A Portrait of the Artist
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| April 20, 2000
By BONNIE ROTHMAN MORRIS
Ms. Shapiro, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., realized that she had neglected the final piece of the puzzle: a marketing plan. "Nobody on the planet was going to know the book was there," she said. Ms. Shapiro then figured out what she needed to do: publicize the book on the Web in any way possible, including offering to write reviews of other peoples' books on sites frequented by women, in return for a mention of her book. Eventually, she sold copies of the book through Amazon.com and garnered enthusiastic reviews on that site. Her efforts not only helped her establish a readership but also grabbed the attention of a net-surfing publishing executive who purchased the book for mail-order book clubs. Ms. Shapiro landed a contract for "Lip Service" with Pocketbooks. The book, which was published in hardback in August 1999, will be issued in paperback this summer, and Ms. Shapiro has written two more novels for the company. Luckily, she was able to avoid the mistake made by many
artists who leap onto the Internet with a single-serving Web site and expect
to be discovered instantly, showered with accolades and riches, and able
to give up their day jobs.
" 'If you build it, they will come,' just isn't true," said Eve Smith, project manager for Open Studio: The Arts Online, a four-year-old project financed by the Benton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts that helps artists and arts groups learn how to use the Web to promote their work (www.openstudio.org). To start on the road to recognition, Ms. Smith advises artists to list their Web sites with as many search engines as possible and join e-mail lists. "Merely having a Web presence will not be enough to attract people to what you do," added Ms. Smith, noting that the Open Studio, which is based in Washington, was founded because artists and arts groups were perceived to be among those most likely to fall into the digital divide without proper training. To date, the project has helped more than 1,100 artists and arts groups with the nuances of getting recognition on the Web. Faced with the unlikelihood of being discovered the old-fashioned self-produced-, self-maintained-Web-site way, and without the time and unbridled drive of Ms. Shapiro, artists and writers have plenty of Web sites where they can gather, post their work -- or images of it -- and offer it for sale. Among the sites are Art on the Net (www.art.net); iTheo.com (www.itheo.com) which features online galleries; MightyWords (www.mightywords.com), an e-book store where authors can post work to sell in electronic format only, and iUniverse.com, (www.iUniverse.com), another e-publishing site. SITE-SEEING: FOR ARTISTS
The advantages of aligning with umbrella sites, the sites' founders say, is greater recognition. MightyWords and iTheo.com advertise online and in print, creating awareness that is intended to lure traffic. Artists showing work on these sites may be tempted to stop and let the advertising draw interested patrons to them, but even at these sites, the "if you build it, they will come" maxim does not hold. The artist must be a partner in marketing efforts, Web site executives said. MightyWords, where anyone can publish anything and offer it for sale in an electronic format only, offers a service, Writer's Corner, that is a marketing primer for authors, complete with HTML formatting tips and press releases in template form. ITheo.com does much the same, providing software for artists to create and maintain contact lists and opening communication between the artists and their audiences. "We believe in doing the heavy lifting in terms of getting people to the site," said Judy Kirkpatrick, executive vice president of MightyWords. But she added, "Authors have to be just as involved as you are in making the work available." There are 5,000 authors selling 7,000 novels, novellas, short stories and nonfiction works on the site, which began operating about a month ago. ITheo.com is named for Vincent van Gogh's brother, Theo, who was a legendary handholder for Vincent and many other artists. The site helps manage e-mail lists, accepts buyers' credit cards and offers discounts on supplies like brushes and paint. "We found that artists were awkwardly exploiting the Web," said Akash Agarwal, co-founder of iTheo.com. "They weren't using it to segment their business for additional exposure." The approach seems to be working for Aondrea Maynrad, who has sold four paintings on iTheo since the site began on March 20. Ms. Maynrad said that a year ago she had been naïve about the Web, but she said she had been "pretty active and comfortable" promoting her work. She is not represented by a gallery and has shown her work in cafés, home accessory boutiques and beauty salons in her native San Francisco. Initially, Ms. Maynrad showed 11 paintings on the Web site, and she was an instant hit. "I expect to be able to grow my buyer base pretty quickly," said Ms. Maynrad, who added that breaking into the traditional bricks and mortar gallery was difficult for emerging artists like herself. Despite the potential audiences that the new sites are intent on bringing to artists, there are those who prefer to fly solo on the Web and, despite the odds, are discovered.
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 Neal Alexander for The New York Times
has expanded her audience through the Web. "We put out a lot of feelers and were hoping through word of mouth to find out about local artists who might be interested in promoting their work," said Joel Posner, the film's producer and co-writer. Mr. Posner's real-world search proved fruitless, sending him to the Web, where he found Ms. Jacobs. "It's been my dream for years to be ready for a lot to happen, and this is an incredible stroke of good luck," said Ms. Jacobs, who is delighted by the prospect of the national, even international exposure that the film might bring to her work. Luck indeed. Ms. Jacobs said she had listed her Web site with as many search engines as possible and joined artists' groups online. She maintained the site, updating it monthly. She did what online marketing experts advise: build it, put the word out about it, and then watch them come.
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n 1996, Melisse Shapiro's
novel "Lip Service" was rejected by every major publishing house in New
York. After the publishers told her that finding an audience for the book
would be difficult, Ms. Shapiro, who writes under the name M. J. Rose,
set out to prove them wrong. She created a Web site where the book could
be downloaded for a fee, then waited for her audience to come to her. Few
came.