#fanbase building

[garvescope]

Launch your film’s fanbase before filming. Use online content, early events, crowdfunding, and community feedback to build momentum and support. #filmmakers

How to Build a Fanbase Before You Even Make a Film

[formerly-serious]

How did building a fanbase go?

It’s 3 years since I penned what might be one of my most popular articles of all time, “ARE YOU READY TO BUILD A FANBASE? YEAH, ME TOO.” I started it saying that we were in an experiment together, and ended it by saying I would see you all on the other side! Far be it from me to be dishonest with you all, so here’s the results of my experiment.

BEGINNING STATS: 251 people on Twitter, 252 on Facebook, 5 on Patreon. (Something equally petite on Instagram which I did not note down.)

CURRENT STATS: 285 people on Twitter, 322 on Facebook, 7 on Patreon, and a whopping 434 on Instagram.

What a difference three years makes!

…anyway we’re going to go ahead and declare that experiment a F A I L U R E, since those numbers do not constitute what anyone reading my first article hoped to achieve when I wrote the word “fanbase.” I very much did not build a big fanbase. Just at all. Nor did I grow more quickly than before, my pace is still glacial.

THANK GOD.

Now, why would I be relieved and grateful that I’m a big ol’ Loser?

Now, why would I be relieved and grateful that I’m a big ol’ Loser?

The truth is, three years did make a huge difference. The internet became EXTREMELY HOSTILE to artists, with social media algorithms becoming increasingly adversarial to content creators, API’s being torn away from developers, AI generated imagery and AI writing becoming rampant, portfolio websites refusing to protect artist work, industry leaders embracing AI processes in their products that may replace the very artists that are their core customer base, and print on demand websites hobbling certain artists by taking huge percentages of their sales (an example is another 50% on top of the 80% they took in the first place) and withdrawing many basic features of their membership.

In a battle royale situation like this, suddenly the idea of plunging into an extremely large, saturated social media pool and trying to get the attention of thousands of maybe people, maybe bots, seems … unhelpful.

But all of us have been so conditioned into thinking the internet and social media are the only way to go in order to meet new fans, that it’s going to take some doing to explain to you why I no longer think this. Let me begin by going through the experiments in my first fanbase article.

EXPERIMENT ONE: POST EVERYTHING

I did reasonably well on this, making sure to update the aforementioned social media outlets with every new print, drawing and sticker I made (that I was contractually allowed to show anyone).

I intend to keep doing this, actually. I still think it’s a great idea. It made me discard my perfectionism and shame, and I don’t miss them.

I noticed something, however. When you post everything everywhere, you do want other humans to actually look at it. In order to look at it, they have to be shown it. This generally did not happen.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like have evolved in such a manner that your feed no longer shows you your friends’ posts, in chronological order. Instead, a very tiny portion of your friends and followers will see what you post these days. And this is very often strangled still further if the sites’ algorithms determine that you committed one of these sins:

Sometimes you used too many tags and hence, were seen as spamming.

Maybe you used tags in the body of a post.

Maybe you used “forbidden” tags, which are constantly changing.

Maybe you had a link. Social media sites do not want users to LEAVE, so they dislike this.

Maybe the social media site doesn’t think that what you posted will give viewers a sugar rush and make them stay on their site longer. This is typically done by trolling your followers. You can keep them hooked by showing them a highly curated version of your life, making them experience FOMO and comment with pleas for your secret to success, or you can be purposefully nasty to everyone and invite arguments in the comments. Choosing NOT to do these things, constitutes a sin in social media website owner terms.

Did you crosspost?! How could you!! For SHAME

Did you put the same phrase like “link in bio” at the end of every post? NOT COOL

Maybe you… IT LITERALLY DOES NOT MATTER (IF YOU HAVEN’T FIGURED THAT OUT YET).

Social media can be helpful (I guess), but at the end of the day, the website owners are hoping you will be their unpaid employee constantly trying to game their algorithms by posting things specifically geared to make people stay on that social media site longer, so they will be served more ads. Even better, you can pay the social media site to boost your posts! They would love you to do that.

They certainly don’t want you to direct traffic away from their site to maybe spend money on your art or learn more about your projects. …which was kind of the whole reason your busy, exhausted butt was TRYING to use social media for your art business.

So that’s a problem.

EXPERIMENT 2: POST YOURSELF MAKING IT

I did my best to take WIP shots of stuff and upload them to TikTok and Patreon. This is of course, a fraught endeavor these days since people can now feed your WIP to an AI generator and make a piece that they claim as their own.

But we’ll ignore that for the sake of SCIENCE. To continue:

I don’t have a video setup or the disc space to do screen recorder, but the one time I did break my long suffering computer and storage drives to have a drawing video, nothing came of it. So this one I can’t really say I threw myself into, but again, no matter what I posted, people would have had to have seen it for it to help sooooooooooo.

EXPERIMENT 3: TELL OTHER PEOPLE HOW TO MAKE IT

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t actually know how to make anything properly, so I didn’t do this experiment much even though I still believe we should pass on what we know. I am however slowly building up a trove of extra linoleum block cutters in case I get the opportunity to teach a lino carving class.

If I were to try and pass on my digital art skills however, we come back to the lil’ wrinkle of everyone and their mom currently being able to mimic digital art somewhat effectively.

As we professional digital artists and designers start hitting the bread line, I don’t think I’m going to be seriously inclined to tell young dewy-eyed artists that they should totally learn to make digital art. At least, not until the current AI insanity blows over or takes a more manageable form.

EXPERIMENT 4: DON’T BE A FAKE FRIEND, EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU SHOULD

I have indeed been making more of an effort to be sincere in all of my interactions. But since I never had the issue where I had too many fans to pay proper attention to, I never had to limit my interactions with them. When you have one comment a week on a platform, you can most certainly read all their comments.

Instead I ended up largely discarding my advice here, and did my best to get to know the couple of followers I DID have because I’m small enough to DO that.

I’m seriously starting to think that getting to know one single person over the years might be leaps and bounds more helpful than having a high follower count or high post “engagement,” because that one single person might tell one other single person about you, away from the computer, out in the world. Then the three of you could start viewing each other in a much more human context than all the internet social media fairyland we’ve been stumbling blindly through for the last decade.

Maybe distance and scheduling mean you do have to use the internet to communicate. But what if the three of you went to a more forum- or chat-like setting where you could talk in long paragraphs, share links, not spend one second thinking abut tags, not get throttled or shadowbanned or buried in a feed, and in general just communicate however you actually want?

So I would alter this to say:

EXPERIMENT 4.5 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: DON’T BE A FAKE FRIEND, GENUINELY MEET AND GET TO KNOW PEOPLE ONE PERSON AT A TIME.

This is something I can only do because I am extremely small.

When I managed to get into the 2023 Indiana Arts Commission On-Ramp Cohort, my suspicions were confirmed over and over again about how important this granular, personal approach is. I went to an intensive class for three days and met a small cohort of fellow artists as well as some great instructors and other people in the industry. And again and again, I saw how important it was to just take my time to get to know each one of them.

If I continue to get to know them as individual people, taking my time and being helpful when I can, sharing insights and laughs and commiserating with them, who knows how we might enrich each others’ lives.

But you know what I CAN’T DO? I CAN’T deepen these relationships with real people I met out in the world and also be trying to chase down a horde of mythical social media followers!

Can’t do it. I don’t even know who these people are, if they are people and not bots, and if the social media sites will ever show anything I make to them. So how can I spend all my time on that mirage?

EXPERIMENT 5: LET PEOPLE INTERACT WITH YOUR ART

I mean. I’ve done my very best to make my art as accessible as possible to the dozen or so people who see it. And I think this is good! No matter what, I will still be making new art and making it as easy as possible for people to discuss and share, I will always let them know where to see me in person, and of course I will make it as easy as possible for them to buy the art they like.

So I wouldn’t make any changes to this one at all. Since I know my posse well enough to know where they spend their time online, I’m literally just going to do everything with the aim of showing it to these SPECIFIC people. Because they’re REAL and I KNOW I LIKE THEM.

There’s an old saying, “When you grasp at the shadow, you lose the substance.” This has been proven very true in my case. Chasing shadow people has claimed decades of my life.

Wow, shadow people are real dicks! At least there’s only one more experiment.

EXPERIMENT 6: JUST MAKE WHAT YOU WANT (UNLESS PEOPLE PAY YOU I GUESS)

I thought up until a couple of days ago that I was being really good about this one, because the jobs I’ve had recently have just been fabulous. Projects I adored working on. So I’ve definitely reached the point where other humans that I like, hand me money to draw things I like.

But in the last couple of days, I went through my planner books and was horrified to see all of the personal projects I haven’t finished, or in many cases started.

So while my clients gave me what I considered to be reasonable deadlines and gave me subjects I loved, I was still ignoring myself as a client. I was doing lord knows what, off chasing shadow people I suppose. Selling out too. But while my sellout efforts at least gave me some money, the shadow people (the fanbase building) just sapped my time, energy and faith in myself.

So for the first time in my entire art life, I can say with conviction:

I DO NOT WANT TO BUILD A FANBASE AND I AM DONE TRYING.

That was not at all the result I was expecting! In my 3 year fanbase experiment I still met new people and got enough jobs to keep me busy. That puts my results in the net positive, so usually I would conclude, “Hey it’s slow going, but it’s going! And just think, at some point it will snowball and then…”

But that’s not where my path led me after all. Instead, it made me want to GO SMALL OR GO HOME.

Now I want to dictate my social media posts ONLY to the people who want to hear from me.

That would exclude artists I admire and have tried unsuccessfully to cultivate in the past. It would exclude famous or successful people who could publish me or give me “my big chance,” if only they would notice me. It would exclude me from blindly chasing numbers because “If I can just show I have a built-in fanbase of buyers, I can get into that gallery show or find an agent to publish my book no problem!”

In fact it would exclude trying to court or woo anyone human, much less spending any time at all pleasing an algorithm. Instead of today’s social media approach it would be like a chat, or how livejournal or forums used to be.

Back in those days, tags were there to make it easy to cross reference your own posts, not to try and get you seen on clogged feeds. You didn’t worry about an 80/20 rule where you post other people’s things 80% of the time, and then you didn’t turn around and wonder why no one who DID go to your profile never saw anything about your art because your entire feed was other people.

You didn’t worry about some random person leading a mob of opinion against you, because you weren’t trying to reach out to a sea of people you didn’t know in the first place. You also didn’t worry about being doxxed or stalked, because you had the ability to be more anonymous and private while STILL talking to other people. Your personal information wasn’t demanded far and wide just so you would be more efficient to track for marketing purposes.

I think it’s time to admit that for some of us, social media failed. The hits that our self esteem takes coupled with the attack on our sleep are bad enough. Add to that the sapping of our limited time for pursuits that are far more rewarding and enjoyable. Social media sites are designed to suck as much time out of you as possible, and when you play to the algorithms you are aiding and abetting the website in doing this to others.

SO I’VE DONE IT, I’VE COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE.

But instead of coming out the other side from obscurity to fame, I came out the other side from caring deeply about building a fanbase to only caring about supporting those who support me. If we’re meant to be buddies, we’ll find each other! I have faith in us, even if I don’t have faith in social media or a “fanbase” anymore.

I’m off to go live my life, and that’s the way I’ll find people from now on.

See more from the Art Tips series.

[sl1ckn01]

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