A lot of artists I know hate marketing. They know it’s necessary, but they’d give anything for a fairy publicist to appear in a glittering puff of smoke and promote the hell out of their latest project with a wave of a wand, so they could forget about websites and email programs and social media and keep right on making stuff.

 Personally, I’ve long had a more positive relationship with this aspect of the business than many of my peers. When I started my career as a solo performer fresh out of college, I was filled with energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of the job, including promotion. I finagled friends into taking photos of me in costume. I wrote my own booking brochures, blurbs and press releases. I printed the text for my flyers on my printer, cut and pasted the images (literally, with scissors and glue — we’re talking 1988) and went to the copy shop to duplicate them. I walked every commercial neighborhood in San Francisco and the East Bay armed with flyers, tape and a staple gun, posting my image in spots both legal and il. Anyone I chatted with about my show for even a moment walked away with flyers in hand. I, on the other hand, usually managed to walk away with their address scribbled on a piece of paper to add to my embryonic mailing list. When I mailed out postcards for my upcoming shows, I added personalized notes in ballpoint pen. I felt like my audience members were my friends, and indeed, many of them were and still are.

Fast-forward thirty-plus years. My mailing list is now an email list. I have a website and the requisite trinity of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, though I definitely prefer a discursive warble to a succinct tweet. My creative pursuits have evolved too over the years. In addition to writing plays and prose and hosting a podcast and taking photos and even still acting and singing once in a while, I’ve been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops for the past three and a half years. 

I’m also the proud parent of two boys and three dogs, none of whom were in the picture when I was pounding the pavement with my flyers thirty-some years ago. So while I’m as passionate about all my projects as I ever was, I have less time for promotion than I once did. In addition, since my spouse, who’s ten years my senior, wants to move towards easing his workload in the coming years, I’m looking to grow my teaching business. I currently lead four or five workshops a week, and I’d like to increase that to six or seven. I’d like to accomplish this, though, while diminishing the time I spend on promotion, to leave enough hours in the day to write my plays, blog posts, and a freshly simmering book project; host the Off-Leash Arts podcast, in which I interview other artists about their creative lives; nurture my passion for photography; parent my boys and dogs; and, y’know, eat, exercise, socialize — all those other things that make a full life.

I had these dual business goals — modest growth and less promotional effort — in mind a couple of weeks ago, when a Facebook ad for “how to market your business” caught my eye. The ad proclaimed that a lot of marketers provide too much information right out the gate. It said something like, What you are selling is not information, but transformation. You want people to get a hit of how your product or service will make them feel.

That made sense to me, so I clicked, read through some moderately engaging rhetoric, and purchased a $27 video series. After I watched the first video, which talked about identifying your target audience, I got an email offering me a free 45-minute consultation. I soon found myself on the phone with a perky young man — I’ll call him Bob — who asked me some questions about my goals for the business. I told him my dual objective of doing more teaching and less promotion, adding that, since there’s a ceiling on how many classes I can teach each week, I’d like to figure out how to widen the reach of the blog and the podcast so that someday they might pay for themselves.

Bob asked if I wanted to make more money. Over the long term, yes, I said. But since the need is not urgent, my top priorities are to keep doing the work I love and to find a way to share it more easily and efficiently with others who will love it too. 

I’ll cut right to the chase, said Bob. You need to charge a whole lot more for your workshops.  There are plenty of people out there, he continued, who are ready and willing to pay. 

I told him that while this may be so, I don’t want to lead writing workshops that only wealthy people can afford. It’s important to me to keep my workshops accessible to anyone who really wants to be there, I said. I explained that this meant keeping the price reasonable and offering a sliding scale. That’s why I’m looking for alternative ways to generate income, I continued, like finding a way to monetize the blog.

But you don’t even NEED a blog to grow your business, he enthused. Instead of doing these classes, you could work one-on-one with high-end clients and charge top dollar. 

 Young Bob went on to tell me, in a gently condescending tone, that my inability to grasp his advice was natural, given my relative inexperience in the world of business, but by then I wasn’t really listening. While he explained that in the last year alone his company had helped over 3800 businesses grow their revenues to eight digits, I was quietly accepting that the relationship between Bob and me was not going to work out. Age difference aside, he was a terrible listener, and it was clear that our long-term dreams were not compatible. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can help me grow my business in a way that feels organic and true to my core values, but Bob is not that person.

I said goodbye to Bob with no hard feelings, at least on my side. I wasn’t buying what he was selling, but he’d given me something meaningful. Sometimes you need what you don’t want laid out in front of you to see more clearly what you do want. Bob helped me understand that, whatever I may do to increase my profile, I never want to stray too far from that girl roaming around town with flyers and tape, sharing stories and taking names. While Bob wanted to give me a tried-and-true formula for a massive increase in revenue, I just want to continue my lifelong journey of creating a sustainable life by doing what I love, alone and with others. I’m grateful to him for helping me see that what I want is basically what I already have — just a little bit more of it. Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping an eye out for another business coach, hopefully one who’s a better match.

Miss America’s Daughters photos by Kitti Homme.

Tell your story the way you want to tell it! New Thursday morning Off-Leash Writing Workshop starts Oct. 14.