#176 - When Your Audience Gives You A Hint

Stand-up comedians have this tremendous advantage. They develop their material and then throw it into the dark void in front of them, the audience, on an open mic night. They get immediate feedback: either silence or roaring laughter. They can use that feedback to change their material or to decide to ditch it.

Online, we artists can have the same now, too. If we plan it carefully, we can get instant valuable feedback on our work: whether people like it or not. One cool thing about our modern times is that we can put things out there and immediately gauge responses.

Not necessarily on social media, because these platforms are gamed, the statistics distorted by the platform’s hidden agenda.

You perhaps know the feeling. You post something on social media, and your post is met with a lukewarm response. This is not a measure of how good your post is! The social media platforms are currently messed up and, in my opinion, not worth posting on. Whether a post gains traction there seems to depend on whether a group of managers wanted your type of post to gain traction. It has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your post.

Right now, social media is like being a stand-up comedian: throwing your material out into the dark void, and whether your audience sees your act or not depends on whether the venue owner likes your sweater.

But in some places online, it can work.

On YouTube, the feedback is almost instant: Within two days, you will know how well your YouTube video did, including how many people clicked to see it, how long they watched it, and where they left it.

It can be the same with newsletters. I devised a series: “Five Content Types Artists Can Share.” I posted the first three, and each one got several unsubscribes!

Talk about direct feedback!

I was like that stand-up comedian on open mic night, throwing my material into that dark void in front of me—my newsletter, and I got instant feedback: several unsubscribes.

It had happened before. I used to only post exercises and saw the open rate (the percentage of people opening my newsletter) drop.

You can feel resentful about that. I put in all this time to create free stuff, and that is how I am rewarded? But I get it. I unsubscribe from newsletters, too, when I start feeling negative emotions after reading them.

The “Five Content Types Artists Can Share” were about promoting things (Pthew!), not making things, and the topic of promotion, marketing, and commerce in general can leave a bad taste in artists' mouths. Maybe.

And they unsubscribe. Or stop opening future newsletters.

I developed this new formula: I share a drawing exercise at the top, followed by a text on some topic or idea worth pondering, like this one on whether you should keep sharing something if your audience tells you they are not interested, and ending the article with a link to some drawing resource on the website. This seems to do well—most of the time.

The first three “Five Content Types Artists Can Share” articles didn’t do well. I don’t know what to do with parts four, five, and six. I may post the last three somewhere in the future. Or should I?

Should you even listen to that kind of feedback? Should you care? You shouldn’t when it comes to making things, but you should when it comes to sharing them. Make art you like. Make it something you want it to be. Whether you should share depends on how it will be received and whether it is worth your time if it isn’t received well. Why bother?

You can make things in private. Before the internet and social media, most artists did that for years and years before they got a break, if they ever did.

My Week

So, here I am, sharing new things and throwing new material into that dark void that is my newsletter!

The Discord was dormant for a while, but it is active and thriving with activity right now! It’s fun for artists to interact with each other, sharing art, giving and receiving feedback, asking questions, and giving and receiving answers.

I shared three spreads from my sketchbooks.

These pages were meant to be kept private, spaces where I could experiment, but they looked cool. The page where I drew the woman in the coat is an example of how I now do memory drawing exercises: repeatedly drawing the same thing from observation and memory until I feel I got it. I also played around with proportions there.

I did share them this time. Maybe I’ll share more. Or maybe not. But I am going to keep drawing these! These pages give me a lot of pleasure.

I also made a page that serves what I call “ art flashcards ,” it shows you an image, you try to draw it from memory, or otherwise observation, and based on how well you tell it you did, it will re-schedule that image either in the near or far future and then show you the next image. It also has my podcast player (which creates a randomized playlist from many great podcasts) at the bottom of the page. I use it daily now, and it’s really cool (if I may say so myself): no fussing about searching for references and searching for something to listen to. I just go to that page, press play on the podcast player, and start drawing the reference image.

The art flashcards may only be useful to me. In that case, I’ll stop sharing them, but they will still be useful to me.

To share, or not to share. Depends on how an audience receives it. But that should be independent of whether you make something. That should depend on whether it pleases you.

We don’t have to always share everything. It is okay if it only pleases us.