I have a weird little recession indicator. It isn't the stock market, unemployment numbers, or even the rising price of gas. It's when people suddenly start trying to sell creatives the secret to making money or how to sell their art online.

Over the past couple of months, I've noticed more people actively selling community to handmade artists, social media strategists targeting makers with contrarian and clickbait strategies, and a new crop of crafty small-business gurus promising to show creative entrepreneurs “all their ways” so they can build thriving online businesses too.

I've been around the online entrepreneurial world long enough for this to feel familiar. I was selling online before eBay became eBay. I was also an artsy kid who planned to go to art school, changed direction to business school, graduated at the end of the dot-com boom, and spent some of my early career in corporate marketing and sales. That experience gave me a good understanding of the fundamentals of selling and promoting, but it certainly didn't make me immune to believing someone else had discovered a secret I hadn't.

I've paid for strategies, joined communities, followed formulas, and taken advice from people who appeared to have the numbers to prove they knew exactly what they were doing. Some of it was valuable, and some of it worked. But I also found myself promoting other people's businesses more effectively than my own, attracting followers who enjoyed my content but weren't interested in what I sold, and realizing I'd slowly lost some of my own artistic voice.

Selling your own handmade product is hard…

I think artists are particularly vulnerable to promises of easier marketing because selling something you've created is uncomfortable. You're asking someone to place a monetary value on something that came out of your imagination and was made with your hands. There's feeling, connection, and a relationship with a tangible item that is really hard to explain to someone who isn't a maker.

Business school taught me the mechanics of marketing, but knowing them doesn't remove that vulnerability. Selling is a skill, and sometimes it requires the same perseverance as getting through an artistic block. Feeling uncomfortable doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it wrong. Sometimes it just means you're learning to push through the uncertainty.

That's part of what makes the promise of a secret strategy so appealing. The people selling those strategies aren't necessarily lying, either. They may know exactly what worked for them, with their audience, on their platform, at a particular moment. That's useful experience, but it isn't a universal formula. The algorithm changes its ways like a toddler you're potty training changes underwear. Sometimes the rules of engagement have changed several times before lunch.

Learn from successful people, absolutely! Just be careful when learning starts turning you into a cookie-cutter version of the person teaching you.

Community isn't the commodity

I'm also cautious about the way “community” is increasingly being sold within the handmade world.

I have paid communities in my own business, including Patreon and a snail-mail club, so I don't believe charging money automatically makes a community transactional. For me, the distinction is that the camaraderie isn't the commodity. People pay for something you've created: content, an experience, early access, something arriving in their mailbox. The community becomes a by-product that grows around it.

That's different from selling belonging itself.

When something starts feeling like paying admission to play with the cool kids, I pay attention. If you were one of the artsy kids like me, the cool kids probably weren't inviting us to their lunch table, so I understand why that invitation can still be appealing.

Creative entrepreneurs absolutely need people who understand them. We just need to recognize the difference between genuine community and a structure where we're primarily spending our time, money, and influence helping the people who seem “above us” or “further along” become more successful. Especially when it's without receiving that same investment in our own growth through shared knowledge, meaningful connection, encouragement, or support. Community doesn't mean everyone contributes all the time equally, but there should be a sense of reciprocity. Otherwise, what feels like being welcomed into a community can quietly become another way we're being marketed to. 

This is another reason for clear contracts between business friendships... but that's for another blog post.

What are you trying to be seen for?

I've had several conversations lately with handmade artists who feel social media is hurting their creativity. They're exhausted by the pressure to make the newest pattern, use the trending material, jump into whatever everyone is suddenly talking about, find their niche while somehow remaining original, or create increasingly provocative content just to stay visible.

The advice itself can become contradictory: follow trends, but don't copy. Make what people want, but stand out. Get inspired, but be careful how you're inspired. Find your niche, but make sure the algorithm recognizes you. Somewhere in all of that, it becomes very easy to forget that we originally wanted people to see our art.

It's easy to say, “Well then, just don't engage in social media,” but that's difficult because artists do need to be seen if we want to sell our work.

I think creative entrepreneurs need to understand whether they're building a business around selling their own creative work or building a business as a content creator. The two can overlap, but I've found—myself included—that those lines can blur very quickly. It can affect our creative freedom, but it can also confuse our customers. If one day I'm asking you to invest in my newest fabric collection and the next I'm sharing an affiliate link to the rice cooker in my Amazon storefront, what am I actually asking you to show up for? There's nothing wrong with earning income from content, but if your art is the business you want to build, your content should ultimately lead people back to your work.

If you're selling your art, your content should help people discover your work. When you're choosing what to make primarily because you need something that will perform online, your marketing has started directing your creativity instead of supporting it.

You can become very visible for something that doesn't actually light you up, and eventually that starts sucking the life out of the thing you used to love doing. 

Creative business owners absolutely need education. Just not necessarily the kind most are selling...

None of this means handmade creatives shouldn't invest in education. Learn pricing, margins, cash flow, SEO, photography, email marketing, and how to determine whether your marketing is actually producing sales. Take workshops, read books, and pay people with expertise you don't have.

Good education should leave you more capable of making decisions for yourself.

Three books have shaped my creative business more than any algorithm strategy I've purchased: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert helped me rethink creativity and fear; Profit First by Mike Michalowicz changed how I approach the financial health of a business; and Hilda: Tackle Your Inner Critic by Coach Jennie helped me recognize the voice that was already showing up daily to tell me I'm doing everything wrong.

The best education I've found as a solo creative entrepreneur has given me tools without requiring me to become the person teaching them, or to build a business that looks exactly like theirs.

So, about my weird little recession indicator…

When artists and small-business owners become nervous about money, uncertainty creates its own business opportunity. In the current economic climate, I don't know many small-business owners who haven't had at least a few sleepless nights while their brains run through doomsday scenarios for their businesses.

Over the past few months, I started noticing more people offering certainty through a strategy, community, content formula, blueprint, or some kind of promise to show us exactly how they became successful so we can do it too.

Some of those offerings may be genuinely valuable. But uncertainty makes certainty very easy to sell, which is exactly why I think we need to become more discerning about what we're buying when we're scared.

And it's easy to feel scared right now. Let's not sugarcoat it.

Artists need education, but we also need other artists. Find the guild, arts organization, maker space, sewing circle, or creative group in your own community. If it doesn't exist, consider creating it. Maybe you have a community you're already a part of online that you could suggest a maker brainstorm or co-working time. Get to know people whose creative success you genuinely care about, even when their success does nothing for your own bottom line.

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I still believe this is an incredible time to be a small creative business. In a world increasingly filled with mass-produced sameness, rapidly changing trends, and content that can quite literally be generated by a machine, there are still people looking for something made by an actual human being. They care about the imagination, skill, story, quirks, and hands behind what they're buying. (And more importantly, willing to spend their hard-earned cash on it.)

Which is exactly why I'm paying attention when I see a system rewarding sameness while makers become increasingly afraid to trust their own voices.

That's my weird little recession indicator. The vultures start circling when creative people are uncertain enough to believe they can't sell their handmade items without buying a recipe book.

The truth is, there isn't one, there never was one even before social media was a thing, and there will never be one.

Learn what you want to be as a business and get comfortable selling what you want to be known for creating. Pay good teachers who have actually done the work you want to do, experiment with marketing, and find other artists who make you want to create more. Not people who make you question whether you're creating correctly or to fit into the mold they have disguised as belonging.

I believe handmade will be okay because people haven't stopped wanting things with a story, a point of view, and an actual human being behind them. A harder economy may change how often people buy, what they buy, or how carefully they choose, but that makes knowing what you create and why it matters even more important. We don't need to become louder copies of everyone else to survive it.

So tell me: what have you seen circling the handmade world disguised as “advice” lately, and what makes you believe handmade is going to be okay?