some ups and downs are inevitable.

But if you adjust your mindset to embrace marketing as part of your creative work, and if you identify a marketing strategy that is right for you, and if you consistently take action on that marketing strategy, you can smooth them out. The more consistent you are, the smoother your feast or famine cycle will be, until it will feel like you’ve left the feast or famine cycle far behind. No more will you be strapped into a terrifying roller coaster. Rather, you’ll be taking a joyous car ride across a picturesque landscape of gently rolling hills. You can market for feast, not famine.

Thank you so much for being with me today. I’m so glad you chose to spend this time learning about how you can thrive in your creative business. I hope these concepts were thought-provoking for you and prompted you to examine how you reach your audience. If you have any questions or comments for me, I’d love to hear from you. You can always reach me through my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. And if you have a friend or colleague who you think would be interested in today’s episode, or any episode, of this podcast, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! I am always so very appreciative of likes and reviews using your podcast player of choice, and of course, don’t forget to subscribe so that you know when new episodes become available. My vision is that we have a world full of creative entrepreneurs who are living their dreams of artistic joy and excitement, and my hope is that the more people who listen to this little podcast and take action on the advice included in it, the closer we are to a world full of creative entrepreneurs who are flourishing within their work. A huge shout-out of gratitude to my husband and audio engineer, Arturo Araya, who makes sure that this podcast sounds wonderful and is ready for your listening ears.

Marketing is not a dirty word. Marketing is what allows your work to reach those who will most benefit from it, and it allows your work to become whole as a result. And when you market for feast, not famine, you are taking intentional steps to banish the feast or famine cycle forever, to say goodbye your life as a starving artist. You are choosing instead to embrace the full, rich, vibrant life of a thriving artist. I can’t wait to see what you create.