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Keep Creating Even if No One Seems to Care

Audience-building is a marathon, not a sprint.

Sharonda Harris-Marshall
2 min readDec 30, 2018

Ever feel like a monkey in a zoo? Social media tends to make people feel this way, especially artists who share their work. But eventually, the children throwing popcorn at you get bored and move on to the butterfly tent.

Social media holds artists accountable, but it also creates the neverending funnel of imposter syndrome, anxiety, and anonymous toxicity. And sometimes, it’s discouraging to see your Instagram post of your latest work receive 20 likes when some cryptic and horoscope-sounding pop psychology quote receives 9000 likes. You support and follow so many of your friends and colleagues, but see little engagement in return. You’re putting your best work out there and you appear to have no audience. Well, except for the robots.

I’ve seen The Matrix. This is how it starts!

But you gotta keep creating. You gotta keep sharing. Putting eyeballs on your work is how you stay fed. And if you don’t make money with your work yet, you probably want to. So you continue to share your work with the world.

At the risk of sounding like the hypothetical pop psychology Instagram post from above, you have…

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Sharonda Harris-Marshall
Sharonda Harris-Marshall

Written by Sharonda Harris-Marshall

is a filmmaker, photographer, and digital media artist living a stereotypical artist life. She could have been a doctor or a scientist, but here we are.

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