Asking people for advice

[GraemeMcA]

Hi everyone

I'm working on an photobook project involving graphics and poetry. The production side of things is going swimmingly - I'm halfway through this stage but here's the problem. It's time to start thinking about and planning the marketing/selling side of things.

I've been doing some research on art photobooks on blurb and I've noticed there is little difference between some of the high and low sellers in terms of quality and concept. Now logically this has to be due to savy marketing so.. How do I approach the successful sellers and ask for advice?

There is very little advice to be found on marketing artwork and even less on digital pieces (to which conventional art marketing strategies don't apply because their based on unique, unreproducible pieces).

So has anyone ever successfully approached a 'high profile player' for advice? How do you go about it without sounding needy or idiotic?

PS If anyone has any tips about marketing this sort of product from personal experience, I'd love to hear them too.

I appreciate you all as always

G

[Matthew Cluff]

Here are 3 possible courses of action I can think of that you could take:

1. Usually high-end marketers have some sort of "gatekeeper" that prevents contact with the marketer directly. You could ask the gatekeeper himself for advice, and see if he'd have any knowledge to help you out.
   
2. You could try to get past the gatekeeper to ask the marketer directly. If you plan on doing this, try Googling some articles about Getting Past Gatekeepers for tips on how to get to speaking directly with the high-end marketer.
   
3. Simply "copy" the marketer's techniques to marketing his products and use those same systems for promoting your products. For example, notice things like the sales copy they use, whether they use video to sell, how their websites look, if they have an email list, how often they email their list, etc. I don't know how this kind of thing would be related to the "photobooks" niche, but I hope this gets my point across. Figure out what's worked for them, then take that and simply "paste" it onto your business/product.