Recently I posted about illustrator Joanna Basford, who is a fountain of creativity where self-promotion is concerned. In order to attract potential clients to her work at the New Designers show, she wrote letters to about 100 studios. She included a printout with images of some of her work and some sample fabric cuttings.
She said, “I got less than five replies from those letters. At first that was really disheartening, but when I got to New Designers it paid off hugely. A handful of the studios I’d written to came along, saw my work and offered me placements, or invited me to freelance for them.”
One of the morals of the story is not to get disheartened if you don’t get immediate results. Often the pay off comes later—sometimes even after you’ve given up.
In the interview she reveals that for other graduate shows she made silkscreen-printed envelopes for press releases, hand-printed black and white invitations and mini sample books of her work to distribute in place of business cards.
Notice another feature of her efforts? They took a lot of work. More than most competing applicants were willing to invest, I'd guess.
How can you come up with similar strategies for your writing or other projects? Just make a list of what everybody else is doing, then do the opposite!
(Two books that can help you stand out in your field are "Do Something Different," published by Virgin Books with a foreword from Sir Richard Branson and "Marketing for Entrepreneurs," published by Pearson.)
