Launching an Art Tutorial on Gumroad

If you are interested in publishing video tutorials of your own artmaking process, I recommend using Gumroad as a digital distribution partner. Gumroad is an online company that provides an easy to use platform for individual creators who want to sell their own digital content, such as ebooks and videos.

One of the things I love about Gumroad is their commitment to helping individual creators figure out how to market their content. They asked me to share my experience with "Watercolor in the Wild" as a case study for the Gumroad blog. 

Traffic by channel to the Gumroad page for "Watercolor in the Wild"

You can read the whole case study of how I launched the video at this link. 

Here's my conclusion to the article:

Any final thoughts to share?

My background is as a painter and a writer, not a marketer or a sales guy, so all this is kind of new to me, and it’s fun. Instead of working with a big publisher that keeps all this info to itself, I get to work all the levers.

I’m grateful to Gumroad and its community of artist-publishers for sharing information to help me succeed with self-publishing.

What I come away with is that the new digital arts economy is different in several fundamental ways compared to the old one. These differences are suggested by the following four paradoxes:

• You have to give something away in order to sell it.
• Some people will pay more than your asking price if you give them the option.
• Promote others if you want to advance your career.
• Share your trade secrets and you will benefit.

These principles seem counterintuitive to someone like me raised in the pre-digital arts economy. The differences arise because people buying digital content understand that they’re directly supporting the personal vision of the artist. They’re not just buying a product; they’re buying into a relationship.

Gumroad blog: "10 Strategies for Selling Art Tutorials" by James Gurney