(Record scratch. Heavy sigh. Coffee mug hits the desk.)
Alright. Let’s talk about the soul-crushing, uniquely modern hell of pouring your entire existence into a project, posting it into the digital void, and getting… checks phone… twelve likes. Twelve. And three of those are from your mom, one is from a bot selling crypto, and the rest are from other creatives who are just liking it so you’ll like their stuff back. It’s a pity circle. It’s the creative equivalent of two hobos sharing a cigarette butt.
You spent a hundred hours on this thing. A hundred. You bled for it. You had a breakthrough at 3 AM. You wrestled with the geometry, the colour theory, the freaking kerning. It’s the best thing you’ve ever done. It’s pure. It’s honest. And the algorithm looks at it, yawns, and scrolls past.
Meanwhile, you open your feed and see it. The post that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window. It’s some half-baked doodle, or a janky photo, or a video of a guy painting with a mop. It’s mediocre. It’s derivative. It’s the creative equivalent of microwave pizza. And it has 40,000 likes.
Why? Because that guy with the mop didn’t just post the painting. He posted a 45-second reel of him almost spilling the paint, a voiceover about how his dog died and this painting saved his life, and a caption that reads like a Hallmark card. He told a story. You? You just posted the JPEG. You gave them the steak without the sizzle. You handed over the punchline without the setup. And you’re mad about it?
C’mon, man. Get out of your own way.
The “Gatekeeper” is a Ghost
Here’s the lie you’re telling yourself to protect your ego. You think there’s a “They.” A board of directors. A secret society of curators who are supposed to descend from the heavens, pat you on the head, and say, “You’re the chosen one. We will now put you in the gallery.”
Let me be brutally honest with you: There is no They. There is no gatekeeper. The algorithm doesn’t care if you used a sable-hair brush or if your colour palette is a commentary on the socio-economic collapse of the 19th century. The algorithm is a robot. It’s a hungry, stupid beast that only cares about one thing: Engagement Velocity.
That’s a fancy way of saying: “Does this make people stop, react, comment, or share in the first ten seconds?”
The robot doesn’t care about your soul. It cares about friction. If you post a sterile, perfect image with no context, the robot sees zero friction. No one stops. No one argues. No one says, “Wow, I never thought of it that way.” The robot shrugs and gives you your twelve likes.
You are sitting there, waiting for permission from a ghost, while the rest of the world is moving on. You aren’t invisible because your work is bad. You’re invisible because you are silent.
Stop the “Selling Out” BS
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Andy, if I make a Reel or write a story about my work, I’m selling out. I’m a marketer. I’m a shill. I’m not an artist anymore.”
Oh, spare me. That’s not nobility. That’s laziness dressed up in a beret.
You need to reframe this immediately. Marketing is not selling out. Marketing is curation. You aren’t a used car salesman trying to offload a lemon. You are a tour guide. You have seen something beautiful, or solved a really gnarly problem, and you are inviting people to look at it.
You are not selling the output. Nobody cares about the output until they care about the why. You are selling the process. You are selling the problem you unstuck. You are selling the client who was crying because they didn’t know how to fix their brand, and you came in and fixed their whole life.
You are selling the story of the work, because the work itself is just a corpse without the story.
The “Messy Middle” Solution
So how do we fix this? How do we stop the 12-like pity party?
You have to do something that is going to hurt your ego a little bit. You have to stop treating the project like a precious little flower that can only be seen when it’s fully bloomed.
Spend 20% of your time documenting the “messy middle.”
That means, the next time you start a project, I want you to act like a war correspondent in the trenches. Screenshot the ugly sketches. Photograph the disaster on your desk. Screen-record the moment you realize you messed up the proportions and have to start over.
Film yourself throwing a tantrum. Film the “Aha!” moment. Film the late-night coffee cups.
Why? Because that is the stuff that connects. That is the engagement velocity. People don’t care about your perfect final render; they care about survival. They care about the mess. When you post the messy middle, the failures, the pivot points, the “Oh shit, I almost ruined this” moments, you let the audience in.
Now, when you finally post that “Perfect Masterpiece,” they don’t just see a picture. They see the war you fought to get there. They’ve been with you for three weeks. They are invested. They hit like because they feel like they are part of the crew.
That’s how you win. Not by being the best artist. By being the best storyteller about the artist.
So, put the brush down for a second. Pick up the phone. Document the chaos. And for god’s sake, next time, give the robot something to chew on.
I have become really obsessed with the lies we creatives tell ourselves, especially when it comes to marketing. I have heard them all, even said a few of them myself. It is these lies that stop so many creatives marketing effectively. All of these lies require a change in mind-set. We creatives really need to re-think this marketing.
I sat down and collated the most common marketing lies I heard creatives tell themselves. I documented 22 of these common lies, but 21 sounded better in the book title so I conveniently mislaid number 22 and came around to “The 21 Marketing Lies Creatives Tell Themselves”.
It started as a blog post, then it started to grow into a series of blog posts, but the muse was pushing hard so I just ran with it and it became a book.
I don’t just explain these lies, but I deconstruct them and then help change your mindset, and as result we’ll turbo-charge your marketing. Because that’s my goal: help you to build a marketing machine that allows you to spend more time creating, yet continue to market effectively.
The 21 Marketing Lies Creatives Tell Themselves is available at Amazon
Every week I post at least once, giving hints and tips for creatives who want to market more effectively. Pop your email in the box below to stay up to date with all future posts.
Digital Marketing for Creatives 
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