For Artists in the Entrepreneurial Age: 10 Adages From Alex Miles Younger

By Amy Cuevas Schroeder

Alex Miles Younger had us at “hi” when he took the on-the-ground stage at CUE Art Foundation in Manhattan on December 13.

By the time his second slide—a quote from Matisse—hit the screen, I knew a speaktorial star was born.

On December 13, 2011, the former Domino Project Creative Director (and, now, founder of Unozip Design) made his debut as a visionary leader for creatives.

Younger and I co-presented on the topic of “Branding as Storytelling for Artists,” a two-part (four-hour) seminar about leveraging the Internet as a medium, the power of collaboration and how to get your work “out there.”

Younger designs books for people with ideas too good to ignore. His portfolio includes nine bestsellers, and his client list is comprised of business innovators, change agents and artists of all kinds.

He helped launch The Domino Project (a publishing house founded by Seth Godin and Powered by Amazon), and designed these books: B, We Are All Weird, End Malaria, Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness, Read This Before Our Next Meeting, Pick Four, Anything You Want, Self-Reliance, and Do The Work.

Here’s a sort-of Top 10 list of his quotes from his presentation—but these don’t really do his presentation justice.

The better news is that Younger is just getting warmed up. You’re likely to see him speaking at other tech and entrepreneurship conferences—including DIYTogether New York in 2012 .

1. “The art we love functions as a way to start conversations, geek out, and determine who is like us. It provides us an easy way to connect with other people. In this way, artists aren’t in the visual arts business, they’re in the connecting people business.”

2. “Artists are ideally suited to succeed at marketing, because the things they create provide easy ways for people to connect with one another.”

3. “The easiest thing to market is something that connects people and comes with a story worth telling.”

4. “If it’s not remarkable, it’s a commodity.”

5. “It’s what other people say that sells your work.”

6. “Adapt what you do until people start telling the story you want them to tell about your work. Marketing is not rocket science—it’s more like gossip.”

7. “It’s the people who share genuinely and generously who are going to win in the new economy.”

8. “The stock photography business is dying, but wedding photography grows every year. As more and more people make things that could work for anybody, it’s the work that’s custom made which becomes more valuable.”

9. “People are less likely to pirate your work if you provide it to them in the format they want it in, instead of creating artificial scarcity because your business model is based around selling your work in a particular format.”

10. “You cannot pirate custom work.”

Follow Alex Miles Younger on Twitter: @unozip.