Category: Promotion
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Contextualization
Over a decade ago, researchers ran an experiment, starting by generating hundreds of pieces of art and splitting the art into two groups (source, backup). One group was labelled as being part of a prestigious art gallery, and the other was labelled as computer generated. The researchers recruited fourteen student subjects, scanned their brains with…
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Contentions: Describing your work
The way you describe your work is incredibly important. Not only is it how other people know what it is you do; it’s also a chance to show what you believe in, and to make the case they should believe it too. For example, Debbie Millman distinguishes between the image of “personal brand,” and the…
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Pounding the pavement
I’m constantly reminded of how hard successful people work to get their work out there. Last week, I met up with a NYT-bestselling author who took an interview with me, and told me he’d been cold emailing people on TikTok offering to send them copies of his book. Even with over a million copies sold,…
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Make a habit of sharing other people’s work
One of the scariest things about promoting your own work is the fundamental reality that nobody else cares. It’s not a personal attack on the worth of you or your work; it’s just that people are living their own lives. They experience their own thoughts, curiosities, and challenges. You may know this in theory, but…
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Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the Paris Expo, which over…
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Overidentification
It really isn’t always your responsibility. Timing won’t always work out right away. It won’t always feel like this. People don’t ignore or reject you, they’re living their own lives. Things will not always turn out as you prefer or expect. It doesn’t always get worse. Things are constantly changing. Just trying is enough. P.S.,…
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How to distribute your writing
A friend approached me a week ago or so with a really great long-form article he’d published. 3,000 words, really in-depth, oozing industry expertise. I wasn’t even part of the industry and I enjoyed it. He asked me for suggestions, and my main question was: What’s the plan for people finding this piece? Our minds…