With any creative venture there are two things that your potential audience engage with - the actual creative entity and the story that is told about it. More often than not, the story comes first.

What's important to realise is that there's always a story told - if you don't tell it, someone else will. I had this conversation recently with some band-mates about a forthcoming album, explaining to them that they could frame the release of the album with their own story of how they got involved with the project, how the music came together, what it meant for them to be playing this kind of music (it's an album of freely-improvised music that still sounds like well crafted songs...). The response from one of my fellow musos was that he wants to let the music speak for itself.

The problem here is that it never does get to speak for itself - there's almost always a descriptive context in which people first hear music, or decide to watch a film, or visit a website - whether it be a review or a recommendation from a friend. For music especially, it can be a random encounter via radio or film, which provides a framework that may well be misleading, depending on what the DJ says about it on the radio, or the kind of images your music accompanies!

So it's best to have the story in your words first! This is obviously one of the uses of a press-release - you not only hype up the event you're promoting, you provide context and back-story. Without it, the journalist compiling an item to do with your creative venture will either give up and move on to something that has got a press release, or just Google you. And we all know how hard it is to control what people find on Google! Whether it's a journalist or potential client or fan, your voice needs to be louder than the ambient chatter about what you do.

For me as a musician, this often entails me talking about what I do on a range of different levels. I play solo electric bass, but because I use technology that allows me to record what I do as I'm going along then loop and layer it, it doesn't sound like one guy and a bass. Not much of it sounds like bass at all. It's often more like a spacey film soundtrack. What's more, most of my influences are singers, even though almost all my music is instrumental, so that lends a lyrical quality to the melody lines that often appeals to fans of singer/songwriters as much as to more typical fans of instrumental jazz/electronica stuff. So I've got different stories for different audiences - all are true, they just focus on different areas.

The story I tell enables me to make my music accessible and appealing to people who may well go out of their way to avoid hearing a solo bass player in most contexts, who may have pigeon-holed it as something they'd not be interested in, based on their own assumptions, or on someone else's story. Unless I tell the story, they won't even have the chance to hear it for themselves.

In any business, the challenge before getting people to pay you for what you do, is getting them to even be interested in the idea. Being great at what you do is one thing, but piquing people's interest enough to get them to investigate your work is a whole other challenge.

One thing telling our story does is it provides a genealogy of ideas - it's a space to say who you've worked with, who you're influenced by, and who your peers are - to frame what you do in terms of other people your audience might relate to. We all love the idea of being relentlessly original, but the truth is that people are far more likely to engage with you if you're closer to their comfort zone.

So try telling your story to a friend or colleague who isn't an expert in your field - who's an enthusiastic listener, but won't let you get away with jargon. Try it with a few different people, and see which bits they respond to best.

None of this has to impinge on what you do creatively, you're just inviting your audience closer into your space.

Tell your story, so that what you do makes sense, so your audience knows what they're supposed to DO with it, why it's cool and how they can tell their friends about it! How many different kinds of stories do you need to tell about what you do?