this woman’s work

I mean, look at this site: Brilliant!

Unless you’ve been lurking on the edges of Chamber of Commerce meetings you don’t know what a typical insurance agent looks like. Me, I know not only from those Chamber meetings but also all those years I spent hanging out at my dad’s insurance conventions. I’m used to a big slab of cheese on top of my insurance sales pitch. I’m talking guys who call women “little lady” and are used to throwing their weight around.

I’m scared of most insurance guys. Did I say scared? I meant hostile towards.

So this guy? I met him at a meeting today and he introduced himself as “a not entirely for profit insurance agent.” And that, of course, got my attention. Plus Brett and I were just whining about insurance (again) because that’s what freelancers are prone to do so my ears perk up any old way when I hear the word. Plus he has a kick-ass business card, which he handed to me along with a sticker that says BUY LOCAL COLUMBUS like on the front of his web site. Hey, he had me at “not entirely for profit” but the sticker and stellar biz card put me over the top.

I don’t know if his insurance will work for us (I’ll let the insurance expert aka Brett figure that out) but his heady dose of “be who you are and the work will follow” was a soothing balm to my troubled soul. Because if an insurance guy can head off cheesy and make a living, there is hope for the rest of us.

(By the way, the only thing more cheesy than an insurance guy is a financial planning guy. Which, by the way, is what my dad does now only he works with clients whose financial hem I cannot touch so it’s a special brand of cheese now. A unpasteurized triple cream, if you will, served in Provence by alabaster virgins.)

Get this. I’m supposed to deliver this talk in June for the Greater Columbus Arts Council:

Becoming a Working Artist: What it Takes to Make a Living (Workshop)
June 25, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
GCAC Large Conference Room, 100 East Broad Street, Ste. 2250
Writer Dawn Friedman will talk about her switch from part-time writer to full-time freelancer and family breadwinner.  She will discuss the challenges of balancing artistic and financial needs and share the way she learned to market her job skills through marketing her creative self.  Space is limited to 25 attendees, so pre-registration is required by June 13 to attend this informative event.

And of course that came into my email and my addled insecure little brain shouted, “Fraud!” at itself because I was invited to do this during a particularly high point of my life last year and today happens to be a rather low point of my life this year. (That sounds overly dramatic — I mean I’m having a week where I spend a lot of time worrying.)

See, I made sure my work calendar would be clear while I was in Portland (for the most part) and kinda forgot to line up work for the weeks after, which means down the line there the mailbox will be woefully empty of checks. Oops. That reminds me — any of y’all got any writing you need written? Because I’ve got a keyboard right here and I’m not afraid to use it!

As you can see, I’m hustling. And the meetings are revving back up and soon (one hopes) the email box will be filling up with assignments again.

I know one thing I’ll talk about at the workshop is branding because I absolutely absolutely absolutely think that branding is vital to consider in a creative career although it might not seem quite like it on the surface. Branding is such a shallow word for such an important thing, which is that you (I) need to understand how people see you (me). The difference between a working (as in trying to make a living) artist and a corporation is that the corporation is something of a slave to its brand and an artist isn’t but an artist still needs to understand the message her work is sending in order to understand how to get more work.

I mean, this is as simple as saying if you’ve built a reputation as a sculptor and now you’re working in pastels, you have to understand that some folks will have a hard time visualizing your work outside of the sculpture box they’ve set you in and this may play into how they feel about giving you a grant or a show or a commission. It doesn’t mean that once you sculpt you must always sculpt; it means that understanding what you’re up against in other people’s minds will help you get around those barriers.

What I’ve realized recently is that I’ve built a pretty good platform within the adoption community and now I face the danger of limiting myself (i.e., only speaking to the adoption community) and that I need to concentrate on my brand as Writer. Because I’m not an adoption writer — I’m a writer who writes about adoption an awful lot. But I want to have room to write about other things and (importantly because of the message I want to send) I want to write about adoption for more than just an adoption audience.

Is this making sense?

These are two things that I think confuse other writers: branding and marketing. And these are huge things. Once you’ve understood your brand, you have to understand how to market yourself (I am confused by this myself and am working hard to get clear on it, which means sifting through a whole bucket of neuroses. So fun, this artist stuff). Some of it — the marketing — is obvious like knowing which clips to mention in a pitch to this market or that. But some of it is hard like knowing how to hammer down the doors when I have huge emotional roadblocks to pitching. (What is up with that??? I’ve been pitching for, what, 8 years now? And still — the horror!)

Oh and if you want to come to my talk even though I’m outing myself as a person afraid to give it, hit up the good folks at the GCAC. I’ll be awfully glad to have you.