Digital Marketing for Creatives

(The sound of mic fuzz, a chair creaking, a long, beleaguered sigh.)

Okay. So.

I was talking to a painter friend the other day. A good person. Makes these anguished, beautiful little landscapes. Like if Bob Ross had a nervous breakdown in a Home Depot parking lot. And she’s telling me, you know, she’s got an Etsy, she’s got an Instagram with twelve followers who are all other artists, she’s got a stack of canvases in her closet that are starting to feel like… visual accusations. Just staring at her. Judging her. “Why don’t people want us? Are we not bleak enough for the current market?”

And she says to me, “I just wanna sell the thing. Directly. To a person. Without it feeling like I’m running a multinational logistics corporation from my phone while algorithms fist-fight in the background for my soul.”

And I got it. I got it. Because that’s the thing, right? You make the thing. The painting, the weird ceramic mugs that look like sad presidents, the ebook about your obsessive relationship with sourdough starter, you name it. You make it, and then you’re thrust into this… this bizarro world of commerce where you’re supposed to be a shipping clerk, a marketing guru, a graphic designer, and a emotionally available content creator, all while the platform you’re on takes a vig that would make a loan shark blush.

So I said to her, “Have you tried Gumroad?”

And she looked at me like I’d just suggested she sell her paintings out of the trunk of a ’87 El Camino at a flea market. Which, fair.

But listen. Just… listen.

Gumroad is not a marketplace. It’s not Etsy. It’s not Amazon. It’s like a digital lemonade stand you can set up in the middle of the internet’s backyard. You build the stand. You make the sign. You tell people where it is. And when someone buys a cup, you get, like, almost all the money. There’s no mall traffic. There’s just your traffic.

Here’s how it works in my head, and probably in reality: You make your thing. Your digital comic, your PDF zine of poetry, your recording of a guided meditation where you just sigh for twenty minutes, whatever it is, it’s your thing. You go to Gumroad. You make a page for it. You write a description that sounds like you, not like SEO vomit. You upload a picture. You set a price. Or you set it to “pay what you want,” which is a whole fascinating psychological experiment you can run on your friends and enemies.

And then you get a link. That’s it. That’s the whole machinery.

You put that link in your Instagram bio. You tweet it out into the void. You send it to your aunt Carol who “doesn’t understand your art but supports you.” When someone clicks it, they see your page, with your vibe. They put in their email, their credit card, Gumroad handles all that security stuff, which is good because the last time I tried to remember my PayPal password I had a minor dissociative episode, and bam. They get the thing. A download link. An email with the file. A notification that their sad-president mug is on its way.

You get an email that says, “You made a sale.” And most of the money goes to you. They take a small cut, plus the credit card processing fee. It’s transparent. It’s not a mystery. It’s not a puzzle where you have to sell 400 units to unlock the “maybe we’ll pay you” tier.

The beauty of it, the terrifying beauty, is that it’s passive. You’re not renewing listings. You’re not bidding on keywords for “melancholy badger sculpture.” You set up the stand, and it’s just… there. Forever. A piece of digital real estate that sells your thing while you’re asleep, or while you’re making the next thing, or while you’re spiraling about whether your thing is any good. (It is. Probably. I don’t know. That’s your baggage.)

Is it magic? No. Nothing is. Gumroad doesn’t bring the customers. You gotta do that part. You gotta tell people you exist. That’s the hard, sweaty, vulnerable work. But what Gumroad does is take the other hard, sweaty, technical work, the storefront, the checkout, the tax calculations if you’re into that, and just makes it a non-issue.

It turns the monstrous, soul-crushing question of “How do I sell my work?” into a simpler, quieter one: “Hey, I made this. If you want it, it’s right here.”

And sometimes, man. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes just having a clean, simple, non-exploitative lemonade stand in the chaos of the digital backyard is a revolutionary act.

Gumroad can be found here.

(Sound of a coffee mug being set down too hard. A final, static-filled sigh.)