Self-marketing decisions
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@smceccarelli What a great post! Thanks for sharing all this great insight.
I've been wondering about the efficacy of postcards myself recently. It certainly does seem like a lot of work (and money! Especially if you're sending to American publishers yet don't live in the States yourself...postage is expensive!).
It's funny you mention Behance - less than a week ago I signed up again after years of not being on it. For now I've just posted my graphic design related work, but now that you've had success with it for illustration, I think I'll check to see if there's different groupings you can put things into (so that I can keep the graphic design work separate from the illustration).
Also... a HUGE congrats on your new book contract! I can't wait to hear more about it. Yay!!! -
Thank you Simona for sharing your experience. I'm at the beginning steps of understanding how the illustration business works and this is exactly the kind of info we all need to share with each other. Very useful!! I recently obtained a little extra money and was on the fence between buying an iPad pro or using it for a postcard campaign. I decided on the iPad pro and I'm glad I did based on your experience. I found your comments about Bechance to be very interesting. I've had very little buzz with my account because I haven't spent time with the layout and presentation. Now I know. Thank you again. Between learning how to paint/draw/communicate, the business side of things also needs attention!
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Thanks for this I've always considered Behance as an after thought it has always just been the little box that pops up after I update my Adobe portfolio it asks if I'd also like to post my work to Behance and I just click yes. Maybe only ever been to the actual site a couple times a long time ago when I first got my Adobe CC account....now I guess I better get over there and clean it up and start learning the ropes.
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@evilrobot Keep in mind that I do not know how many publishing art directors are on Behance. Advertisement agencies are definitely moving there, and a bunch of other art buyers. There is a good selection of Children´s illustrators in the feeds as well. Are the big-name publishing art directors looking there? I don´t know. At the end of the day, you need many different ways to gather eyes around your work...
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@smceccarelli Congratulations on your book contract!! that is so exciting - thank you for the great informative post too!
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@kevin-longueil Thank you! I have to raise a cheer to my agent, who managed to get nearly double what I would have asked....
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I guess I am still very unfamiliar with how of this works. If you already have an agent, why does sending postcards matter anymore? I assumed that once you have a rep, they get you the work.
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@eric-castleman We agreed to share the marketing. My agent only targets Children´s book publishers and only on the US market. She is a literary agent and focuses most of her work on pitching book dummies - she is doing a great job with my dummy, showing it to pretty cool people (though with no success so far). She will handle other negotiations and contracts if they come along, but she is not that focused on getting “clients” - she is more a “career-building/coaching” type of agent. I sent postcards to magazines and to European publishers - the space that she does not cover. Fundamentally, she does the face-to-face and targeted interactions, while I do blanket marketing.
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Well done on your success and thanks for sharing this information
I'm on Behance but it is really difficult getting noticed on it. I use it to find other artists and get inspiration a lot though.website: https://thimblefolio.com
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@christine-garner I have seen your Behance account and you have beautiful work there! Here are a couple of pointers I got from the friend who helped me get on Behance:
- A Behance project normally consists of a series of illustrations related to the same theme (for example all of your animal illustrations, the best of the year, a whole book), often arranged together with text or other materials to build a full presentation of a project. Single illustrations do not fare well on Behance.
- Attracting eyes (and followers) and being included in other people’s collections is the focus of the first few months on Behance. The main way to do this is through interaction: making solid comments on other people‘s work, especially illustrators that have similar styles or work in the same area and have a good following. People look at the collections pinned by prominent accounts - similar to Pinterest - so getting on those collections is a good strategy.
Again, it is a lot of work and takes a long time - Behance is much slower than other social media platforms.
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@smceccarelli @smceccarelli I have never looked into Bechance before - i was just now scrolling through the curated illustration galleries to see if there was any possibility that my work might stack up to any of it and I bumped into your "Forest Kids" gallery - Which led me to your other galleries which led me to your Charlotte Holmes pieces! Those are SO good!! (here is the link for folks)
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@kevin-longueil Thank you Kevin! And your work definitely stacks up!
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@smceccarelli Thank you for the advice, really helpful
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I wanted to mention what happened yesterday: it sort of makes the case. I put all "Alice" illustrations in a nice layout last week and posted them on Behance. Yesterday morning at 5 am (my time), the Behance editorial team featured the project on the Illustration collection - the feature time is 24 hours, so it ended at 5 am this morning. The pickup was really good (about 3700 views) - and during the past two days I have been contacted by six prospective clients. Most of these are uninteresting or plain weird (one Chinese company contacted me to do designs for children slippers ... !?), but I have arranged a couple of follow-up calls to discuss two potentially legit ones. So, yes - it's quite an interesting platform to promote on...
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@smceccarelli Thank you so much for sharing all this information! This is very valuable to other artists. I was really wondering what to do with Behance, because it seems so overwhelming when you begin. I really like what you did with the layout of your projects, you gave so much ideas of how to approach it!
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How does Behance work with regards to getting seen? Can I place tags?
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@eric-castleman Yes - every project can get a description (not seen by the viewersI and up to 10 keywords. The keywords are also not visible to the viewer (not in a prominent spot anyway), so they are not like tags, they are more like metadata.
Knowing how I use Behance from the other side, (when hiring illustrators) I tend to set keywords not on the content (unless it´s very unique) but more on the genre and general categories (children’s illustration, fairytale, etc...). -
@smceccarelli can you comment more on how you updated your IG as you mentioned in your original post? Also, do you have links to the blogs and videos you went thru?
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@tombarrettillo Here is what I did with my IG channel:
- I converted the channel to a business account. I did not do any paid promotions and I am not sure I ever will, but the business account gives you detailed analytics, which are quite interesting;
- I deleted all posts that I was either not proud of, were not consistent with illustration for children or had low engagement (I left some of the early ones, though, even if they had low numbers by nature). While deleting, I paid some attention to getting a consistent grouping of threes as much as possible (see below). I deleted all that is not illustration or illustration-related or not my work.
- I switched my posting schedule to “campaigns of threes”. Because IG shows your work on a 3-column grid, this gives your profile layout a nice consistency. Now (since four weeks) I post three illustration at a time on Wednesday (my day of highest follower-activity) within 2 hours. The three illustrations are stylistically related or share the same color-palette or even the same story.Another option would be to show process shots and then the final, or the final and then details, in groups of threes. Note that I always try to have material for social media activity. If I cannot post the project I am working on (as is the case for book projects and any client work) I reserve part of my studio hours to do stuff specifically for Instagram. Depending on what it is, I will re-use the same material for Twitter and FB (I try to keep the channels separate now - but I will repost illustration work because I cannot do more than three per week just for social media).
- I spent some time researching influencers and I use their hashtags or mentions (depending how they prefer it). Some that work really well are ChildrenWritersGuild, Illustration_Best and (on Twitter) Colour_Collective. ChildrenWriterGuild now picks one of my IG posts nearly every week - and every time there is a spike in following.
I do not have links to all the blogs and videos I watched on this, but I found the one that led me to change all my IG strategy:
It´s for designers and it´s very long, but it was so interesting for me that I watched it twice. Do go and look at the examples he mentions in between - they are highly inspiring!
The whole channel (The Futur) is actually super interesting, but maybe it is because I do a lot of graphic design and motion design work in my day job - so I can connect to the content (which only marginally touches on Illustration). -
@smceccarelli thanks for posting all this! I find I struggle with the social media side of things- I have an Instagram that I use predominantly and somewhat neglected Twitter and Facebook accounts. I had never really considered a Behance account properly. Needless to say this has helped me rethink how I use social media. A cull of Instagram posts that I am not happy with/ that are irrelevant had never occurred to me and I'd also completely disregarded twitter- so thanks again for sharing this insight!
