art business network > the business >Artist Self Promotion
You are a good artist but find selling art is hard, really hard. If you are “unknown” it can seem next to impossible. Sure you can sell to friends and relatives but to make art your business you need a much wider audience.
That audience will not have heard of you, won’t care about your problems and will not want to pay anymore than they have to for your work. Gaining and maintaining a profitable following is not easy but it is essential if you are to succeed.
The first thing to come to terms with is that selling your art (as opposed to making it) is a business. You sell - they buy … a business. Painting may be your calling but living from it is a business.
All businesses compete for customers and their money. You compete not only with other artists but other things that your customers could choose to spend their money on. So you may lose out to a sofa, or a holiday in Ibiza.
The good news, however, is that similar “rules“ apply to all businesses – even selling art. Sometimes, when making your art is so hard, it is easy to forget it is so easy to fail by neglecting the basics..
So lets have a look at those rules…..
You need to show customers your work.
Unless you want to travel around the world with your portfolio under your arm then most artists produce a catalogue…. mmm … well they would like to and they are very expensive and they get quickly out of date and the colour matching can be patchy and we have to design it and, and …. so we don’t do it.
However the internet has come to our rescue ….. We can create and maintain an on-line portfolio of our work for a fraction of the cost of a physical brochure…
Wham…. bingo….. done that … down the pub and wait for the cash to roll in.
