The Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion: Innovative Techniques to Build Your Career as an Artist - Softcover

Julius Vitali

3.23

13 ratings by Goodreads

9781880559352: The Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion: Innovative Techniques to Build Your Career as an Artist

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880559358 ISBN 13: 9781880559352

Publisher: Allworth Press, 1997

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This book is an innovative guide to understanding and implementing the possibilities for self-promotion and marketing available to fine artists. With an emphasis on which strategies work and which don't, the author explains ingenious and not commonly thought of ways fine artists can become visible and establish a reputation, even on a small budget.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap:

"Artist/author Paints True Self-Promotion Picture"

By Jodi Duckett
Of The Morning Call

The word appears again and again in Julius Vitali's book, ''The Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self Promotion,'' revised edition.

Persistence.

Persistence, Vitali writes, is a hungry artist's ally. Call and call and call. Write and write and write some more. Don't stop until you've talked directly to someone and then check back again.

The man knows what he's talking about. This article is about him, after all.

Vitali, an Emmaus resident and former executive director of Allentown's now-closed Open Space Gallery, has spent decades honing the techniques of self-promotion.

''I have been a professional artist living off my wits for more than 24 years,'' he writes.

His Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion (Allworth Press, $19.95, 239 pp.) serves two goals. It's a way to help people who are important to him -- fellow artists. But it's also a treasury of publicity for himself. The book includes the story of Vitali's life and his work and numerous photos of that work---digital photography and painting.

Marketing and self-promotion is essential for artists, Vitali says. No matter how good their work is, artists can't make a living if they don't have a place to show it or expose people to it. And that's particularly tough in today's economy.

''It's entirely possible you could have your work on a street corner someplace and be at the right place at the right time. But the odds are so high against that happening,'' says Vitali.

''I usually tell people that with the proliferation of arts degrees -- there must be 2,000 to 3,000 people who graduate a year -- the market has become hugely competitive. In order to be able to rise from those numbers you have to be able to know techniques and strategies.''

''The Fine Artist's Guide,'' first published in 1996, was long overdue for an update. Technology and the Internet have changed everything.

''When I was writing the book, Windows 95 was the operating system that was out there. You didn't have much memory or RAM. Now everything is much more sophisticated. You pretty much have to have access to a computer and a digital camera to compete as an artist,'' says Vitali.

For example, paper press releases and slides used to be the modus operandi. Now it's e-mail and digital images.

The book provides, in almost exhausting detail, the nuts and bolts of such things as:

Preparing press releases -- how many words, how to design them.

Describing and documenting your art -- quality of photos, types of images.

Setting up a home office -- necessary equipment and postal rates.

Finding exhibition space -- resources for research, types of exhibition/gallery opportunities.

Alternate sources of income -- freelance writing about your work, selling photographs.

The book also includes profiles of artists -- including Lehigh Valley artists such as Cynthia Rodriguez, Berrisford Boothe and Barnaby Ruhe. Vitali hopes the profiles will provide insight into the process of promoting yourself. They reveal, for example, how a small notice in a newspaper can lead to a a gallery show, which can lead to a grant, and then a show in a big city.

Vitali tells the story about how he created a buzz around his ''puddle portraits,'' which led to grant money, which led to an article in Newsday, which led to an appearance on ''The Late Show with David Letterman.''

Vitali says he believes most artists have ''some sort of rudimentary understanding, but there are refinements that my book gives people.''

"The Fine Artist's Guide to Marketing and Self-Promotion" was also recently featured in

Detroit's Metro Times
Salisbury Press
Business Lehigh Valley
The Artist's Magazine

About the Author:

Julius Vitali is an internationally exhibited artist whose work is in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and Polaroid Corporation. His innovative artwork has been the subject of articles and features in over three hundred newspapers and magazines worldwide, and he has received grants from the NEA, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Adolph and Esther Gottleib Foundation, Polaroid, and Kodak.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.