Best Art Books from Jen’s North Light Picks

Every business book you read will tell you that you need a contract for every client and every project. But in the real world of doing business, it’s easy to let this detail slip through the cracks, especially if you aren’t particularly comfortable with it in the first place. Is it because you don’t have a good contract? (If you read this article, you won’t be able to use that excuse anymore.) Full Article

How many times have you submitted a proposal and then never heard from your prospect again? Or worse, learned that the project was awarded to someone else because your price was too high?

If either of these is a common occurrence, you’re probably wasting valuable time writing proposals you will never win. The only solution is to learn how to distinguish the viable prospects from the deadbeats before you agree to write anything. And that means you have to find out what the prospect’s budget is.

But that’s a problem, because either you’re afraid to ask, or you ask and the response you get is useless. Either way, you’re back to square one. That’s the moment to do something different. Full Article

In the early days of my marketing communications firm, there was nothing I wanted more than a blueprint for what I should be doing as a business owner. I was doing well, but I had no idea how to manage my business, and didn’t know if I’d be around next year—or even next month. There wasn’t a resource specifically written for creative professionals available to me back then, so I had to learn on my own. What follows is a brief overview of the plan I created for myself—the guide I wished I’d had handed to me all those years ago. Full Article

Brought from Japan to corporate America in the 1950s, the OGSM concept was used initially by car manufacturers. Today large corporations, including Fortune 500 companies, employ this framework to keep their workforces centered on goals and objectives. Ideally this tool can express in a one-page document what a traditional business plan takes 50 pages to explain. The initials in OGSM stand for objective, goals, strategies and measurements. So in what way can this concept be applied to an artist’s business or artwork? Let’s walk through the process of creating a sample OGSM and see. Full Article