Twitter: you're doing it wrong

Yesterday I saw a blog post by a fellow Etsy seller in which she gave detailed instructions on how to have your Twitter feed automatically update with your shop listings.

I follow a few people who do this. I don't know why they do it, nor why I continue to follow them.

Imagine this: you're at a cocktail party meeting new people, exchanging some witty banter, and chattering away happily.

Then a new person arrives and all they do is plug their business. They don't care about what you have to say: they just want to repeat news of their GREAT DEALS and NEW INVENTORY and the like.

That's when you ignore them and hope they'll go away, right?

Twitter is like that cocktail party.

Twitter does not need to be spammed with automated bullshit. By subjecting your Twitter followers to this crap, you are:

• Boring the pants off your followers
  
• Alienating your current and potential customers
• Wasting a perfectly good opportunity to use Twitter to have interesting conversations, gather useful information (Twitter is like a free focus group) and handle customer service inquiries
• Wasting a good opportunity to show your customers our human side - which, after all, is the whole reason they're following you on Twitter
• Wasting other people's time
• Adding spam to an Internet that has plenty of spam already, thanks

Talk about mundane stuff all you want: your baby, your dog, what you ate for breakfast. That stuff, at least, can be the start of a conversation. And it reassures people that you are, in fact, a person and not some sort of robot. Hell, talk about the process of making stuff and selling it. We're all waiting on stories of creativity and glue gun accidents (especially glue gun accidents). Maybe once in a while, have a bitchin' contest or promotion (note: that is not the same as yelling FREE SHIPPING FREE SHIPPING at your followers every five seconds).

So, my plea is this: keep Twitter random and noncommercial. Don't fuck it up with your spammy nonsense. You're only losing business, bub. Actually, I would really love to hear the story of someone - anyone - who has gotten a single sale from doing this.

By the way, follow me on Twitter if you want to argue about this. Arguing 140 characters at a time is one of my many talents.

Penelope Trunk on being an artist

I just discovered Penelope Trunk's blog today, so I can't vouch for her, but she has an interesting piece entitled How to Build a Career as an Artist. Some money quotes:

The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art.
...
Your art reflects your surroundings, and you can live like a pauper, but that limits the range of your art.
...
So if you think you're an artist and you are not making art now, but you think that in the right circumstance you'd make art, you are lying to yourself. I'm sorry. But it's true. Unless you are starving. If you are starving, see point number one: You need to get a job.
...
Are you making money and you're wondering if you should quit your job to do art full time? Take this test: Did you marry rich? Do you have a trust fund? Do you have reliable buyers for almost everything you produce? If you did not answer yes to any of these, then keep your day job.

I think the last point is particularly important. Etsy has a whole series of articles called Quit Your Day Job. It's an irresponsible thing to push, especially in this economy. Incidentally, many of the artists featured in the Quit Your Day Job series are supported by a spouse.

Why I buy 200-foot-long spools of wire

Via kottke.org, an except from a book called Art and Fear:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Put another way: practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to art.

Or, put yet another way: the way to have a good idea is to have many ideas.

Artists: go forth and make your 50 pounds of pots!