Many artists and creatives (including me) get really involved with the marketing and selling side of products and simply get stuck in there. From there they either stop practicing their art completely or they get financially successful and slowly lose interest because marketing, *surprise surprise*, involves impressing the market. And art is simply not meant to impress anyone or make million dollar sales. However, there is a middle ground too. And I wouldn’t call it middle ground. I would say it maybe one of the highest and most authentic ‘grounds’ which artists and creatives can reach. In this article I have listed down some points which may prove to be helpful to artists and creatives specifically if they are in the same situation. There are some harsh truths here but I guess it maybe worth a read. In the end I am no one to tell you what you should be doing. This is just my personal experience.
I have been developing small video games as a hobby for almost 12 years now. I have some really small titles available on sites like Gamejolt, Google Play, Newgrounds etc. I don’t even want to link them because they are not that good to be honest. I just made them for practicing game development and because I like making games in general. Recently I got into selling and marketing the games I made. So, naturally for this purpose I had to make better games and spend a lot of time and effort in marketing them. Well, I did all of that and the growth seemed to be extremely slow to me. My games haven’t sold much across all platforms (maybe 20 copies in total?). This made me realize that impressing the market is REALLY hard and that you have to spend a lot of time, effort and money to do that. Well, I was ready to go into it and do all of that but then something weird happened…
I found out that I wasn’t really enjoying that process of marketing and sales so much. I found I was more of a creative type than an entrepreneurial one. At the same time I realized that I didn’t really want to impress the market anyway. All I wanted was money to live off of. And for the heavily creative types, the solution to that is, getting a regular day job. That is harsh and I can understand that it certainly is. However, this doesn’t have to be your permanent situation…or it does have to be your permanent situation. I really can’t say. Maybe you will be able to get enough recognition by practicing your art that people will start paying you to do that…maybe you will not. Ultimately that does not decrease the value of your art in anyway. And that does not decrease the enjoyment you will get out of doing it either.
And by art here I mean any form of art really. It could be painting, dancing, singing, game development, writing etc. Any form of art has this reality. It is really hard to sell. Being super successful in making art is like winning a lottery. Out of thousands of people that make songs I only know a handful names. But how does my knowledge of their existence affect the value of their songs? It does not. Yes, they are not getting paid as much as Eminem but they are still there. They are doing the thing they love. And, now this may sound very very illogical, that’s all they need. They have won.
Ayush Raj 
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