Selling the Wag (Essay) (Patreon)

I had a conversation with a friend recently about social cliques, and how people often get into them. This got me thinking about how that works when you’re a creative. I cannot say I don’t have my friends and there aren’t people I enjoy hanging out with, but this desire also intersects with being a creative and the need to promote your work.

As a creative, you might have your good friends and your core group, but you still need to be receptive to people outside your group, because the vast majority of people who will be interested in your work won’t be your friends. You’ll have to deal with the general public, and for some people that’s hard. I like my little hidey hole full of books, but I know when it comes to getting people to buy my books, I need to not only sell the book, I need to sell myself. And to do that, I need an openness to go beyond my comfort zone. In furry, since we need some levity with this topic, I’m going to refer to that selling the wag of my tail.

This is a tough thing for many people. In an ideal world, artists, writers, musicians, and crafters would create their work, and the people who create the best works would earn the most money. In this reality, Twitter destroys your following by doing something asinine, and you spend months or years trying to rebuild it and at best can only find some of the pieces. This does though show one of those hard truths of this process: all you can really rely on as a creative is yourself.

Now let’s not be a downer here. This doesn’t mean don’t have friends or other creatives you work with, but at the end of the day, if you aren’t collaborating with others on a project, the success and exposure a specific piece of your work receives comes down to you. Unless someone else is willing to do all this leg work for you, you’re the one out there doing this stuff. When people come up to you and ask you about your work, you’re the one who they’re going to talk to. That means how you present yourself and how you deal with people matters. That mean we need to smile or wag our imaginary tails here in furry. Being friendly and open helps this process immensely. I’d love for this not to be a part of the process of finding an audience, but the way you present yourself impacts how people respond to your work. You can be shy, you can be boisterous, but you are the one who tells people about your work, and you ultimately are the one to interest them in it.

The hard reality about this is this is terrifying or very hard for some people to do. It’s also exhausting. When people walk up to me at a con, I feel I present a reasonable case for why someone should check out my work, but even after having run my own dealer’s table at multiple cons, it’s still kind of terrifying to think that this is one of the primary ways you get discovered.

I am not always that ears perked, tail wagging canine. I have my own emotions, fears, nightmares, and joys. Everyone does, but when I step out to talk about my work, I have to sell that wag, and you, if you endeavor to sell your work, will need to do the same. You need that easy patience and the ability to repeat the same concise sales pitch over and over to each new person who picks up whatever you’ve made. If you’re largely promoting stuff online, the pitch changes, but even there you’re selling yourself by being seen as present and working while also not being seen as annoying, so you don’t drive people away.

I’m not sure many people think about this when they embark on a creative endeavor or realize this is part of the process. I’m not even sure it should even be part of the process, but it’s there, waiting for you to do after you’ve done all the hard work creating the thing. And for people with social anxiety, this is probably even harder than creating the work itself. You need to get out there with other people and talk about what you’re doing, and that is terrifying. It requires answering questions, and worse, sometimes having your work casually dismissed with hurtful comments. Yet if you don’t do this, or do as much of this as you can stand, how can anyone find your work?

That does require leaving your comfort zone and getting out there so people can find you. It does require using some social media, and trying to promote yourself, but also not trying so hard the authentic you gets lost in the process. You want to project an ease with self-promotion that can be as hard to master as the craft you create. I wish being a creative didn’t require doing this, but in this reality, it sadly does.