80+ Business and Marketing Books, Podcasts, and Tools for Artists
Are you an artist looking for the right resources to help you jump-start your creative business? You’re in the right place!
When we launched our own art businesses, we felt incredibly overwhelmed, so we went looking long and hard for any help we could find—we were googling things like how to start an art business, the best books for artists, marketing for artists…it was a difficult journey, and we had to piece every answer together, little by little.
Now that we’ve got years of running our art businesses under our belt, we’ve finally decided to round up all our favorite resources right here for you in one ultimate list, so you don’t have to look far and wide like we did!
Business Courses for Artists
Let’s kick things off with our favorite online classes that’ll teach you everything from how to manage your time as a business owner to how to come up with marketing strategies that will get your business noticed.
Seth Godin’s altMBA
We’re super obsessed with Seth Godin over here. If you’re not familiar, we’re really honored to get to be the ones to introduce you. Seth is best-selling author and marketing expert who is incredible at taking the sleaze out of selling and teaching us all how to put more heart into what we create and how we express it to the world. This particular event is a 4-week online leadership & management workshop. It’s not specifically geared to artists, but it will certainly kick your butt into thinking like a real business owner. It’s hard to get in and it’s expensive, but if you’re really dedicated to learning from the best—this is it.
Workflow, Time Management and Productivity for Creatives
In this class, artist Lisa Congdon will teach you how to establish effective, workflows and time management strategies that will to streamline your processes and maximize creative work time. We love Lisa for her sunny demeanor and her zest for creative work. She’s a superb person to learn from, and she has built a killer business.
Create & Cultivate Marketplace
Whether you’re starting a side-hustle, launching a business, or figuring out the freelancer life, Create & Cultivate’s curated bundles have the tools, resources, worksheets, and checklists to help you build the brand or career of your dreams.
The Marketing Seminar
This is a 100-day online modern marketing seminar designed by best-selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin (we told you we liked him). You can also sign up for the “highlight reel” from this course if you don’t want to do the full shabang via Udemy.
Passport to Pinterest
Pinterest is one of our favorite tools to recommend to artists when it comes to marketing. It’s like a search engine and a social media platform in one, which means you get a lot better chance of getting your work found than, say, an Instagram post that gets buried after a day! Learn how to get more traffic, higher engagement, and more sales on autopilot with Pinterest in this online course.
Business Articles for Artists
Here, we’ve gathered some of our most popular blog posts and articles on important topics for art business owners. We’ve got plenty more where these came from.
Business Plans for Artists
In this article, we’ll walk you through the most important steps you can take when starting your business and creating your business plan. Your business plan will be the guidepost you’ll repeatedly refer to, so let’s set it up right together!
how to set up an art business
Learn how to set up an art business that is legal and legit!
What is Sales Tax and How Does it Apply to Your Art Business?
Learn when to charge sales tax for your art business and how to file those taxes with the government.
Business Books for Artists
Looking for the best books for artists about business? We’ve got you covered. Here are some of our favorite resources for learning business basics and transforming your perspective as a creative business owner.
Mind Your Business by Ilana Griffo
A workbook to help you pursue your creative passion and turn it into your full time gig.
An indispensable resource for people who create art and those who buy it. This is a very important tool for pricing art and running your business.
Art Inc. by Lisa Congdon
Learn to set actionable goals, diversify your income and more!
This is Marketing by Seth Godin
No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it's presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.
Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
Learn a behavioral approach to accounting and why taking profit first can transform your business.
Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk
How great entrepreneurs build their businesses and influence - and how you can too.
Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace
Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. From co-founder of Pixel Animation Studios.
Creative Confidence by Tom & David Kelley
Principles and strategies that allow you to tap into your creative potential in your work and personal life.
Don’t Keep Your Day Job by Cathy Heller
This book will get you fired up and teach you how to use your zone of genius.
Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon
Ten transformative principles that will help you discover your artistic side and build a more creative life.
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Embrace curiosity and let go of needless suffering. Tackle what you love and face what you fear.
Creative Pep Talk by Andy J Miller
An inspiring tool and beautiful art book in one, Creative Pep Talk offers illustrated words of wisdom from 50 of today's leading creative professionals.
The Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Circillo
A productivity technique that’s as simple as using a kitchen timer.
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
A framework to build your business on, learn why it all starts with why.
Business Podcasts for Artists
Prefer to listen and learn? Here are some of our favorite shows to pop on when you’re on the road—from art marketing podcasts to interviews with art business owners, they’ll be sure to get you inspired.
How I Built This
Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.
Don’t Keep Your Day Job
Cathy Heller has honest conversations with successful creative entrepreneurs about the hands-on, practical steps to make a living doing what lights you up.
Being Boss
A podcast for creative entrepreneurs, freelancers, and side-hustlers, whether you're wanting to quit your day job or have been your own boss for a while now.
After the Jump
Through a series of interviews with designers, store owners and up-and-coming members of the creative community, Grace Bonnie (of Design\*Sponge) delves into the world of independent artists.
Akimbo
Akimbo is a podcast by marketing guru Seth Godin about our culture and about how we can change it. His topics are vast, but always thought-provoking and related to business and marketing.
Entrepreneurs on Fire
Entrepreneurs on Fire is an award winning podcast (Best of iTunes) where John Lee Dumas interviews Entrepreneurs who are truly ON FIRE.
The Side Hustle Show
The Side Hustle Show is the podcast for part-time entrepreneurs who are looking for business ideas, actionable tips to start a business, and killer strategies on how to turn their side hustle dreams into a growing business.
Strategy Hour
Get actionable strategies and killer marketing tips to grow your creative business inside The Strategy Hour podcast.
Business Therapy
Helpful and valuable conversations about all things business.
Seth Godin’s Start Up School
Hear Seth as he guides thirty entrepreneurs through a workshop exploring how they can build and run their dream business.
Design Matters
The world's first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought
Best Business Software and Apps for Artists
There’s so much that goes into running an art business (we know intimately), so we’ve rounded up some of the tools we use to keep things running smoothly.
Email Marketing
Whether you’re just sending out newsletters to your audience or pulling off more complicated automations, email marketing for artists is super important. An email list is a group of people who are actively looking to hear from you—they’re your most interested fans! Let’s talk about how to reach them.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a great first email marketing platform. If you’ve never dipped your toes into something like this before, it’s a little bit more intuitive and easy to understand than some of the other email marketing options.
ConvertKit
We personally use ConvertKit for Goodtype because it can do SO much. We have some pretty complex needs when it comes to automating emails and setting up sequences that go out when people sign up for courses, for example. This is the big daddy of email marketing platforms, but it may be more than what you need if you’re just trying to send a simple newsletter!
Shipping
If you’re selling any kind of physical product, you’re going to have to deal with (sigh) shipping. I’ve never really met an artist who enjoys the shipping part of running a business, but there are certainly tools to make the process more manageable!
Shipstation
If you’re looking for a platform to help you ship your art and print postage at home, this is a pretty solid option. Some sites like Etsy have these shipping and postage options built in, but if you don’t have that feature, or just want something more powerful, this is your guy.
Payment Processing
If you’re selling anything at all, you’re going to need to figure out how to take payments. We’ve tried a lot of different ones, so let’s talk about which payment processors are best for artists.
Stripe
Stripe is a really popular payment processor, and we’ve never had any issues with it at all. Most online shop platforms integrate with Stripe, like Squarespace (which we use ourselves).
Square
If you need to collect payments in person, Square is a great option. I’ve used Square many times for craft fairs. They actually have a little device that can plug into your phone and allow you to swipe credit cards, which really comes in handy.
PayPal
Most of us are familiar with PayPal. To be honest, we’ve had mixed experiences, and the way PayPal tends to import transactions into our accounting software is very strange and has complicated our lives many times. PayPal is nice in that everyone has it, but it can be a little touchy in our opinion.
Video Chats / Recording
If you’re wondering what the best platform is for video meetings, webinars, or recordings—we’ve got your back. And in general, it’s not something you really need to overthink. Here are our most used platforms.
Zoom
Ah, Zoom, we know it well after the pandemic, that’s for sure! We use zoom all the time for video conferencing as well as coaching sessions and webinars. We recommend it!
Google Meet
If you have gmail, Google Meet is a really cool option because it integrates really well with all Google’s other features—like their calendar and email services. We haven’t had any issues when we’ve been invited to Google Meet calls!
Data Storage & Transfer
Dropbox
Dropbox is a good option for when you’re sharing data with someone else regularly. You can create a shared folder that updates on both ends, which can be helpful.
Google Drive
This is the main storage platform we use, especially because it’s easy to manage with our g-suite subscription. Just make sure to always check your sharing permissions when you send someone a link—the default settings trip everyone up!
Wetransfer
I use WeTransfer for big files that need to be delivered to clients. The links expire, so the files don’t sit on my drive taking up too much space when I don’t need them anymore.
Branded Materials (Printing)
Marketing and networking is a really important part of running an art business. Don’t forget to make something you can leave behind with people you meet, or give as a little treat to current customers! It’s the little things that really make you stand out.
Moo
Moo is known for having great print quality for their products. You can order custom business cards, postcards, stationery, etc, and trust that they’ll be really nicely made. We always get complements.
Noissueco
We’ve worked with noissue quite a few times, and we especially love their custom tissue paper. They can print custom packaging and marketing materials.
StickerRobot
Great option for printing labels and stickers.
Sticker Mule
Another good sticker option!
Blurb
Blurb books lets you print really well made one-offs of books or magazines. How cool is that!?
Accounting
Managing your money is perhaps the MOST important thing you’ll do as a business owner. If you don’t have a hold on your finances, you don’t have a business (or at least you don’t have a successful one!). Here are our favorite accounting platforms for artists.
Quickbooks
We used Quickbooks for a long time, until we transitioned to Bench and they have their own software. Quickbooks helps you organize your income and expenses into the proper categories, but it can be a little overwhelming to use because it has so many features.
Bench
We’re currently using Bench, which is an online service that handles our bookkeeping. We got really tired of doing our own bookkeeping, and we’re so much happier now that we have help.
Social Media Management
Social media is its own beast, but it helps to tackle it when you can schedule posts ahead of time. Here are the apps we use to schedule our social posts.
Tailwind
Tailwind is (at this particular moment in time) the only app that can schedule posts on Pinterest.
Later
Later is our preferred platform for scheduling our Instagram and Facebook posts. You can keep images in a kind of “library” and then drag and drop them onto the calendar and add captions, hashtags, tags, etc….
Website and Portfolio Hosting
As artists, our websites or portfolio sites are hugely important.
Squarespace
Squarespace is, in our opinion, the best website builder for artists. They have great templates to start with, and if you want to customize, you have practically endless options (including code!). We love Squarespace and have had great experiences with our websites and with their customer service.
Wordpress
If you want to build a website more from scratch, Wordpress may be more your speed.
Behance
Behance is a creative network that showcases artist portfolios. If you’re not ready to create a full website, consider hosting your work on Behance.
Workflow & Productivity
When you have so many parts of your business to manage, you need a way to keep everything organized and on track. And the more you can automate and simplify tasks, the better off your art business will be!
Notion
We use Notion to organize our whole business. It’s like the most thorough to do list you could ever dream of.
Zapier
Zapier is an incredibly powerful tool that automates tasks. It gets very tech-y and can be insanely complicated when you get into some really advanced stuff. Essentially, if you find yourself repeating tasks or going between programs too often, you might be able to save yourself some time by using Zapier.