I thought when I made the decision to be an artist, all I would have to do was this.

Well, I do have to make art.

But I found my life was turning into this

So to be an artist, making space from the things turned out to be as important as making the art.

Instead of calling the things a ‘horrible list of annoying to-dos’, I renamed it…

Make Space For Art

That changed my mission from getting through the horrible list into eliminating and simplifying all the things on the list so I had space for art.

.

Make Space

Making Space in Myself

I need to make space in myself so I believe making art is something I can and should be doing.

Of course, the brain provides all the thoughts about how useless and deluded I am to believe that.

Getting past these thoughts and into the studio, used to mean just rushing in, pushing past them and slam into the studio as quickly as I could so their cruel hooks couldn’t sink in before the joy of making took over.

Now I take a lot more time, working through all the thoughts with attention, uncovering and releasing the underlying fears more thoroughly, and slowly building better thoughts.

Subscribe now

Making Space in my Energy

I need to try and step away from overwhelm and exhaustion. It sucks to come into the studio already worn out and frazzled. Making art takes lots of decision-making, and they should be really good decisions you are making in the studio. (Because thats how you make really good art)

Paying attention to simplifying everything else in life helps. Simplifying the clothes you wear, the food choices you make. That eliminates so many trivial decisions and allows for lots of art in your life.

Using a good efficient way of corralling, collecting (and winnowing down) all the tasks is a divine necessity too.1

(footnote) Cal’s systems work for the more linear thinkers - for the jumpy live-wire ADHD thinker, Andy J.Pizza’s podcast here is perhaps a good one.

Make Physical Space

Honouring the time I have carved out and finding the physical space that I need to make art in -both of these are huge, continuous struggles!

Make Art

I think you’ve got this bit, you’ve probably figured out your own amazing way of making art. Or at least you are enjoying the journey to get there.

Make a Vehicle to Take your Art out into the World where it can create an exchange of value

Because I always felt bad and scared about taking my art out into into the world to show other people, my art would just pile up. It became dispiriting to make art that would just go into a cupboard.

I have slowly and painfully come to this thought: When you create art, you are creating energetic beings in the world.

You can sense this energy in cave drawings, in the precious religious icons from the Byzantium, in the powerful wooden totems and masks created in Africa (which had their spiritual meaning stripped away by the Cubists).

in issue 28 of Dear Doris

These energetic beings you are creating need a place in the world - they need some pathway to go out and find their way into other human’s hearts, and create value to the world there. (footnote - some just have little bit of energy, like an ant, some much bigger).

Unless you have had a great deal of luck sometime in your life, you are the one who has to create this vehicle so your art can travel on this path.

And if this pathway of exchange is in place, the humans who have received value from your art can give you back the value you need in your life.

The value they return to you might be money. Or it might be respect. Or it might be this acknowledgement, that they have been moved by, and felt the same feelings you are expressing in your art. A kind of communion. Or all of these.

in is it ok to hate stuff for no reason?

I think of creating this business of taking your art out into the world to exchange value as creating a kind of boat, or sea vessel for your art

There are so many types of ship that one of them is sure to fit with your way of being in the world. And the strength of the visual metaphors works so well for me, and makes it easier for me to think through what its right for me:

A friendly inter-island ferry for transporting plenty of smaller, frequently made bits of art back and forth in a warm fug.

A luxurious super yacht for incredibly exclusive things.

A tough, knocked-up small fishing vessel that is 100% for locals, to provide nourishment for the few close to you.

A yacht for soloists to explore new territories, to go beyond the horizon. Not always coming back to shore, the adventure can be so strong. But finding places no-one has been to before.2

The platforms, the body of the boat, are the venues to place your work in and offer them for an exchange of value.

These platforms are galleries, shops, art markets, websites and os on. Some art connects well with one of these platforms but not others. And different platforms bring back different types of value. Some platforms are more exclusive, and can bring you back offerings of respect. Some platforms are better for the exchange of money, but do not bring you any status.

The next part of constructing this vehicle is finding ways to propel it through the choppy waves and currents of the world’s attention. Because your work has to be seen by some people in order ofr it to create value in their hearts. Maybe it has to be seen by a lot of people before it finds the right attention (which is a scarce resource).

Figuring out what will best propel the particular art you have made, and what best matches your own particular energy and way of being in the world yourself, is very important work.

The energies of propulsion are things like advertising, or meeting and talking to people in real life, or social media-ing, or being written up in the art world. All of these provide extra energy for your art’s journey out there.

These are the sails, the motors, or the oars that give your vessel motion.

Advertising is a like using a motor - it gives you fast propulsion but drains your reserves quickly (reserves of cash, in this case).

A sail takes energy upfront to create, but gives you gentle propulsion for years afterwards with only nudging and upkeep from you. These are the things that are evergreen on the web, like articles that keep turning up when people search, or pins on Pinterest, or being featured in art books.

And the oars, the rowing? You don’t need much in the way of reserves to get started with oars (they are just some big sticks) but you need LOTS of continuous energy to keep moving with your oars. These are those social media sites that make you keep posting and posting and posting, always creating new material, always constantly responding. Wearing you out. And as soon as you stop all this high energy activity energy, your boat stops moving. (And you need to watch out that you are not some kind of serf, just moving Mr Zuckerberg’s boat forward rather than your own)

But you can get started and go places that way with only your own personal energy and not much cash.

So many artists don’t like - or struggle with - the thought of mixing business and art. for so many, it seems so be two things that aren’t right together.

It can feel so hard, or wrong, that artists maybe just have a rough raft as a vehicle for their art.

Maybe we can love our art a little bit extra, and build something beautiful for it to travel on.

2

I did not invent the boat analogy - and my understanding of the propulsion analogy was deepened by this book: Content chemistry : the illustrated handbook for content marketing by Andy Crestodina

UPDATE 2026: Pinterest and Substack have both changed a lot since I wrote this. Whenever you are reading this, please do a quick check of current recommendations before following mine, things will have changed!

The biggest changes have been a) the success of Substack. No-one I talked to had ever heard of Substack when I wrote this, now everyone is on the platform. That means that being active on Notes is currently the easiest way to get people visit and subscribe to your Stack. There are new people on Notes all the time, and there is no friction to subscribing straight from Notes, unlike when people find you on Pinterest or Instagram or other platforms.

And b) Pinterest has changed direction and they are trying to be useful to larger e-commerce people, rather than the small maker/artist/author who is likely to be reading this post.

The other change is I am currently not putting my own Substack up on Pinterest! I took quite a long break from all posting everywhere and rather lost the consistency that Pinterest values.

I can't seem to understand Instagram, and I never understood Facebook. It's like an avalanche of small talk - on a global scale. The posts there appear to me as strange social postures, social performances that I just can't interpret. Here, on my part of the autism spectrum, those things just don't register in my brain.

I am capable of decoding and replicating them, though. It's as if I am watching a bird species doing a mating dance. I can see the codes they are using clearly - a hop here, spreading of the wing feathers there. But it doesn't translate to me actually feeling anything (such as wanting to mate) in the way the birds must feel when they see these dances.

Other people will feel something when they encounter these social signals - some sort of response will be triggered that is absent in me.

So trying to do normal social media feels to me like going out and hopping in the same patterns as the birds hop, spreading my arms out in an echo of their wings.

I may successfully replicate the movements, but those beings on the other side of the screen are only seeing me perform an odd sort of code; I am definitely not getting a signal to mate as a result.

My earnestly studied and mimicking patterns I perform on Instagram are all just hard work for me, and I am not sure my posts don't vibrate with the awkwardness of masking. When I put a fire emoji in a comment, it feels as genuine as if a bird has desperately pecked at the keyboard.

But back around 2012, when I was still puzzling over why people enjoyed this peculiar, cryptic form of interaction on Facebook, I got an invitation to join Pinterest and found, happily, I could get those signals clearly and experience a genuine response to them.

In those days, Pinterest had a chronological feed. I could watch and understand people’s visual obsessions blooming and fading. I could be a part of and contribute to the waves of images passing backwards and forwards, images we were all obsessing about at the same time, creating patterns and tides of visual delight. We could see, via pins, through each other's eyes for a while.

Because I was a bit of an early adopter and totally in love with pinning all day, I still get the benefits of that time I spent on the platform. There is one viral pin, a sculpture I made all the way back in 2015 - and that same pin has just got 161,600 views in the last 10 months. There is no way anything will last that long on Instagram!

Subscribe now

Pinterest and Substack Now

I have recently started Substacking and pinning the Stacks, and that's giving my Pinterest account an overly boost! Pinterest loves fresh pins - new images with new URLs to connect to - and Substacking regularly means I am creating lots of new URLs, new images, and new things to talk about, all of which add up to high-quality fresh pins. (This might be a mind-blowing fact, but Pinterest actually wants and rewards you for creating new, good-quality links outside of their platform.)

Substack now allows people to post their thoughts, ideas, and responses in a deep way, beyond the social posturing that happens on other platforms. And I am so relieved - I can now 'see' the people on this platform and communicate with them genuinely. My neurodivergent brain doesn't have to struggle to decode everything. It can focus on ideas, so Substack has allowed me to connect with people on the internet again.

The wonderful thing is that Substack and Pinterest can work brilliantly together to create a (relatively) non-addictive, (relatively) low-stress way of growing an audience.

Both platforms offer perennial, evergreen ways of having your content live forever on the internet, unlike the 12-hour lifespan of other platforms.

The rhythm of both platforms is in tune as well. Both recommend posting once a week. Peace!

And I have picked up some ways to use Pinterest over the years that I would like to share to help you grow. I mention Instagram below because, as an artist, that has been the main way of showcasing my work, but the points may also be valid for a number of other platforms.

Addiction to marketing on social media

One big problem I have with Instagram is that it makes you addicted to marketing, constantly ramping up how much content you have to create to please the algorithm.

Instagram needs a constant supply of fresh content to capture the attention of app users. So it needs to convince you, the creator, to work very hard adding more and more content to the platform, as you are the one generating this constant novelty. And they must manipulate you so that the type of content you add aligns with their mission of keeping people engaged within the app. If IG didn't succeed in making you, a creative person, addicted to putting many things on their platform for free, they would have a significant problem - no audience and no business.

At the same time, Instagram is reducing their usefulness to content creators. The short-form videos make it more likely for users to mindlessly scroll and less likely to engage with your content on a deeper level.

The other major issue is the ethical foundation of Meta's business. The more addicted you are, the more money they make from selling your data and your audience's data, as well as selling ads and enticing you to pay for features. It's not pleasant. And they seem to disregard the collateral damage caused (genocide in Cambodia? Self-harm in young women? Cambridge Analytica?), considering it unimportant.

Yes, I still have an Instagram account. Fortunately, it is starting to fade into irrelevance in my life.

Step Zero - an attitude shift to peaceful platforms

Pinterest is a non-addictive marketing platform. This is a good thing! But your brain will try to tell you to focus on IG (or your previous platform of choice) because your brain is used to and addicted to the dopamine you get from posting there.

So it is going to be really helpful to create a different mindset - a change away from making material for Instagram and repurposing it for Pinterest if you ever get around to it.

Instead, put your energy into creating pins. Create posts entirely for Pinterest first. And, as a sort of waste product from your pin creation, you will have created some vertical images and captions you can reuse for Instagram.

And instead of posting in real-time - and having all the thoughts about likes and comments jiggling up your equanimity - use an auto-scheduler to post for you and give yourself lots of lovely distance from the process. Meta’s own scheduler is good. Also, set yourself a time later in the day to respond to comments on your desktop, not your phone. Weirdly, it's less addictive to do that.

Turn off or mute notifications from Insta. I turn off mobile data for Instagram in my phone settings so I can't just jump on it when I am out. Others delete the app from the phone or use various blockers or focus settings.

Put the Pinterest app in the middle of your phone’s home page instead and open that if you feel an urge to look at nice images on a scroll. Again, weirdly, the Pinterest app is interesting for a few minutes, then it is really easy to close it down.

And turn the notifications up on Pinterest. I get a little banner on my home screen floating past. (I turn the badges off the app itself; that seems a bit shouty to me). So I see these constant signals that Pinterest is working away for me, which soothes my anxiety. Pinterest isn’t a place for chatting, so you never have to do anything about those notifications except absorb a little bit of happiness juice.

Step 1 - Claim your Thing

Actually, make sure you have a Pinterest business account first! Make a clear introduction of yourself and your thing on your profile.

Then, claim your existing website. This will help protect your materials - now naughty people can't just 'take' your images, pin them, and put their own links on the images to their thing. Pinterest has marked you as having first dibs on those images now that you have claimed that website. It helps Pinterest connect your materials to your website. By the way, people might already be pinning from your website that they like, and pins of your thing are already there. Having your website claimed helps Pinterest keep those points connected to you.

Note that you can’t claim your Substack on Pinterest if you have the typical substack address, the one that is yourtitle.substack.com . That’s because you won’t be able to upload the necessary HTML tag to the root directory - only Substack themselves will have access to that.

However, if you get a custom domain for your substack, you can claim the custom domain for Pinterest through the DNS records, which you will have access to.

Claiming your website differs a bit depending on how it is hosted, so I won't go into it here. This is the Pinterest page on how to do it. Claim Your Website

UPDATE: I HAVE ACTUALLY NOT SUCCEEDED IN CLAIMING MY SUBSTACK FOCUSED WEBSITE ON PINTEREST, ONLY MY MAIN PERSONAL WEBSITE. I AM RUBBISH AT THIS SORT OF DIGITAL STUFF, SO I DON’T KNOW IF IT IS ME OR IT IS NOT ACTUALLY POSSIBLE

Step 2 - Make four boards (or more)

Think of some contexts in which your thing will be happy. An artist might create boards called 'Abstract Paintings', 'Art Inspired by the Sea', 'Blue Interiors', 'Minimalist Interiors', and 'Art by My Name' for their boards. Someone creating a slow living Substack might choose 'Seasonal Slow Living', 'Simplify your Home', 'Quit Social Media', or something similar for their boards. Make sure to fill in the board descriptions as well as the board titles.

Now pin things you like to the boards. Have fun pinning things you find interesting and attractive. There is a small boost from the algorithm simply by being on the platform and pinning. And I believe you are more likely to gain followers if you have an interesting flow of pins. By the way, having followers is not very important on Pinterest. Views and Saves are what you want.

The algorithm also uses boards as context to determine the theme of the pins you create. So if your pin about Your Thing is in a board surrounded by pins about The Similar Thing in a board titled All These Things - and with a board description 'an interesting variety of lovely Things', it's all for the better. Now you are starting to master Pinterest SEO

Step 3 - Make the Pins

The next step is to pin all the things that are already on your website and make pins from Substacks you have already published.

This is the process:

1. Decide which web page or Substack post to make a pin for. Choose an image that connects well with that page. (You probably already have that, right?) and looks good. Make sure what people will find on the web page and what you have put on the pin match up. It is very important to Pinterest that their users find what they are looking for.

2. Don't link to posts that are completely behind a paywall. Pinterest likes its users to find what the pin has promised, and they can't if it is behind a paywall.

3. Pinterest will accept a variety of aspect ratios, but the best size is 1000px wide and 1500px high. If you already have a lot of photos in other vertical formats, and you feel overwhelmed by resizing them all, it's okay, you can still use them if you want. It's even possible to use horizontal images if you need to, but they don't look very good on Pinterest, so it's probably a bit of a waste of time to bother with them.

4. You can make either a static pin or a video pin. You used to be able to make something called Idea pins (actually my phone still shows me the Idea pin option, but they are just slow in phasing them out around the world), but now they have simplified it back down to static pins and video pins. Video pins do get better engagement on Pinterest, so use video if you have some good videos lying around.

5. It's often a really good idea to layer on words that will draw people in - but for my art, I like to keep the pin free of text. Nice-looking quotes work too.

6. Pinterest can read the words on a JPEG you have uploaded, especially if the font is clear. Sans serif bold helps here.

7. On Pinterest, upload the image. Add a clear, simple title. Add a description, using sentences in normal human language. Don't use hashtags. Add the URL from your website or Substack post that the pin connects to. Now you are getting even better at Pinterest SEO!

8. If you have a nice backlog of material on your website or existing Substacks, make a lot of pins and use the scheduling function to auto-post the pins out once a week into the future. Pinterest has a scheduler built-in, and Tailwind is the best third-party scheduler for Pinterest.

9. Once a week is a bit of a magic number for Pinterest. If you do that much, the algorithm knows you are a creator on their platform and, as a result, will treat you well.

Pinterest says, "Quality and relevance matter more than frequency on Pinterest. So while you can determine the best schedule for you, posting on a weekly basis is a good rule of thumb."

So long-term, it is better to pin once a week for a year than to pin five times a week and burn out after two months. Put your beautiful, precious energy into writing or painting, not making a million different pins! Don't burn out, please. Pinterest really isn't about the hustle hustle.

Step 4 - Fresh Pins every week

What Pinterest truly loves is a Fresh Pin. A Fresh Pin is one that has both a new image and a brand new URL to go to. Every post you make on Substack has a fresh URL, so if you post here once a week, you are sorted.

What to do if you don't create new Substacks that frequently? Create semi-fresh pins. That means having a new image connected to a pre-used URL. Maybe do a flat lay of your thing for one pin, and your thing hung on the wall for the next pin, both leading to the same URL. Even changing up the layout of the (same) text and (same) image dramatically will fool the algorithm into thinking you have delivered a new image. Some people really get into this remix and have a bunch of Canva templates to do this remixing with.

Look after your links. Once upon a time, I used to just change the titles of my website's pages constantly, willy-nilly, depending on what I felt like. But all the pins to the old pages become broken links, and Pinterest doesn't like that.

So I have learned to treat all my existing URLs like treasures and protect them forever, thanks to Pinterest.

For Substack, this has meant I have chosen a custom domain for my stack. There may come a day when I decide to leave Substack (but I hope not), and this means I can re-host my writing and still keep all the URLs (and the Pinterest link juice from them) forever.

Pinterest also notices domain authority. If your pins consistently lead to non-broken, good quality URLs, with good quality on the pages, Pinterest will reward you by ranking your domain authority well.

Step 5 - Just keep going once a week for at least six months

And stop there for 6 months - just pin once a week.

Pinterest is slow, and it will take time for things to grow on Pinterest.

So after six months, you might want to check in and see if some pins have performed better than others. See if you can do more of the things that are resonating with people.

See your audience via Pinterest -

When people have started pinning your content to their boards, you can go and see their boards. You get a lovely insight into where your content fits into people’s lives.

Look at this board where one of my posts is. I can understand quite a bit about what this woman likes and who she is by looking at her board.

I don't think you get anything like this type of insight anywhere else!

Analysing the statistics -

Look at your stats to see which pins perform better than others and use the information to create better pins.

Pinterest SEO

Now you can get even more geeky about Pinterest SEO too. There is a small universe for you to dive into if you want.

Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends is another refinement, another level of geeky stuff you can get into. Pinterest announces what is currently trending on their platform, and if your content matches one of the trends, you can make a play for riding the wave of that trend.

Start re-pinning strategically to different boards

This is the way to pin every day without creating new pins every day. After a period of, let's say, one month after creating a pin and posting it to a specific board, find another board and upload the same pin to that board. Using Tailwind will make this incredibly easy - they have an option that automates this for you.

Don't pin the same link day after day - mix up the pins in the schedule so that each day you post a different link. Mix it up so that you create a pin for post A and then one for post B.

Join Tailwind communities

Join communities that are downstream of your business. If you make butter, don't join a butter-makers community. Join a bread bakers community because they are the ones who are going to want to buy lots of butter. If you are an artist, don't join an art community, join an interior decorators community.

Some things to be aware of:

In the USA, during the summer, your numbers will drop dramatically. It's okay; it's just a pleasant indication that Pinterest is a non-addictive platform. People will have put down their devices and gone outside to play rather than staying inside, stuck on Pinterest. It's another good sign that Pinterest is a non-addictive platform.

Group boards can be a bit tricky. Leave them alone unless you have a special reason.

Outdated advice:

For a while, it was a great boost to your account to use Idea Pins (similar to an IG reel or story). Pinterest has since changed Idea Pins, and they no longer overtly say that they prioritize them.

If you go really old school, you might find advice to pin 20 times a day. They changed the algorithm ages ago, and you will be treated as spammy if you do this now. Don't do it.

Following Simple Pin Media is a good idea - they will keep you updated on Pinterest developments

And follow me on Pinterest if you like…

The button below will let you share this post out into the world

Share

Get more from Helen Reynolds in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app