The Complete Smartist Guide: Essential Business and Career Tips for Emerging Artists

Learn how to sell more art, build a thriving business, and lead the creative life you've always dreamed of!

This is the book with all of the practical information about how to actually make a career in the arts that we never learned in art school. The Complete Smartist Guide by artist and Create! Magazine Founder, Ekaterina Popova, and curator and gallery director of PxP Contemporary, Alicia Puig, is packed with tips, hints, and actionable steps from our personal experiences working in the art world.

In this essential guide for self-taught and emerging artists, we discuss not only business tactics, sales strategies, and how to promote your art online and in person, but also actionable information about how to deal with creative burnout, overcome imposter syndrome, and avoid the comparison game! We’ve built our creative businesses largely using social media and email marketing so we share all of the exact steps we used to reach audiences of hundreds of thousands of followers around the world.

To make sure we rounded out this book with even more solid advice, we’ve included interviews with numerous contemporary artists to share their unique insight into how to license your art, attract clients for commissions and mural projects, develop your unique creative voice, and so much more!

Includes Supporting Interviews With Inspiring Contemporary Artists, Curators, and Art Agents: Alonsa Guevara, Ashley Longshore, Chambers Austelle, Erika Lee Sears, Jenny Brown, Kestin Cornwall, Lisa Krannichfeld, Liza Zhurkovskaya, and Tyler Kay.