When I was promoting The Manual of Design Fiction, I found myself reflecting on the challenges creative people face when it comes to promoting their work. This was particularly acute when my co-authors simply could not do that kind of work. Creatives love to create (obs) and love making things but (strangely) dread the promotional side of things. This guide is Metalabel's attempt to distill what they've learned about promoting creative work in a way that feels authentic and sustainable.
Produced by Metalabel, this guide is for anyone looking to promote their creative work without losing their soul. It’s a call to embrace authenticity, build meaningful connections, and find joy in the act of creation itself.
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Promotional Principles for Creative People
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We (Metalabel) are making this guide to reflect what we’ve learned about releasing and promoting work — the good and the bad.
We love to create but dislike, even hate, to publish. Making something new is all experimentation, possibility, and exploration. Super yes to every step of that.
Publishing means promoting, which means venturing into the market to show our wares — an entirely different experience.
We all release work with hopes that other people will like it and even want to purchase it. That generally does not happen without some push from us, which comes more naturally to some than others.
How do we do this? Here we give a guide of sorts — to caring or not caring. A menu of options that may or may not feel right to you. Nothing matters more than staying true to our voice. We hope this guide helps you do that.
01. Do it for yourself
It’s easy to base our feelings about our work on what others think. It’s normal to feel discouraged and question ourselves when things don’t turn out the way we wanted them to.
It’s important to make work because you want it, not because of where you hope it’ll get you, and certainly not because it’s what you see someone else doing. Your work should be work that you are inspired to make.
Doing it for yourself takes courage. It means not obsessing over outside voices. It means staying true to what we believe even when it’s out of step with what’s popular. This is hard but rewarding.
When it comes to promotion, doing it for yourself can take you in very different directions, depending on what you’re comfortable with.
Because you’re doing it for yourself, you could be someone who goes the extra mile, taps into your entrepreneurial energy, and does everything possible to create opportunities for your work to be seen. Some of us are wired this way.
It can also be true that because you’re doing it for yourself, you don’t want to promote at all because it feels out of spirit with your practice. We know what it’s like to create from a deep place. That’s the kind of thing we all tend to be sensitive to.
Both camps benefit from one piece of advice: liberate yourself from caring about immediate responses to your work. Liberate yourself from needing things to sell out. Liberate your judgment of your work from its commercial or social response.
Do not give a f*!k about how many people like it. No matter how many people like your work, it will never feel like enough if that’s the reason you’re making it. You’ll see someone else with a bigger audience and feel inadequate again. It’s a never-ending spiral.
This does not mean you should be casual or careless. You can not give a f*!k about what other people think and still take care in every element because it’s your standard for your work. Be serious and obsessive about the things that feel right to you because they feel right to you.
Give yourself freedom. Don’t give yourself the pressure of needing to deliver creatively and hit some metric. Creating to please a potential audience can be torture.
Create because you want to. When we make work because we care about it, we’re infinitely more likely to find a fruitful path.
02. Small is beautiful
The dominant commercial language of the world says GO BIG. MAXIMIZE, OPTIMIZE, AMPLIFY, WIN. Get ahead. Self-promote. Don’t self-reflect.
This is the world filtered through marketing and social media — the water we swim in.
For some people this message clicks. For others, the ego-thumping couldn’t feel more foreign.
Some of us don’t want to go viral. We just want to make things we like and have our own idea of what success looks like for ourselves.
This is easier said than done. Much of the internet’s pressure comes from the visible, open-ended metrics that surround us. Because a post was liked X many times, we see it as more valuable than something we did with less. How we rank next to our peers is right there in black and white.
This is where we get into trouble. We drag ourselves down. Their thing is so much better than our thing. We doubt our voice.
Can this be avoided?
One counterintuitive way is by releasing work that’s more limited. By setting the ceiling for how much interest we’re looking for, we define our success.
It’s not about “did you get X many likes,” it’s simply asking: are there 25, 50, or 100 people out there that really care about what I’m doing and will take a chance on something I want to share?
Limited releases shape success in a way that can be meaningful to others, too. When the audience is intimate and it means something to be there, magic can happen.
This is a key step towards inner creative liberation. We can let go of the idea of being everything for everybody. Free ourselves from the burden of pleasing an imagined audience. Empower ourselves to make work that we think matters and craft it in a way that it meaningfully matters to others too.
Embrace the liberation of small.
03. Celebrate the night before
Our friends at MSCHF once shared a fascinating anecdote: they always have release parties for their drops the night before. They want to celebrate making the work rather than how the work is received.
There’s a lot of wisdom in this. First, it’s common for our hoped-for release day dreams to outpace reality. Outsized expectations can cause us to misjudge success as failure. Release day hangovers are real and unfair to ourselves.
Second, celebrating the night before reinforces making the work as the act to be celebrated. As it should be. That’s the one part that’s under our control. It’s the process that you as the artist or we as the small team went through that’s deserving of celebration, regardless of what other people think about it.
Learn from MSCHF. Celebrate the night before. Separate the market expectations we carry about a work from the creative effort of producing the work itself.
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