For those of us in the arts, building an audience is almost as important as, if not more important than developing your craft. You might be a genius musician, but it won’t do you much good financially if no one knows about you and, according to Greg Sandow, if you don’t make a point to connect with and get to know your potential audience.

Sandow writes,

As part of the project I’m doing at the University of Maryland, members of the school’s symphony orchestra went out to the student union, and started practicing their parts for Strauss’s Heldenleben, the big piece on their upcoming concert…Did the other students at the Student Union get more interested in the  orchestra? Did any of them come to the concert?

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During my visit to the Yale School of Music last week, a student told me about something very like what the students did in Maryland…Some undergraduates started an orchestra, and held rehearsals in some public place on campus, to develop interest, and of course an audience. And in fact a lot of the other students who encountered the rehearsals seemed very interested.

And then what happened? Hardly anybody came to the performance!

So, what is the message here? Sandow is careful to note he is not making blanket assumptions about the outcomes of “guerrilla marketing” techniques such as providing free sneak previews of your work, but offers that simply showing up and giving people free stuff is not necessarily taking full advantage of the opportunity you have created.

He has some great suggestions,

It might not be enough to do guerrilla promos for an event. You have to follow up.

What would the followups be?

…you need to talk to people who watch you rehearse/practice/whatever unexpectedly in public. Make some friends. Get some names! Put these people on an email list. Make them your Facebook friends. Get them following you on Twitter.

You might also try what Peter Gregson did so successfully on the BBC Proms website last summer. Bring a video camera when you show up guerrilla-style in public, and film conversations with people hearing you who seem interested. And, maybe, with some who aren’t interested! Then put these conversations on a website, or a Facebook page. The idea is to get these people to send their friends to your page, to watch the video. And, of course, to find out about your project, as inevitably will happen.

He goes on to list a lot more great ideas, so read the full post. However, it strikes me that a lot of times artists are not short on ideas for promotion, even for free promotion – some of them just do not have the personality for promotion. Some of them are too shy to start a blog, be on YouTube or tweet about themselves. I think another reason artists do not do a great job promoting themselves is that they may simply not have enough time! It is a lot of work promoting yourself as an artist or your arts organization.

According to a fine art photographer I know who supports himself entirely with his art, he says he spends 90% of his marketing and gigging at art fairs and photography workshops. The other 10% of the time is spent shooting photos. Of the time he spends shooting, he says 90% of it is on capturing images he know will sell, and only 10% on things he likes (abstract images) that do not sell as well.

The reality is, being an artist is just like being an entrepreneur. Especially if your idea (your art) is unproven, you have to work that much harder to promote yourself. I think a lot of artists do not realize just to what extent the life of an entrepreneur is a challenge and exercise in sheer stamina.