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What did Janice Joplin mean when she said "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose?” After drinking a little too much wine last Friday night, Bobby McGhee came on, and the song has been my earworm all week.   I highly value freedom, so I wondered, what did she mean? What actually exists that one could lose?  If I have to “lose everything”, what does “everything” even refer to? Maybe I should start there.   It could refer to material things, certainly.  One could lose their phone, their keys, their car, their home, and even their loved ones.  I often say, “Everything you [...]

Yesterday was a disgrace.  Yesterday was disappointing.  It’s sadly becoming apparent that we are,as a country, more divided than ever and today’s events show that this division is reaching dangerous levels.  We saw people storming the US Capitol, forcing our elected officials to cower in fear.   In the past year, we've had violent protests that involved destruction of property, theft, vandalism, assault and murder.  I fear, if we don’t come together as a people, it will get worse.  A house divided will fall.  We, individually, can't stop those protests, riots, or insurrections. But we can, in our small niche in the world, focus [...]

There is a pervasive myth that marketing people keep spreading about art.   It's part of what I call The Marketing Guru Myth.   This particular myth is this:  that to discover what makes your art unique that you should start by considering what your customers want.   With most products this is true.  In fact, startup accelerator YCombinator's  mantra is "Make something people want."  However, art isn't most products.  And, unlike other products, with your art, if you want it to be unique, you shouldn't "start by considering what your customers want." With art, you start by considering what you want.   In fact, I'd argue if you start [...]

If you have a common name, or, even if there is another individual with the same name who consistently outranks you in Google, it's worth considering changing your name.    You don't have to legally change your name.  If this is an issue for you, just work under a professional name.  "Mark Twain" was an alias of Samuel Clemens, not his legal name.   Find a professional name that "Googleable".   And, importantly, one that is unique, so that you can easily be the only result when people type it into Google.   Most people, when interested in an artist, will Google the name of the artist they are [...]

The first automobiles were called "horseless carriages."  And indeed, many early automobiles were even designed to look like carriages.   Whenever a new technology is introduced, people don't really know how to use it properly, so they try to use it like a similar, older technology.  This is a natural tendency, but these early attempts usually utilize the new technology in a clunky, sub-optimal way. This phenomenon has been dubbed the "Valley of Mismatch" by Florent Crivello, though I learned about it through Gary Basin. -- Here are some other "Valley of Mismatch" examples:    The first television ads where just radio ads played on TV with a static [...]

In 2018, a painting by a computer artificial intelligence sold for $432,000 at Christie's.      Being in both the art and the technology fields, I've kept an eye on AI and art.  And, to be honest, I've seen increasingly good "paintings" being created entirely by computers that have been trained through "machine learning" algorithms. Many of these works have been good enough that1. I'd hang them on my wall and 2. If I didn't know they were created by AI, I would have easily believed it they were painted human artists. These algorithms will continue to improve.  So, how are you going to ensure [...]

Over the past year and, especially over the past few months BoldBrush has gotten quite skilled at listening to our customers. We've added live webinars, we've created an engaged Facebook group, we've refined our process of escalating customer issues from support to development and back rapidly. We send Product Market Fit surveys daily. The results of those surveys come directly into my inbox and I respond to nearly every single one. That is a great source of direct feedback from customers. When people cancel our service, they get a personal email from me, and many of those people respond, opening many ongoing conversations that [...]

When you market yourself or your art by email, your sender reputation is hugely important and you must take active steps to manage it, protect it and improve it. What is a Sender Reputation? Your sender reputation is created and assigned by the big mailbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and AOL.  When you start sending email newsletters, these companies' algorithms make note of many details about your messages and create a new reputation for you.  This reputation changes for better or for worse based on the actions you and your subscribers take. You want to be sure your sender reputation is getting [...]

  Many artists make a huge mistake with their email marketing:  they use their gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, outlook.com or similar address when sending their marketing emails.   If you're doing this, you need to stop, immediately.   It will cut your open rate and sales in half.    Yes, that's right, you could potentially double your sales just by using a better email address.     Here's a newsletter I received recently from an artist sending from a gmail.com address.     Yikes!   Who would open and read the message above?  Who would click on anything it contained?  Almost nobody.  Plus, when Gmail flags messages like this, images are all disabled.  So the recipient [...]

There are two Unicode characters for apostrophe, U+0027 (also ASCII hex 27), and U+2019. Compare, Hamlet's father's ghost (U+0027) Hamlet's father's ghost (U+2019) [...]