About Artonomy

What is Artonomy about?

Welcome to Artonomy. A blog dedicated to empowering creative people with skills needed to promote your creative work {online and offline} and survive financially and mentally {the two do kind of go hand in hand}.

Somewhere along the way you are told {repeatedly} that you cant make a living from creativity! Creative folk get told this so many times you start to believe it, but it’s just not true. You CAN survive and thrive through your creativity. You just need a bit of help with the stuff they don’t teach you in Art School so you can kick some ass!.

Artonomy is a product of my experiences of meandering though the various worlds of the Arts, Web Design & Marketing and running a business over the years. It’s all the lessons I have learned and cock ups I have made along the way that will help you market your art, run a creative business, use the internet more effectively or just simply not go nuts in the process of creating.

So…

• If you want to know more about how to sell the fruits of your creativity online.
• If you are wondering how to make a business out of your art, craft, photos, sculpture, music and creativity.
• If you have already started a creative business and want to improve and grow it.
• If you want to raise your profile as an artist or creative person both online and in the real world.
• If you just want to hang out for a bit of motivation and chat.
• If you want to get out of the 9-5 and have more time to spend on creating
• If you are feeling a bit lost in all of this and just want a bit of moral support

Then this is the place for you.

What can You expect?

We tend to write about these sorts of things.

• Business and marketing for creative folks who HATE business and marketing.
• Useful “How to” type stuff about things that will help you market your work online {with NO techy jargon!} and offline too.
• Entrepreneurship for creative people.
• Stories about stuff we have learned at the business school of hard knocks.
• Art related things that make me go “Wow!”
• Anything that seems like a good idea at the time

Who are we?

Helen Aldous
“I love to help artists and creative folk get online, sell their work and make a decent living from their creative skills. It is possible!”

I worked as a designer and illustrator, both freelance and for a variety of design and advertising companies before getting made redundant in the dotcom crash in 2001.

It was pretty obvious that  basically I wasn’t much good at working for other people and decided to set up on my own. Since then I have never looked back and combine working as an artist printmaker and illustrator with running a web design and online marketing business. I would never go back to having a “proper job” for all the tea in China.

I work in a mini office/studio converted from an old toilet block [much nicer than it sounds] next to  my house on the edge of the moors in West Yorkshire, England. However, I mostly write for this site in the early morning, sitting in bed with my laptop surrounded by cats, industrial strength coffee and biscuit crumbs.

I can also be found on my personal artists website and here at Sputnik, my Web Design and Online Marketing company.

 

Martin Stellar

Ex-monk, once-upon-a-tailor, semi-retired copywriter.

Email marketing specialist, lover of art and teacher of ethical sales and marketing strategies to artists and artisans.

That’s the nutshell version. The longer story is that while in the monastery I became a fancy-pants bespoke tailor. Once I left there, the logical choice was to start a tailoring company. It was fun, but difficult: As with so many artists and artisans, I was dead against marketing.

I thought that the quality of my work would sell itself, that word-of-mouth would be enough. Well, it wasn’t enough. Obviously. And then my father passed away, leaving me some 130.000 Euro. I thought I had it made – money begets money, right? I thought I was unbreakable.

But, I still didn’t do any marketing, so that inheritance didn’t last very long and my company bit the dust.

That’s when I decided to finally grow up, and learn how to promote and market and sell, and that led to me becoming a copywriter – a hired hand, writing texts, a keyboard-slinger.

It taught me a lot – so much so, that in the end I decided to stop that line of work and focus on teaching artists how to be more professional and sell more of their work.

Because there are people out there waiting to find you, who would love to know you and buy your art. My mission is to help you get in front of those people.