Advice on how to have an Illustration Career

I ran across this website by lettering artist Nate Williams who had some great advice marketing your art, brainstorming and creating your own artistic and recognizable brand. He has done his homework.

Here's an excerpt:
The first step to a successful illustration career is to find your voice – a unique consistent style. A lot of artists have trouble committing to one style at first because it kind of goes against an artist’s nature of exploring and not limiting their expression, but as an illustrator, art directors hire you because they want to give a project a specific tone, feeling and they need to be able to count on your work being a certain way for their project, campaign, etc. Imagine if you bought a Metallica CD and it was full of acoustic Bolivian folk music .. you would be kind of confused??? Art directors usually don’t want to play style roulette.Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t do other styles.. it just means when you present them to art directors have consistency between the body of work. A number of illustrators, writers, and musicians work under various names for this particular reason. For example, my alter ego is Alexander Blue. This is a wackier, colorful style I do.Here is a really good book to read regarding this subject:

see more on his website...


And here are some insightful Q&A on illustration careers answered by different designers.
Sample: