The challenge of any creative field is getting your work exposed to the right audience. Frequently.
Mind you, before someone even considers getting to that point, they better have spent a great deal of time mastering their craft and building a volume of work. Without those two, no amount of exposure will be of any benefit.
Where many go wrong is confusing exposure with working for free because those two are very different from each other.
As a magician, I would offer my services for free a few times a year to causes I felt in tune with and where I was happy to do so. There was no monetary or publicity benefit to me on those gigs and I never advertized doing them.
Every year, however, I would get emails from students at the local college here asking if I would be willing to do a free gig for their major marketing assignment/event. There was always the promise of “tons of exposure” including “live tweeting the event” and other sorts of nonsense. It was always the same impersonal copy/paste email from the year before (name changed at the bottom).
My response was always no.
Why would I work for free (which is what they were asking) when I could book a gig identical in nature that paid my fee? After all, this wasn’t an audience of carefully curated people who book magicians on a daily basis. If that were the case, then I wouldn’t be working for free, I’d be auditioning for potential bookings.
That’s the difference between free and exposure.
Exposure is working for an audience who can actually impact your future. Sometimes there is no monetary exchange, but that isn’t always the case. Free is either somebody just trying to get something for nothing or believing in the cause enough to offer time and energy for it without the expectation of anything in return.
I had someone recently ask me to volunteer for an organization that I didn’t support in any way because “it would be good for my resume.” I had to refrain from laughing because this person had no idea what was even on my resume and didn’t consider volunteering for this organization would be a detriment if I put it on there.
Another person asked if I would be willing to give a talk at a conference, but they would be unable to pay. I agreed to this one because it’s a conference I was already interested in, allowed me to refine my current talks with updated insights and put me in front of other conference organizers.
Oddly enough, the way I found people get the most exposure is to spend inordinate amounts of time on their work while saying no to all requests outside of it. They don’t exist in a vacuum, but their field of vision is so narrow that it seems to attract everyone.
There’s nothing wrong working for exposure, or even working for free, provided it’s on your own terms and you understand the difference between the two.