Reimagining My Creative Business From A 20ft Sailboat

At the start of each new month I like to look back at the month just gone and check in with myself about how things are going. Sometimes, these reflections have turned into Substack posts, like the ones here and here. Sometimes, I’ve been too busy to stop and look back, and the start of the month passes in a blur.

But recently, for the first time in my adult life, I had the unique experience of having an entire month of looking back and reflecting. This first month of my sabbatical has given me an entirely new vantage point from which to view my creative practice and my business - to see it in its entirety from the outside, instead of as someone crawling about in its innards.

And there have been many times in this last month where it felt like everything suddenly came into focus. Intractable problems that I’d grappled with for years felt solvable. Familiar pitfalls and long-running bad habits made sense when looked at afresh. And new options and alternative pathways opened up, when previously things had felt clouded and obscure.

I had expected this sabbatical to be creatively inspiring, but I hadn’t expected it to be so clarifying. I think there’s something about being in nature, and being limited by nature, that opens up new space in your brain. My husband and I had made all sorts of plans for the month of May - we were going to sail out to sea, we were going to head up the coast, we were going to see new places and learn new things. In the end, with the weather against us, and our beloved boat still leaking alarmingly, we kept our journeys limited to the river where we live - and I think this first month has been all the better for it.

I’m so used to working for as long as my body will allow, instead of following the rhythm of dawn and dusk, and ending my work when the daylight fades. I’m so used to switching between different projects, and even between different studios, when the mood takes me, instead of being confined to a 20 ft sailboat and the tools and materials I’ve brought on board.

All of this to say, I think something has really shifted in how I think about my creative practice. But when I came, at the start of June, to sit down and try and write about it, I found myself feeling a bit overwhelmed. I simply had too much that I wanted to say.

I’m also acutely aware that while I have excellent clarity in my current state - fully rested, nervous system regulated, surrounded by nature - this clarity will almost certainly become obscured again when I actually go back to work full time. I’m wary of writing a lengthy Substack on “what I’ve learnt from one month working remotely from a sailboat” when I haven’t actually put any of those insights into practice yet.

But there is one issue that I’ve found a renewed sense of clarity about in the last month. Better yet, it’s something that I can actually start to tackle while working remotely from a sailboat. It’s my relationship with Instagram.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Instagram has been a reoccurring theme on my Substack over the years. I wrote about going viral, running two Instagram accounts, how social media kickstarted my career. It’s always been there in the background, lingering like a toxic friend who you can’t seem to stop hanging out with.

And just like a toxic friend, I’ve dedicated way too much time and emotional bandwidth to thinking about Instagram. Why am I on this platform in the first place? Are the benefits really worth the downsides? Am I just contributing to something that’s ultimately a net negative for the world?

Part of me thinks that if I was really serious about making art, I would get off Instagram completely. Archive all my posts, delete my account, begin again in relative obscurity and work my way out of it. Do it on hard mode, do it old school. Real artists don’t post Reels! Real artists have never heard a “trending audio”, or spoken awkwardly into a clip-on microphone on camera.

On sabbatical, I had time to really sit with these emotions. I also looked at the data.

I saw that in the months when I was regularly posting, traffic to my website was almost double what it was when I wasn’t posting at all. In the month of May, customers from Instagram accounted for 33.88% of my sales, more than any other source.

I know that if I really couldn’t stand to be on Instagram any longer, I could find an alternative route to sharing my work. But I also know that the benefits of Instagram (for me) do outweigh the downsides. Every artist has a choice to make between creative purity and getting paid, and we all have to make a compromise somewhere. Instagram is mine.

A Better Way Is Possible

Letting go of the lingering question of “should I really be on Instagram” freed me up to look at my account with a lot more clarity. I saw that because I was so often dragging my heels, posting reluctantly because I felt like I had to, I wasn’t getting the most out of it. I did make content that I was proud of, but my focus was always on the metrics - the likes, the follows, the number of people clicking on the link in my bio. I had no goal for what I was doing on the platform beyond “get people to buy my stuff”.

I decided that if I was going to invest the time and effort into Instagram, I needed a bigger vision. I needed it to, in fact, be something more like this Substack - a space where I’m telling the story of my creative practice, exploring the world I’m creating with my art, and taking my audience with me on the journey.

And the amazing thing that I’ve found with this Substack over the last six months is that as I think more seriously about how to share my work, I become better at expressing what my work is about. I used to be terrible (I mean, really terrible) at explaining to people what I was trying to do in my art. It’s one of the reasons I struggled to make anything new work in the first place. It’s really hard to prioritise a creative vision that you can’t properly articulate, even to yourself.

Just as Substack has helped me to get my ideas out into words, and pushed me to actually share them with the world, I think Instagram can help me too, in a different way. Substack is a deep dive - it’s slower paced and intimate. It’s the cafe at the back of the shop where the regulars congregate. Instagram is the shop window. Passers-by might hurry past what I’ve hung up there, but hopefully the right people will stop to look, and come inside.

So what does this look like in practice? This is what I’ll be exploring here on this Substack over the coming weeks. I’ll think about how to build my audience’s connection with my practice, how to maintain consistency without burning out, and how to use the framework of Instagram in a way that actually benefits me. Who knows? I might end this experiment by concluding that this app is not for me, that the compromise is just too much, and the friendship is just too toxic. Either way, I’ll be sharing the outcome right here with you.

In next week’s post I’ll be sharing the rules I stick to for my Instagram - from posting times to image formatting - and how I balance optimising for the algorithm with genuine creativity. And in the meantime, if there’s anything you’d like me to write about, whether Instagram-related or not - let me know in the comments.