Show your process

No one can find you if you’re invisible. 

Want to build an audience for your work? Need more clients, more commissions, more sales?

First, you need to let people see you. To be discovered you have to make yourself discoverable. You have to be clear about what you do, and who it’s for. What you stand for, the results you get.

Then your tribe – the people you love to work with, the audience you have in mind when you make your best work – will know if it’s right for them. They’ll feel welcome, seen, invited.

This is obvious, but it’s not always easy. 

• How do you get seen or heard when there’s so much noise?
• What should you share – especially when you are working on long-term projects?
• And how can you get people to see the value in what you do, why you charge what you do for your products or services?

The answer: show your process.

People love to see how you do what you do. Even the most mundane details can be interesting, to people who don’t know your world. It allows them to get to know you, to understand your work. Without needing to turn your life into a reality show, 24/7.

If you’re asking your audience, collectors or customers to invest money in your art, buy tickets to your performance, it’s important to show the love and care that went into creating these things.

If you want people to book your services, you need to be clear what’s in it for them – the results you get, for your clients. 

It’s not all about you.

Really, it’s more about them. Your clients. your audience. Your tribe. Make them confident that you know what you’re doing. Explain your work, your techniques.

Show the value they’ll get from hiring you. Give them stories to tell about your materials, your craft, what it looks like backstage, how you make the work.

Show your finished work in people’s homes, to make it easier for them to imagine it in theirs. Share how carefully you pack your work before you send it to them. Talk them through the process if they book you for a service.

Listen to what they tell you.

Especially the questions they ask. For every person that dares ask for more information, there are probably several more who didn’t have the time or the nerve – and so went elsewhere.

Get skilled at addressing their objections, before they even vocalise them. Create a consistent on-boarding process to give new clients all the information they need to work well with you. Start a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website. Explain the stuff they don’t know, and you’re showing your customers that they’re in safe hands.

Long-term, you’re also saving yourself a lot of time explaining the same things again and again.

Show your tools. 

Show your workspace, your materials, your skills. 

If you’re feeling particularly courageous, share your doubts, your fears, those horrible days when the work just feels terrifying and you’d rather be doing anything else.

Share the new things you’re learning. Use your creative assets. Show your past work, and how you made it.

Let people see your research, your experiments, your thinking, your diagrams and rough sketches.

Allow them to know, then like, then trust you. Because only then will they buy from you.

Be generous. 

Don’t hoard your knowledge. Share it.

Teach. Demonstrate. Help others. And in the process, make connections. Stay in touch, nurture those connections. Make yourself useful. Be a resource people turn to. Soon you’ll be an expert, a thought-leader, and opportunities will come to you.

Practice in public. Show your workings-out. And your mistakes.

This might be terrifying at first.

But people enjoy it. And most of them can tell the difference between work in progress, and the finished thing.

(The ones that can’t? The trolls, the haters, the “I could do better than that” baiters? They’re not your people. Let them go, and darken someone else’s door with their dark clouds of negativity.)

You don’t have to be perfect. In fact people will often like you more for being human, flawed. And for showing how hard it can be to make something look effortless.

Let people into your world.

Let them get to know you, understand you. Then they might follow you, become loyal customers. The 1000 true fans that every creative needs to make a good living from what they do.

Share your influences, your teachers, work by other creatives that you enjoy or find interesting. (And of course: remember to credit them!)

Share the stuff that inspires and excites you: the books you’re reading, the music you’re playing, the films you’re watching. And everything else that makes you uniquely you.

This doesn’t have to mean sharing every detail of your life.

We only need to know what you ate for breakfast if you’re a chef, or if food is part of your business. One picture of your dog asleep in the studio is fine. Lots of dog pictures will get you followers, but not bookings or sales.

Mainly, just share the parts that connect to your work. With maybe 20% of what you’re sharing about the rest of your life. (But only if you want to.)

Austin Kleon is great on this

I wrote this post thinking it was all my original thinking. Then I re-read Austin Kleon‘s gorgeous little book, Show Your Work, and realised I’d lifted a lot from its wisdom-packed pages.

If you’re shy about sharing, I heartily recommend it. It will only take an hour or so to read, but it will linger long afterwards, gently nudging you to share what you do.

Below is just one of Kleon’s illustrations, helping you to decide what to share.

Share daily, if you can.

Or set a regular schedule. Knowing you’re going to share will help you find things. You’ll start to see little info snippets or images everywhere, once you start looking.

Show the time, love, and effort that goes into making what you make. 

Share the frustrations. The quiet satisfactions. The joy of a job well done.

You might also want to tell stories about jobs that didn’t go well. Explain what went wrong, what you learned – and how you saved the day. (Which of course is another way of showing your experience.)

Share social proof.

Share feedback from satisfied customers. Awards, media coverage, past work.

Don’t be sheepish or embarrassed about this. A doctor doesn’t apologise for writing out a prescription. A mechanic doesn’t go all bashful when explaining how he’ll fix your car. Why should you be any different about your skills?

Be shameless. No one knows your work like you do. Telling people about it is just part of the job.

How you show your process is up to you.

Write a blog. Take photos. Film yourself, or get a friend to do it. Talk to your phone or computer and post it as a video, podcast – or both. 

Offer classes. Make how-to videos. Teach a workshop or give a talk, then post it online.

Don’t feel comfortable in the digital sphere? Then go meet your ideal customers or audience in real life. Creatives somehow sold their work for centuries before the internet and social media were invented. You can, too!

Post your work at every stage in the process. Let people see you build it, step by step. Talk about the days when nothing got done at all – and why. 

What might this look like?

Here are some things my clients have done, that made a difference.

• A ceramicist makes a short video showing how carefully her pots are packed before being despatched to customers. She also offers a money-back guarantee if the pot arrives broken – or even if the customer doesn’t like it. And her online orders soar.
• A painter makes a stop-motion video showing him creating a huge canvas, layer by layer. Four months work, condensed into four minutes. It took a lot of effort, but three years on he’s still taking queries from people who’ve seen the film on his website. And selling new work as a result. 
• A photographer records a talk explaining her editing process, the work she puts in after a shoot, with before and after pictures so clients can see how the images are improved. It helps justify her high fees. But it also unexpectedly launches a new income stream, tutoring less experiences photographers in the software she uses. 
• The owner of an art gallery posts a list of the music he’s played that day. People bond over a shared love of Nirvana or the Velvet Underground – then they visit, and eventually buy art. 
• A writer does a podcast in which she talks to other writers about process, problems, and how to build an audience for your work. She establishes her name – and grows her network. 

If this terrifies you, start small. 

Remember that many of the things that are now mundane to you are fascinating to people who don’t know your world or understand your skills. 

Buying paint. Preparing a frame. Setting up a mic for recording. Your vocal warm-up exercises. Preliminary design sketches. What camera kit you use. How you light something you’re shooting. Costume fittings. Makeup tests. The software you use to write a script, the storyboards you create before filming, the mood boards for new designs – this is all material you can share. 

Creative process is often messy. Which is why we feel we should hide it. That we should wait until we have something perfect and complete to show the world.

But perfection is over-rated, and other people’s mess can be interesting. So don’t delay: build an audience now, while you’re still making the work. Let people buy into your story, and see the effort you put in. Show the mess. Show the process. 

Most of all, let you be you. 

Fully, authentically, warts and all. It’s what’s unique about you. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

Be vulnerable. Be brave. And be visible.

Connect, connect, connect. Then watch what unfolds.