In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric addresses the first things you should do when you’re ready to begin marketing your art; and how to know which media could be the most effective for showcasing your unique work.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 131 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
this is from Sandy White in Colorado who says I am finally getting into marketing my own artwork. What are the first things that I should be doing? Sandy, congratulations. You’ve asked a loaded question because marketing is vast. And it includes so much and I will go into some depth. But all these answers are in my book, or maybe most of them are. But let’s touch on some of the key things. First off, you, you ask yourself, why? Why am I marketing? Why do I want to market what do I hope to accomplish, you need to be very specific, not broad. For instance, instead of saying, I want to sell more art, which is broad, you say, I want to sell $500 of art in every single month, or 5000, or 500,000, or whatever your number is. Now, we all have different reasons for our why. And that’s why we have to define what we want first, because marketing isn’t always about selling art. It is always about selling yourself and your brand. But you might do it for different reasons, you might do it for recognition, you might do it for awareness, you might want to get galleries to pick you up, you might be marketing to get invited to all the great parties in your town. And of course, you might be marketing to sell art. So no, you might want all those things, but you got to pick one, and make that your primary focus. So make a list of everything that you want, prioritize it, define that list exactly into exact terms, and then set some goals, your goals will determine the actions that you take, because each action requires a different approach in most cases. So once you get some goals, break them into small steps, what I call micro goals, I like weekly goals, I have a weekly goal every week of the year for my entire year, based on my big initiatives I’m trying to accomplish. So you can do that, too. It’s not hard, take some time, but it’s not hard. Just follow a plan. So it’s not all or nothing at once, right. So we can’t get it all at once. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much money we have, we can’t get it all at once. There are things you can do to stimulate things better with those things. But to get noticed, to get started selling, you’ve got to gradually build sales with confidence before you pull the trigger. You know, if you decide you want to go full time, and replace your full time income, then you’ve got to kind of get used to it first. So don’t just jump in and quit your job. I mean, I don’t recommend that I think you want to keep that job because things always take longer and cost more money than you think they will and having that job will help you and you’ll be able to just work two jobs simultaneously your art and that job. Alright. Also, you need to decide where your focus is gonna lie is it local, regional, national or international, it becomes more complex and more expensive, the more you add to that and expand, but I want to recommend that every artist ultimately, as a local strategy, and a national strategy. And the reason I say that is because local is really important to you. Because you know, you can get involved in local things and become a celebrity locally, and that’s gonna buy you a lot of parties and invitations and things like that, and you’re gonna get seen, and there’s money in your town who will buy your paintings. But a national strategy is also good because sometimes the local towns have bad economies, and you want to have a strategy so you can go where the money is, jump or fish are jumping into the boat, so to speak, right? So this list, of course, is the top of the iceberg. But start defining what you want your life to look like what you need financially, what you want to be able to do, such as travel or workshops, or other things, perks. And then you know, maybe it’s building the ultimate studio like Lori Putnam did. She’s famous now. But she came to me she was broke. We built a plan. I helped her with her marketing. She built her ultimate studio and makes more money than she ever thought possible in her life. And it’s very possible, it just takes time and dedication. She’s worked very hard at it for 10 solid years. And she made really good progress fast, but she makes more and more progress. The longer you keep it going you build momentum. She’s passionate, she’s driven, she works hard. And she’s also become a better marketer than me, because she’s really good at it. She’s got good instincts, and so if you study it, you can become that too. So hope that helps.

The second question comes from Scott in Middleton, Pennsylvania, who says this is a long one. I’m driven to specialize in biblical narrative compositions in the style of Caravaggio, late Titian and late Rembrandt in the 10 of Burzum. Tradition. I don’t know what that means. I’m drawing upon it education and biblical studies. 20 years of managing a high end picture framing and manufacturing business, and a lifelong connection with the church. Over the last 24 years, I have researched museum conservation bulletins, technical books, and the old masters and frequented museums. I am making my own on panels using historical pigments sourced from regions in Europe, where old masters are likely to have acquired theirs, you would like our our video that Eric Johnson did. He goes through a lot of that. Anyway, using high quality, linen, traditional techniques for the restricted palette and I aim to create quality paintings that will age well far beyond my lifetime. Let’s hope so I prioritize creating powerful and dynamic images that evoke contemplation. Currently, I’m working on donating two eight foot by 16 foot paintings for a church ceiling. Installation. One is an intimate dramatic composition of the Last Supper, the other is an eerie landscape with Christ carrying His cross. My primary goal is to create a masterpiece that is worthy of appreciation, as though by the hand of an old master, or, as I would say, a new master, right? I feel that I will be ready to begin promoting my work sometime next year. What type or which type of media do you think would be the most effective in showcasing my work? Wow, Scott, that’s very impressive. Man, I’d like to see your work. I’ll look it up. You know, that’s a loaded question. Because it’s really a question that is not answerable. Because you haven’t given me enough data? You see? You have to know the purpose or the desire, you see what a start marketing, but for what purpose? Are you going to give away paintings, you got to do more donations? What are you going to do? Most people think about advertising and where they want to advertise, before they even consider what goals and outcomes they want, which is really not the right thing to do. Because you end up spending a lot of money you don’t need to spend when you don’t know it’s like, you know, taking your car and putting it on auto drive and not knowing where it’s going. Right. So you want to begin promoting your work. To what end? I asked okay, I can imagine a lot of scenarios like wanting more Commission’s wanting to sell collectors wanting galleries, seeking recognition or galleries. I’m sure there’s many, many more. But I’d like you to go into depth with your answers. Asking which media I should use is kind of like saying which tool should I use to build something? Well, it all depends on what you want to build, how fast you want to build it, how long you want it to last, what are the weather conditions it’s going to be exposed to all those things matter because your tools and materials matter. So marketing doesn’t have to be complex, it’s a simple solution to overcome a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. But I can’t solve a problem till I know what the problem is. And you can’t either. So you need to define that. media choices can accomplish a lot of different things for you and at different levels. I magazine Fine Art connoisseur, for instance, reaches a lot of really mega rich billionaire type art collectors, who love realism. But it may not reach people who commissioned church paintings, for instance, you know, my neighbor was put in charge of a megachurch commission of a mosaic and she spent five or 10 years on it. She went, she didn’t even know my magazine existed, she went to Florence found answers there ended up getting an artist there to do it, who spent five years building this and then shipping it over and installing it. So you know, you need to figure out where the fish are that you want to buy, and that you want to catch. Right? So, you know, first off, you got to know what the problem is start by stating the desired outcome. And if that’s I want to get more commissions then get specific, how many more commissions, one commission, two commissions and at what amount of money? If you want one commission within 12 months, and I know you have to work in advance, because you’re going to be working on one for a long time, then, you know, what are you willing to spend to get that commission? Are you willing to spend 10%, five to 10, sometimes 20%, marketing expense is pretty normal. And so if you get $100,000 Commission, whether you spend 10, grand or 10% to get that commission, it’s probably worth it. Right? And so sometimes it’s not about advertising, though, you know, it might be a matter of a couple of phone calls, or asking the right people who the right people are, or maybe it’s advertising, maybe it’s in a church publication that church art curators read or something I don’t know, you’re gonna have to figure out that out. But answer those questions first. And then I can suggest the tools you need. And you can ask again on here and I’ll give you more answers. Might not be immediate at all though. Right? Hope this helps. Anyway, that is today’s art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this episode, Eric Rhoads opens the floor to our friends in the Dreamliners* group for a special Plein Air Podcast that focuses on art marketing and the eternal question, “How do you sell your art?”

*The Dreamliners group was started by fans of Eric’s Art School Live program in 2020 and has grown to 3,700 members. As a listener of the Plein Air Podcast, you’re welcome to join the “Dreamlineartists” group on Facebook.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 130 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Speaker 3 13:44
I’m Pat White. I’m from Louisiana. And I’m a been a professional Realtor for 40 years and been painting for about 13 years. So I have a lot of experience in marketing. So as an artist, what percent of our gross income should be spent on marketing for budgeting purposes?

Eric Rhoads 14:05
Well, I think that’s a loaded question. Everybody’s going to be a little bit different. Everybody has to spend marketing money based on the timing of their marketing. Right so let me give you an example of that Pat, the if you’re a brand new artist, you have no brand whatsoever people don’t know who you are people need to discover you. You’re going to spend a higher level of money on your marketing to build yourself up at that time. And that will probably last for potentially a few years because it takes a few years to really properly brand yourself as an artist. Now it depends on where you’re branding yourself to so branding yourself in a what Where did you say you live?

Unknown Speaker 14:55
Baton Rouge Louisiana

Eric Rhoads 14:57
Okay, so and Baton Rouge If the cost of marketing is going to be a lot different than the cost of marketing in, let’s say, San Antonio, or in New York City or something, so if you’re focusing on local marketing versus national marketing, etc, then it changes. So I believe that every artist should have at least a dual strategy, and probably a trio. And that would be a local marketing strategy. Local, meaning local and regional, and a national marketing strategy, meaning reaching the entire US if you’re in the US, or whatever your country is, and then potentially an international strategy, if that makes sense for you, it does for some artists, I was talking to TL Lawson, yesterday or the day before, and he’s doing a big show in London. And about last time, he did a show in London, about 50% of the audience bought from Europe, and the other 50% bought from the United States. And so that that would be an example of someone who has an international strategy. He has a Gallery in London, he probably has them in other places as well. But this gives you an opportunity then to grow in other markets, if you feel that need, most of us aren’t going to need that. Because we’re probably likely to sell all we need in either our local or national strategy. So if you’re brand new, then you’ve got a lot more marketing expense than you normally would. And there is there’s the there’s the issue of time versus money. So in the case of time versus money, a lot of us don’t have any money to market. But we have plenty of time. And so you can make up for a lot of the lack of money with time, by you know, even if you’re hand addressing envelopes by yourself and taking the time to do it, versus paying somebody to do that or paying a service to do that. It’s going to depend on you. When I started my business, I had no money. And I had a lot of time. And so I did everything imaginable for a number of years, probably for I went seven years without a paycheck. And when I first started my business, and so I think the idea is, you know, you’re contributing what you can give of yourself towards that marketing effort. You might not be able to afford advertising in the beginning, you might have to do you know, list building or other things, which we’ll probably talk about.

Speaker 4 17:42
Good to see you. I’m Linda Marie Crab. I’m always here in Italy. And yes, and my question is a lot of what’s in the book, and I love the book, but it doesn’t work. Over here overseas, for example, you just mentioned, I believe you said he’s an American artist who shows in London. But in Italy, the market is totally different from what it is in the States. And so I was wondering if, if you make a new addition, will you include more for an international artist or or perhaps, like a small chapter where there are other things because here it’s marketing is if you go up to an Italian and you ask if you can have their email address, if they’re watching over your shoulder while you’re painting, they’re going to be thinking that you have other motives. And so some of the things just don’t work in Europe. And so that’s my question.

Eric Rhoads 18:57
Well, I let me answer that in a couple of ways. Linda, Linda, Linda Marie, you want to be called Linda Linda Marie and Linda’s fine. Okay. So first off, Europe is different. And different areas of Europe are different. I’ve been told that the way I do marketing would never fly in England, for instance, because it’s just too abrupt to direct to in your face, so to speak. And yet, I remember a story about a friend of mine who is a world famous marketing guy, consultant. And he was told this, he said, you know, he wanted to do a series of seminars in England. And the his advisers said, No, you can’t do that. You can’t use the same kind of headlines, the same kind of copy the same approaches. And he said, Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. He said what works works And he says, I don’t think I need to change my tone, I don’t think I need to change anything. And while they battled on that, but he decided that he was going to do it the way he wanted to do it anyway. And he had a partner in England, and in that partner was the one saying, you know, it won’t work over here. Well, it, not only did it work is that he sold out everything, and he sold it out fast in his partner, living there, realize that what he’s being told about what you can and cannot do in England is only opinion. And so his partner now has built a thriving business using same same type of marketing that this fellow, Dan Kennedy used. And so I would caution, you know, we hear a lot, Linda, not just in Europe, but throughout the United States as well. We hear people say, Well, I could never do that, or I can’t do that, or people don’t want that, you know, you’ve got to be thinking about really understanding your audience. And sometimes we think we understand our audience, and we don’t understand it. So let me give you an example. I work with a guy who is a world class marketing consultant, who built a company from zero to $400 million in two years. And he did it using certain types of marketing. And he was told, you know, this, this type of marketing, you know, lots of frequent emails, that type of thing is just too much never worked, and that he would completely lose his list. And so he went ahead with us anyway. And he would send emails daily, sometimes two or three emails daily. And he lost about 2% of his list, and the rest never left him. And he gets massive amounts of response every day. So I think that there’s a rule in marketing that applies really, to everything, and that is to test everything, you know, maybe giving, asking somebody for an email, when you’re out, you know, painting and somebody talks to you maybe that that is something you’re not comfortable with. And if you’re not comfortable with Don’t, don’t do anything in marketing that you’re not comfortable with. But there may be a way and you want to test different ways, you know, maybe it’s having a little card that you hand out that’s got a QR code on it, or maybe there’s a QR code on your easel, or maybe there is some kind of an explanation that makes it in the eyes of the beholder, and an acceptable thing. So those things might might work, they might not work, you know, we all have to adapt. And I, you know, I’ve been doing marketing now in the United States and a little bit in some other countries from time to time I did marketing for I can’t mention the name, but a world famous Watch Company, out of a foreign country. And so what you have to do is you have to kind of figure it out, you have to try things you have to adapt, you have to, you know, things that are hot, one minute change. You know, two years, three years ago, Facebook, you could do almost anything on Facebook, you could do retargeting on Facebook, that would get to all the Apple phones, and then Apple changed it. And so now you can’t do retargeting on those phones unless those people have given you permission. So that killed a lot of businesses overnight, I hurt my own business. Thankfully, we knew it was coming. We had planned for it, we had some other things ready. So you’re gonna be experimental and just try things, you know. But be careful about what you tell yourself, you know, we give ourselves messages. And those messages might be true. They might be you know, if I were to ask my friends, I have an employee, a guy who works for me. And he’s, he’s always saying, you know, this won’t work. We shouldn’t do this. We do too much of that, you know, on and on, and on and on. And for him, he’s right. I would never respond to that I would never do this. And but the reality is what we’re doing is working. It’s, it’s working well. And we have tested the ways that he suggested because we obviously you know, somebody says, hey, try this. We’re going to try it. And you know, there are there are people who believe that long emails are necessary. There are other people who believe that short emails are necessary, or other people believe no emails are necessary. So we test it and we test it all the time. So if we’re sending out an email We have taken a certain number of people, and you know, maybe a small group of people, maybe it’s 1000 people. And we’ve sent half of that group one way and half of that group and other way. And then we track the response. And so and whatever wins, that’s what we end up doing. Sometimes it’s a short email, sometimes it’s a long one, sometimes it’s no email, sometimes it’s an image. So you just got to try everything related to the book. I’m working on another book. I don’t have any plans to update the current book, although I might at some point, I’ve updated at one time. And the next book, I’m not going to get too much detail about it yet, I would say it’s about a quarter of the way done. And it’s just kind of trying to reflect some new things that I’ve learned some new things that I’ve discovered. So we’ll talk about that when the time comes.

Speaker 5 26:03
It’s great to be here. Eric, I can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve done. And if not for COVID, I never would have found this wonderful book. I love this book, it is filled with so much good information that I always keep it nearby. And if I could show you the highlights, it’s practically all highlighted for important information.

Eric Rhoads 26:29
Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot, show him to show me the highlights.

Speaker 5 26:34
Okay, so I got tired of highlighting every line. So I just put a yellow line down the entire because just putting a few here and there wasn’t cutting it, it was all important. So I’m Elaine Miller, and I’m an artist I’ve been painting for about eight years. And I’ve owned a series art gallery that I created seven years ago. And I am just so thrilled to have your guidance in all that we’re doing here. My question is, with all the news about the economy coming up, and I’m trying not to listen to news, but the economy goes in a roller coaster, and we might be coming into a recession. What is your advice for artists and galleries to protect themselves during a recession? What’s the best advice to give?

Eric Rhoads 27:30
Well, I first off, I think we’ve been in a recession for several months. And I think that, you know, the news media tries to control the narrative or somebody tries to control the narrative. We’ve been in a recession for a long time, we, you know, we’ve seen indicators of business changing substantially for at least six months, maybe maybe eight months. And so I think that, you know, we’re in it. And I talked to a lot of artists every day. And many of the artists that I talked to are feeling it. They’re not, they’re not seeing the level of sales. They’re worried or concerned. And I’ll just tell you a couple of stories. In the Great Depression. Now, the Great Depression was worse than any recession that we’ve seen in the United States, since although there’s been some that have been close. The Great Depression. I’m hearing feedback. Did somebody unmute? Okay, so in the Great Depression, there was a dominant cereal company, it was called post. They did post toasties. They did post them they did, you know, all kinds of things. You’ve heard of Marjorie Merriweather Post, it was her father that created that company became General Foods. And during the Great Depression, there was a startup company called Kellogg’s ke Double L O, double good, right. And Kellogg’s started advertising when the Depression started. And board of directors at post, one of the people that post cereals, went to the board of directors and said, Hey, there’s this young startup company, and they’re advertising a lot. And we’ve cut all of our advertising because of the depression because we’ve believed that, you know, we’re number one, and we’re going to always remain number one. And the board met and they said, Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna keep that. Keep that philosophy. Nobody’s going to beat us. They’re a gnat. They’re a little company just ignore them. Well, by the end of the Great Depression, and post cereals at the beginning of the Depression had a 90% market share. At the end of the Depression, Kellogg had a 75% market share, they beat post and And to this day, post is never recovered to this day. And the reason this is an important story is because a recession or a depression is the biggest opportunity to grow. Because you can grow with almost no noise. So what happened to Kellogg, they dominated at the time newspapers and radio, they were advertising heavily, I’m sure it was really hard for them to put that money out there. But it was working, they were they were winning. And nobody else was advertising, or very few others were advertising. So not only were they advertising, they were getting great rates, because the media was desperate. And so this is the message. And that is to always remember that if you’re gonna go down, you go down in flames. And what that basically means is you’ve got to try everything, you You never give up 50% At least 50% of your success or failure during any time is about your attitude, your mindset. And it’s also about your mindset in a tough economy. So here’s what happens. I was in the radio broadcasting business for a number of years. And I was always able to say, Oh, the recession is right around the corner, because we saw trends when everybody started canceling their radio advertising, and the TV stations, but it had not been publicly announced yet that it was a recession. When we see people cutting expenses, you know, there’s a problem. And so what’s the first thing everybody cuts? They cut advertising because they look at advertising is an unnecessary expense. When in reality advertising is the opposite of that. It’s it’s it’s a total important expense and something that they do all the other times, why would they do it here? So there’s a gallery. I think it’s okay to mention a name, but I you know, I better not, there’s a gallery that started up in 2008. And all of a sudden, they just appeared on the scene. And they had all these major artists, they appeared on the scene in 2008. And I was in the advertising business at the time, I have fine art connoisseur in plein air magazine. And I noticed that we were losing a lot of advertisers. But this advertiser was, instead of buying one page, they’re buying 5678 pages of advertising. And they were just blown everybody out of the water. And so a few years later, had dinner with his advertiser. And I said, Okay, what’s the deal here? You know, I think I know what was going on. But you tell me, because he had since sold to Gallery. He said, Well, I used to be a consultant for one of the major, major consulting firms. He said, I know that the best possible time to make a business is during a recession, because everybody’s gonna stop advertising. He said, All of my competitors, all the ones that I had targeted and cared about all of them had either reduce their advertising or stopped altogether. He said out of the, he said, I got 10% 10% of the customers from each my top 10 customer, top 10 competitors. He said, several of those galleries don’t exist today, because they they stopped advertising. He said that 10% of there’s always money that will buy those 10% will always buy said My goal was to get all those 10 percenters that are going to keep buying. And so a lot of galleries went away during that period of time in Santa Fe, I’m, I think I remember there were 210 galleries, something to that effect that went away. I may be wrong about that. And yet, the ones who survived are the ones who kept their face far forward. They were out there. They were doing the same disciplines that they were doing before. And in some cases, like this guy, they were doing more. So you know, what happens when, when you’re trying to cut expenses, you start looking at the things and saying, Oh, these are unnecessary? Well, I won’t do any shows for a while. I won’t do any gallery shows because that Wine and crackers and cheese are too expensive. Or I’m not going to do any advertising or, you know, whatever the the promotional, I’m not going to do any direct mail or any postcards or any books or you know, whatever they normally do. And so what happens is that you’re out of sight. You’re out of mind, people forget about you. There’s a concept in advertising called momentum. And it’s true with all things is once you build momentum, you know You’re really crushing it, you’re just driving through, but the minute you stop putting fuel in the airplane, the airplane starts to glide down, and then that airplane eventually crashes if it can’t land. And so the same is true for momentum. You know, when you’re building up your brand as an artist, or you’re building up your brand as a gallery, you know, there’s this, this theory, you know, that post serials took on, which is, well, we’re so big. And, you know, if we stop for a couple of years, it’s not gonna matter. I had an advertiser. Again, no names, I had an advertiser who called me up and said, You know, I’ve been advertising consistently for five or six years. I’m gonna stop and, and move my money somewhere else for for a while. And I said, Well, I think that’s mistake. And I know you’re gonna believe I’m just saying that because I don’t want to lose your business, which is also true. I said, but the problem is that I have you have built up momentum with my audience, and you’re deciding, you’re gonna go to a completely new audience that doesn’t know you, they don’t know you exist, there’s going to be some overlap, you know, two or 3%, probably, but they don’t know you. So you’re starting from scratch. So you’re gonna get out there, and you’re going to spend your money and you’re going to have to spend more money than normal? Because you are trying to get known? Oh, no, no, that’s not true. Everybody knows me now, everything’s gonna be fine. So person left, about three, four months, six months, tops later, person calls and says, my phone stopped ringing. I, you know, I stopped hearing from people I will I’m not top of mind anymore, I’m coming back. So what ended up happening is, the ads in the beginning of this other publication weren’t working yet. It takes time, you got to build up momentum. And not only that, but this person was out of sight, out of mind with the audience that that had been built up. As a result, the, you know, things go down pretty fast. So you want to, you always want to maintain a presence. I’ve always believed that. To some extent, any presence is better than no presents, you know, I do have a caveat to that. And that is, if you’re a full page advertiser, or you’re a double page advertiser, or what we call a double truck. And all of a sudden, you become a quarter page advertiser, you’re sending a signal to your market, that something’s wrong. And so if you’re a quarter page advertiser, and you maintain a little smaller ad, that we don’t sell them, but if you had a smaller ad, that it’s probably not as dramatic as moving from a three times the size four times the size. So you know, there are a lot of things like that. Do you have to keep in mind? I’m not sure I answered your question.

Speaker 5 38:06
Oh, you did. You did marketing, maintain the marketing, and don’t disappear. I mean, the serial story is proof that it works, it worked in the Depression. And so if we can all hold on to that idea, if we’re in a dip, then we put all of our money that we can and just stay invisible, and not drop out with the rest of them, because the people who are the survivors are the ones who are going to be successful. So thank you so much.

Eric Rhoads 38:35
You’re welcome. I had all my top executives fly in a few weeks ago. And I made a speech. Now we had lots of agenda items for two days, but I made a speech and I said, if anybody here is thinking about cutting expenses, just know I’m totally for cutting expenses if we need to. And it’s always better to get out ahead of it. But I am not cutting any advertising expenses. As a matter of fact, I intend to increase advertising. And you know, a lot of deer in the headlights looks and then I tell the story. So this is a really great time, it’s really a good time for an artist to launch. Now you have to have the the money to launch. Now you don’t have to do advertising, but if you’re gonna do things that cost you money, you know, you’re gonna have to have some of that and anybody who’s starting a business and you as artists or business and so on if your gallery. I mean, when you’re launching a business, you have to put money aside for marketing. Now. I didn’t answer the question about the percentage, and I will answer that. Because that was an early question. Like I said, standard is I didn’t say a standard but I said there is a is higher than normal level in the beginning. And then once you get to a point of maintenance, you probably don’t have to work as hard. I think it depends on the type of business to like, if you’re in the cosmetics business, cosmetics business has a 90% margin, glop is basically just mud with with dye in it, lipstick is just goop, right? It costs nothing to make the most expensive part about it is the packaging. And they will spend loads of money on advertising because they got 90% profit, they spend a lot of their money on advertising, they grow their business, they still got 50% profit, if you’re in a business where you have no profit, then you can’t spend a lot of money. So in in your business. You know, I don’t want to diminish this. But the reality is, at least as a as an artist, you know, it’s your time and some materials. And so you have a little bit of flexibility there you have what I would consider to be a high margin business. Now, if you have a gallery, you’re given away half of that to the gallery. So now you’re in a much lower margin business. So you have to, you have to decide. The other thing you can do is you can partner collaborate with others, whether it’s your gallery, there’s a thing called Co Op advertising, where a lot of people will go to their Gallery, and they’ll say, Listen, I want you to advertise me, and I’ll pay 50% of the ads, when you feature me as the primary artist, because now you’re buying an ad for half off. They’re they’re buying an ad for half off, you both get benefit, you’re getting benefit of them promoting you. Next question, Katie, what’s your question? I’ll tell us who you are.

Speaker 6 41:47
I’m Katie Smith, and I’m from Santa Maria, California. And my question is about mastermind groups. I’m wanting to start a mastermind group with some like minded people. And I’m wondering how you go about choosing who to be in a group with? And then also, as we get started, should we place a timeframe on our group from the get go and say we’re going to be together for one year or two years or five years? Is there some kind of a timeframe that should be established? Or do people come and go from mastermind groups and it’s, it stays as a body that changes its members over time.

Eric Rhoads 42:31
I’m gonna, I’m going to answer that first. And then I’m going to answer the other piece of it later. You know, you want to try it out. Before you, before you commit to anything, you, the key to a good mastermind group is who’s in the group and how participative they are. And if if you find somebody’s a dud, you got to move them out. So you’ve got to have somebody who’s the head of that mastermind group, who is going to be willing to make the tough decisions and call people out if they’re not participating. Now, let me just back up and say that if you don’t know what a mastermind group is, it’s a group of people who get together to share information so that you can grow. The idea is you have one mind, but if there are six of you together, you have a master mind, everybody’s working on your problem, and you’re working on their problem. I have been in and paid for to attend multiple masterminds in my life. And there, I wish I learned about him when I was 30. Because I would have done it then. I’m in one mastermind. Now, I spend a substantially high amount of money, the equivalent of a full time salary for one person to be at a mastermind. And not just an average person, but a pretty high level person. And the reason I do it is because I have 15 other people working on my business, and they can see things I can’t see. And they tell me the truth, even when my baby is ugly. So tell me your first part of your question again.

Speaker 6 44:16
And the first one was yes. How to choose who to be in a group with?

Eric Rhoads 44:21
Well, I think the first thing is to set a goal and the goal is to understand what it is you want, do I? What’s my mastermind about? Is it to sit around and chat have friends? Or is it to become a better painter? Or is it to become a better marketer or a better business person? You need to articulate that? And then you need to handpick the people that you think are the smartest people that you can get your hands on because the reality you’re starting a mastermind so that you can learn from the best and you’re going to have people who want to participate, and you’re going to have to be willing to, to in the nicest possible way, say, Sorry, Charlie. And, and that you don’t have to be rude to anybody, and maybe they don’t even know about it. But I think the idea is, you try to articulate so you, you pick up the phone, and you call one person. And you you call your, you know, one of your top targets. And you say, hey, it’s Katie, remember me? Hey, I’ve been observing that you’re doing this really, really? Well. That’s your superpower? From what I can tell, would you agree yes or no? Yes, I do this really? Well, this is my superpower. Would you say that I do that better or worse than you? And if they say, well, you’re probably doing better than I am in that say, Well, why don’t we put our heads together? Let’s meet, you know, once a quarter, once a month. And let’s just compare notes. And I’ll help you and you help me? And why don’t we see if we can get you? Would you agree to that? Sure. No charge, right. And then who, what, what areas of your life are missing that you need help with? Let’s say it’s about marketing. I need somebody really understands advertising? Oh, you know, I do too. Why don’t we call I understand that, you know, this person is really good at advertising. And so, you know, and I would start it out small, I keep it to two or three people in the beginning, see how it goes, you have to have a format, you have to follow a discipline, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have a leader who’s going to be like, we’re not going there. This is this is off topic. And I have a mastermind, actually, this week for two full days in Austin, Texas. And the guy who runs my mastermind that I pay a lot of money to, he keeps us on task, we’re not talking about that that’s not relevant. And he just kind of reigns us in all the time. Because it’s really easy to get off on stories and, and things that are not focused. And so you want to keep it focused. And if you really want to do it, you can also find a professional who can kind of guide your group, but that’s gonna cost you money. Did that answer your question?

Speaker 6 47:14
Yeah. What about that timeframe, though? Is it something that there should be a timeframe on like, when you’re in these mastermind groups? Are they open ended?

Eric Rhoads 47:24
I would say let’s try it for a year, and see how it goes. And if everybody participates, and everybody wants to keep going, and if somebody drops out, then you get to invite somebody else in, I wouldn’t necessarily make it a group thing. But you can. But the thing you got to be careful of is you’re going to have friends who want to get into the group that are not necessarily people are going to put in the work, everybody’s got to put in the work.

Speaker 3 47:53
And, and your book, great book, again, we talk a lot about social media, and this book was written a few years ago. So things have changed. But it seems like what you cover in the book is still relevant. But you just talk about that you use LinkedIn a lot, which I’ve never spent a lot of time on. And now things have changed with Instagram and Facebook to more real skinny. So you can you talk a little bit about social media and how we can use it to our advantage?

Eric Rhoads 48:18
Well, yes, I can. Thank you, Pat. The The first thing to understand about social media is that it’s ever changing, you know, Instagram and Facebook, and you know, they’re hot. Does anybody remember MySpace, they were hot. And then they were not. Things don’t seem to go in and out quite as quickly. But tick tock came on fast. And you know, there’s some talk about tick tock, being restricted in the future, etc. So things are always going to be changing. The other thing is there’s change constantly within those organizations. One minute, they’re focusing on reels, the next minute, they’re focusing on something else. The reason they’re all focusing on reels right now is because tick tock is eating their lunch in terms of time spent online. And so they want reels, they want things that are quick that people can flip through. And so they, they will reward you. And typically these organizations will tell you what they’re thinking, you know, or you can see clues, you know, like they say, Hey, we’re opening up a new thing called this or that, whenever they have a new thing, be the first to jump on it, because they will reward you if you’re putting content on their new thing, then they are going to make sure you’re getting pushed out there and you want them pushing you out there. The average if you’re on Facebook, the average number has gone down from 7% to 3%. And what that means is that let’s say you, you think you’re a big deal. Let’s say you have 5000 followers and you think every time I put something out on Facebook all 5000 of my followers see what I’m writing or posting? Not true. A year ago, two years ago, 7% only 7% See what you’re using, or what you’re posting. Today only 3% see it. So you’re talking to no one. And the only way that they’re, you’re gonna get to more people is if you do Boost Post advertising, which I don’t recommend, as I know that works. Secondly, is you have to figure out how to get Facebook to push you to other people. So when if Facebook sees high engagement, they are Instagram to, or LinkedIn really, if they see high engagement on your page, then they will reward you with more views because they want people engaging. So things like asking a question. You see, somebody asked a question about something and everybody chimes in with an answer. Facebook sees that Instagram sees that, and they’re like, oh, this person’s got a lot of people interacting, that means more people will interact if we push it out there. So now they’re going to show it to 7% instead, and it gets more action, maybe they’ll show it to another 5% and so on. You know, even the people who have 10 million followers aren’t getting out to more than a small percentage of their people. But if they get good interaction, so that’s why engaging content, things that are relevant to the audience. That’s why those things matter. Did that answer your question?

Speaker 3 51:45
Did my I guess the second part of that, again, with a social media? You said you don’t believe in boosting our our ad but don’t isn’t? If you’d run an ad, you can target your friends and friends of your friends. Right? And that would force everybody to see your your painting or whatever you’re putting out? Is that true?

Eric Rhoads 52:05
No. No, I didn’t say I didn’t believe in ADS. I said I don’t believe in boosting, there’s a difference. There are boosting ads, you get these little things to said, Do you want to boost this post? That doesn’t even necessarily mean it’s going to be boosted to your friend list, it might be boosted some to some group in Afghanistan or something it does doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to see it, it’s just that more people will see it, and not a lot of more people. And you got to ask yourself, can I spend an extra 20 bucks? You know, what is that worth? To me? Why am I doing it? If you cannot see a specific return on your Instagram, your Facebook, you know, this is a giant trap. You have all these people who believe, you know, they beat their chests because they have 100,000 followers, having 100,000 followers on Instagram is the equivalent of having 5000 followers on Facebook, it’s been proven time and time again, Instagram, it depends on what kind of following you have and where you’re being followed. But it is. It’s what we call vanity metric. And so if you’re focusing on vanity metric, I hired an agency to help me with with social media posting, and they, you know, they helped me a lot, they got a lot of stuff out there. And I was spending, I don’t know, some large amount of money every month. And I looked at it and I said, Why am I doing this because I’m not making any money from it. And I’m not trying to make money for you know, I don’t monetize my YouTube show. I don’t monetize any of my stuff like some people do. I don’t really want people drive in ads in my stuff i and it’s not worth the money to me. I’m doing it for completely different reasons. I’m doing it about my community, what I’m involved in, you know, plein air painting or realistic painting or otherwise. And so that’s what that’s more about for me, but I still to this day have not figured out how to make money with it. Now, I do know people who do, but those are not necessarily certainly things that are a right fit for me. So I’m not necessarily going down that road.

Speaker 7 54:18
Hi, my name is Gabriel Stockton. I live in sunny San Diego. And my question for you, Eric is from a video publishers point of view. What are the points that you’re looking for in artists for consideration of making videos?

Eric Rhoads 54:39
Well, everything in marketing boils down to one thing, Gabriel what does the audience want? The hardest question to answer in any marketing is how do I find out what my audience really wants? Because you can ask Ask them and sometimes they don’t know what they want. And and I don’t mean that to sound rude. But let me give you an example, I had a product that I developed back in 1902 or something. It was a product that had never been created before. It was a broadcast studio on wheels that looked like a giant radio, it was called a giant boombox. And I had a manufacturer lined up, and I had this great idea. And I did a survey of radio stations that I wanted to sell it to. And the survey came back that they didn’t want it. I even put a picture of it, would you buy this, if it was available for your radio station with your call letters on it? And they said they didn’t want it. And I was pretty discouraged for a minute. And I thought, Well, I’m gonna do it anyway. Because I think they once I show them, they will want it. And I build a $6 million business on that overnight, because of my gut instinct. Because my gut because I came out of that industry. My gut told me that I I believe that to be the right time. Now I can tell you 30 Other failure stories that were my gut was wrong. So to answer your question, when we do art instruction, courses, videos, master classes, whatever you want to call it, we have, we’re investing heavily in the artist, it’s not unusual for us to invest 20 3040 $50,000 in a single production, you know, we have Hollywood level, video team, we have soundstage, we have cameras that just the lenses alone are seven grand, the cameras are 20 3040 grand, that you know, this is really high quality stuff. You know, we spend a lot of days with them. There’s travel involved, and there’s a lot of other things. And you know what I say to my team, who helps me put this together? I say, Okay, would you be willing to take 30 $40,000 out of your pocket? And roll the dice on this artists that you’re recommending to me? And there’s usually a long pause. And oftentimes, the answer is no. And you know, and I want to be able to do anybody and everybody, I love artists, I like they’re my friends, I want to be able to help them out whenever I possibly can. But at the end of the day, if I do too many failures, I’m not helping anybody. I’m not I may be helping the artists, I get a lot of publicity. But at the end of the day, if they’re not making money, they’re not going to come back to me. And if, if I’m not making money, I’m not going to want to do anything else with them. I mean, maybe other things, but not that. So that’s the problem is, you know, you have you have a big investment. So we ask a lot of questions. When we’re developing, who we’re going to approach we ask questions like, what are their followings? Like, what, what is the interaction on their following? You know, how many people do they have on certain social media? How active? Are they promoting themselves? Are they good, you know, we have some artists who work with us and promote themselves. We have other artists who they never want to help. They don’t even want to tell anybody a website, because they consider it to be evil to promote themselves. So, you know, there’s a lot of different things at the end of the day. If, if we can’t make it successful for us in some way and successful for our artists, partners, it doesn’t make sense to do it. And we get surprises all the time, we have artists that we’ve done on a whim that we’ve invested in that we have done massive sales with, we have artists that we have that are massive, big names that we’ve done things with that, you know, didn’t do as well as we hoped they would. And you know, so it’s still very hard to understand what to do with it. But, you know, at the end of the day, we shoot 2025 30 of these a year. So do the math. I mean, you’re talking about a very big investment. And though we kind of look at it, like venture capital firm would look at companies, you know, they say, Well, you know, we’re going to invest in 10 companies, we hope that seven of them make some money and five of them make a lot of money and two of them are really really big hits. But that’s not always true. I mean, sometimes we have several that don’t do well and sometimes We have some that do well, the artists always win. We don’t always win. The artists always win. Max Ginsburg called me one day. And he said, Eric, you made me famous. And I said, why? What’s that all about? He says, Well, you know, you just talked about me so much. So I’m getting invited all over the world and, and I’m getting articles about me and other publications. And, you know, so when we get behind an artist, you know, we’re if if it makes sense, I mean, we’re not going to put something inappropriate and but if we have a watercolor artists, they’re gonna go into our watercolor newsletter, or if a pastel artists, our newsletter, or our general interest newsletter, or our magazines, and on our stages at the conventions, you know, those kinds of things we we try to be as proactive as possible to push these. That answer your question?

Unknown Speaker 1:00:59
that does, thank you so much.

Announcer 1:01:02
This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

Eric Rhoads 1:01:11
Well, I hope you enjoyed that. If you have questions, email me, [email protected]. We’ll get them on the art Marketing podcast. And also on the plein air podcast. I have an art marketing blog. It’s artmarketing.com It’s really easy. And you can go there and learn a lot about it. I have videos and things like that at paint tube.tv. But if you’re really interested and a career and selling your work, marketing, your work is obviously an important part of it. And I studied Marketing long before I ever got into art, I did marketing, I wasted a lot of years and a lot of dollars making a lot of stupid mistakes and learning things. And I’m still up on it, I still stay very, very current. I’m in marketing groups and a lot of other things. So anyway, hope you enjoyed it today. I want to remind you guys pastel live is coming up in August, make sure to sign up for that at pastel live.com. The next artist retreat I’ve got coming up is fall color week, which is a week of painting in September into the early October. And last but not least, we still have some seats left on our fine art trip to Stockholm and Madrid. We go deep, and we get contacts that you’ll never meet on your own. We do experiences that you’ll never be able to do on your own. Because we use our Rolodex, anybody remember what a Rolodex is. And so that’s something that that we try to do want to remind you guys that we do have a regular podcast called The Art marketing minute and look for that it’s on its own. But you can also get that at the end of end of these broadcasts. I’d like to encourage you guys to subscribe to plein air magazine. That’s kind of the root of it all. And some of you are not yet subscribers. 10s of 1000s of you are thank you for that. If you’re out of the country, a lot of people just pick the digital edition. But most people pick the subscription to digital and print because the digital comes out sooner. Right? You don’t have to wait for the mail. And it has 30% more content, more images, things that we just don’t have enough paper to do because paper is expensive. Last but not least, I want to tell you about my blog called Sunday coffee. I come out with it every Sunday and you can find it for free. It’s at Coffee with eric.com. So anyway, I want to thank you guys for watching today for being here for the 250th episode for listening. And remember it’s a big world out there. Go paint it. We’ll see. Bye bye.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

This week’s Art Marketing Minute was recorded live in person at the 10th Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo! 

Listen and watch as Eric Rhoads answers questions on:

• writing emails get the attention of art galleries;
• how much time an artist should spend on marketing;
• your name when it comes to branding;
• using software for art business;
• finding balance as a painter and other aspects of being a full-time artist;
• social media for artists – using photos versus videos, and if you should ever “boost” a post;
• finding new work with galleries no matter how “old” you are;
• how important it is to have a niche

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 129 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads 0:13
So welcome to the Art Marketing podcast. We’re live today at the plein air convention. Welcome you guys. Thank you for being here. All right. So we’ll be taking some audience questions. And we’ll also be answering some questions that have been pre-delivered to us.

We have a question from Jennifer Smith, well in Canada, and the question is how to write a great email that will get attention to get into a gallery. So let’s, there’s a whole different answer about how to get into a gallery. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But let’s just talk about writing emails. If you’re writing, marketing, emails, marketing emails are essentially designed to get somebody to pay attention, maybe, maybe the goal of the email is to get somebody to buy something, maybe the goal is to get them to go to a particular place. And so the very first thing you do with an email is you ask yourself, what is my goal? What do I want to accomplish? So sometimes, we do emails where we want to do what we call sell the click right? So the whole goal of an email is to get somebody to click through to something. So that that that email will get them to open up a webpage or something, it might be to get them to schedule something on their calendar, or it might be to get them to respond to something. So the first thing you ask yourself is, what do I want somebody to do? The second thing you want to do is ask yourself, Who am I speaking to? And what is it that they want? So if you were, let’s say you were targeting an art gallery, and you’re writing an email to an art gallery, which by the way, I don’t recommend, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But if you were writing to an art gallery, ask yourself this, what’s important to an art gallery. And most of us who are artists don’t necessarily understand what is important to an art gallery. There’s an art gallery owner here in the room right now that I see. And I can tell you that the conversations that she has, are a whole lot different than the conversations that you have. And what I mean by that is that she’s thinking about different problems that she has to solve, right? So what are the problems that an art gallery has to solve? First off, they have to figure out how to sell enough to keep the doors open, and to pay for the lights to pay for the employees. And so the one thing that’s always on the mind of an art gallery is how am I going to sell enough to keep the doors open? And then the second part of that is, how am I going to sell enough that I can actually make enough profit to pay myself? And then on top of that, how am I going to make enough profit that I can actually have a future, right, so I can put some money away. And so an art gallery owner typically is interested in one thing only, and that is, how am I going to sell something. And now that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you. They’re not interested in in your art, because they are otherwise they wouldn’t be in that business. A lot of art galleries very, very deeply care about their owners, I mean about their artists, and they want to help them as well. But if you have an artist that you think is just a really, really terrific artist, and you’ve had them in your gallery, and you’ve tried to sell them and they don’t sell, there’s only so far they’re gonna go right, they’re not going to keep giving you that wall space. Think about this. If you walk into a shopping center, or let’s say a grocery store, and what do you see on the ends of the aisles, right? There’s always a product on the end aisle cap. And those companies, let’s say it’s Coca Cola, Coca Cola pays the store extra money to have their product on the end aisle cap. Why did they do that? Because they know that’s the most visible spot, do you end up somewhere in the middle of the aisle that’s less visible, but if you’re right there on the end, everybody gets to see it, right? That’s why they want to pay money for it. Well, every bit of shelf space that a retailer has, is valuable. And a retailer, a serious retailer, whether it’s a clothing store, a grocery store, they know how much money they get out of their shelf space, and if they put something on a primary spot, then they say to themselves, this shirt, this t shirt has to generate, you know $30,000 This month and and if it’s not gonna do it, then we’re going to put it in the back of the room where it’s going to generate, you know, a different amount of money. So really, that’s how a gallery person would think as well. And that is I have so much wall space, I have only so many artists, what’s the most important wall space in my gallery? And that’s typically what the spot that people see when they first come in, or there may be another premium spot. And so when they’re thinking about where am I going to put the art, they’ve got to say to themselves, alright, if this is, if this spot makes up 80% of my sales, then what do I need in that spot, I need something that’s going to sell, I need something that’s going to sell for a high price. And as a result, they’re thinking about, Okay, do I put a new artist in that spot? Do I test them elsewhere first? And is this going to be productive for me? So you need to be thinking when you’re writing an email, to a gallery, or to anyone you’re thinking about, Okay, what’s the most important thing that you can say to them, because in an email, it’s the most important thing in an email is the subject line. Everybody thinks, well, the body of the email is what counts. But if they don’t open the email, right, you you don’t get them. Right. So the most important thing you write is that subject line. And a subject line really should not be over five words. Now, sometimes there are exceptions to that. And the reason it’s five words is because if you’re looking at your email on your phone, and you’ve got a small screen, there’s an average of five words that show up in the subject line, and the rest of them get cut off. And 80% of people check their email on their small screen, not their big screen. And most Commerce today is taking place on a small screen. So you want to optimize for small screens. So that means you want to have a shorter email, and you want to have something that’s going to get their attention. So based on what I just said, what’s going to get their attention? And the answer to that is something about how they’re going to make some money off of you. Right? So what do you put in a subject line, and it’s maybe it’s, I’ve got an idea on how you can make some money. I’ve got an idea. That’s kind of it’s more than five words. But the idea is get their attention, draw them in. Now, the second thing is that the second most important thing in an email is the headline. Most people don’t put headlines in their emails. But if you’re in a marketing, mindset, you you may not put it as a big headline, but you might make it as the first sentence. So what’s the most important thing that you can say? You can say, Dear Elaine, I have a history of selling substantial amounts of art at high prices in three other galleries. I’ve decided to add one gallery this year. And I’d like to talk to you about that. All right, now You’ve piqued my curiosity, right? Because now you’ve said, All right, you already know my business, you know, that I need to sell. And so you’ve caught my attention. Now, if you don’t have something like that to say, then you can’t make it up. But you’ve got to look for something that’s going to be of value.

Eric Rhoads 8:35
Now. I will tell you, I’m going to answer this question in a different way. And I don’t want to be discouraging anybody. But when you randomly send an email to a gallery, and a gallery, a really good gallery, like a New York City Gallery, is getting 345 600 solicitations from artists pretty much every week. And if they actually open all those emails, they don’t get anything else done. I was sitting with a gallery owner in New York and he said, Do you mind if I get some work done while you’re while you’re talking? I said, No, I don’t mind. What do you do? And he says, Well, I have he had a pulled out a big box. He said these are submissions from artists. And there must have been 150 of them in there. He said this is a week’s worth. And he had opened it up peek in and throw them away, open them up, peek in and throw away. And he said, I don’t ever pay attention to the submissions that I get because I already know the artists that I want. He said I’m not peeking in to look at their art. I’m peeking in to make sure that I didn’t miss something like a customer said something or whatever, but they kind of knew which ones were probably submissions. And so he said if I were to open and pay attention to every piece of mail every email, then I would never get anything else done. And he said I was in the gallery. I was talking to a client who was about to buy a high end painting. And this guy wondered, and he was an artist, he says, Hey, I’d like to talk to you about carrying my artwork. And the guy said, Oh, can you just wait a few minutes, and he says, Well, I’m in kind of a hurry. And anyway, he interrupted, the client left, he lost a sale. So from the mindset of a gallery, you’re a pest, right? You’re unnecessary pest, they love you. But if you’re, if you’re trying to get into the gallery that way, so best way to get into a gallery is to get introduced, find somebody who knows an artist that’s in that gallery, get to know the artists that are in that gallery, contact those artists, get to know them, ask them to critique your work, don’t ask them for right away for an intro to the gallery. And after you get to know them, and you and you feel comfortable with them, and they feel comfortable with you, you might say, hey, are there any galleries that you would recommend that I should go in? And if they feel comfortable, they might say, well, you know, I actually would introduce you into this gallery or that gallery. But if they don’t say that, then they’re not comfortable that your works ready. So you want to be really careful about not being a pest now, you can get around that. I know people who do get around that, but you’ve got to be really sensitive to being a pest. Right? Because if you if you’re not, then that’ll be an issue. Okay, do we have any questions from the audience? And if so, just come right up to the microphone. Ask your question. And then we’ll see if we can help.

Speaker 2 11:45
My name is Nancy cloths, I come from Portland, Oregon. very delighted to be here. I noticed a major uptick in this plein air convention on computer information. We’ve gotten lots of information through emails, here’s how you access your links and so forth. And I’m wondering as an artist, what percentage in our marketing life? Should we be on the computer in person? Writing, creating brochures? Do you have any kind of formula? Say I consider 50% of my life as an artist in marketing, and teaching? And I just wondered, it seems like the proportions of how we spend our time in marketing materials and access to the computer and so forth, has changed.

Eric Rhoads 12:42
Okay, good question. Thanks. Stay at the mic, because I might ask you a question. Or you might comment on something. The world has changed, obviously, you know, we used to Does anybody remember letterhead? I don’t think our company even has any letterhead anymore. And if we did, I wouldn’t even know how to find it. But you know, we used to spend a ton of money on letterhead and brochures and things like that. And we don’t do much in print anymore. I don’t even carry business cards, I have an electronic business card, somebody holds up their camera to it, and it scans it and puts it in their phone. And I hate I hate the idea of printing something. But I still print magazines. Isn’t that ironic? And people still read print magazines, but some people still read digital magazines. Some people don’t read any magazines. I think that, you know, from our standpoint, we like the idea of being able to be nimble, because if we, we have to change something, we can change it and notify everybody and it’s out there. But in your world as an artist, you have to, you have to think about, you know, what’s your environment? First off, my rule is you should spend 20% of your time on marketing, no matter what if that’s one out of five days, and you can break it up however you want. But if you force yourself to spend 20% of your time, even if you don’t know what to do, you’ll find something to do. And if you find something to do, you’ll be doing productive work eventually towards selling or whatever. So I think artists typically galleries typically need brochures or books or some way to show the art. It’s an expensive investment, you know, even southern beaches and Christie’s has gotten away from from doing the catalogs, it’s all online now, which I prefer because I can just click and look at it and register and and make a bid if I want to. But it depends on the audiences you’re talking to more and more older demographics are more tuned in especially after COVID You know, nobody before COVID knew how to use Zoom. And now everybody does. And so the world is more electronic. And so you have to just get Gotta judge what it is you do. Did that scratch that itch? Or is there more you need?

Speaker 2 15:06
Yeah, my Mondays are devoted to marketing. And then every morning, I’m, I’m one to two hours in marketing, okay, I teach and I present and I sell in a gallery and I, I have to produce, I am trying to establish a balance a new balance with with production.

Eric Rhoads 15:26
Well, what I would ask yourself is, what is my, I have what I call my optimum times, right? I know my energy patterns, I know when my mind is working great. I know when I’m tired. So you know, my day I start out like really high energy, well, kind of, after I workout, I’m low energy, and then I get high energy again. And then I kind of go along, and then after lunch, I lose my energy, and then it starts dwindling down for the rest of the day. And so I try to put the important things that require my brain, my thinking time, in that period of time, and the things that don’t require that in the other periods of time. So, for instance, I oftentimes would, would tell my salespeople, there are certain things that you do when you’re at your best, right, so you make your phone calls when you’re at your best. And when you’re tired after lunch, that’s when you build your presentations, and you get that stuff out of the way. So if you were to look at my calendar, I, I’m not always perfect about this, but I actually calendar eyes, my projects, I calendar is thinking time, because everybody needs to just stop for an hour or 20 minutes or you know, two or three times a week and just think about your business. And I oftentimes will calendar eyes, not just meetings, but I’ll calendar eyes projects, I’m going to give myself one hour to get this project done, or two hours or whatever. in your particular case. And in my particular case, I have painting time as well. And I do my best painting when I’m at my highest energy. And unfortunately, because I have all of this that I have to run, I don’t paint during my high energy times, except sometimes on the weekends, right? If I can get high energy time, on a Saturday morning or after church on Sunday, that kind of thing, then I will I’ll be able to paint better in those periods of time. But you know, I go out to the studio six or seven o’clock, eight o’clock at night, and I’ll paint till two o’clock in the morning some days. And so but that’s, that’s just me, but you just have to kind of figure out what works for you. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you. Any other questions? Come up to the mic if you have one. And and if you could just be lined up so that one person asked them the next one we’ll get to you.

Speaker 3 18:12
Hi, I’m Caitlin Lee line hatch from Wisconsin. Super excited to be here my first time. My question relates to how to figure out how to use my name as my brand. It’s a little complicated. I feel like I’m in an identity crisis. Because I I’ve used my maiden name my whole life doing art, but it was more of a hobby, after getting married, you know, dropped that. But now that I’m finally getting back into my art, after 10 years of raising kids, I still want to sign my work with my maiden name, but use my maiden name and married name to talk about myself because we also have another business that I think goes well with the story of my art. And we run a dairy farm and make cheese and it’s a beautiful story that works together. But I’m worried that if I have two different names, it’s complicated. And is it a mistake? Or will people just eventually figure it out?

Eric Rhoads 19:06
If I woke you up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep? And I asked you if you had to make a liver die decision right now about what direction you would go What would you pick?

Speaker 3 19:17
the hyphenated name but still sign it just my maiden name they want to do

Eric Rhoads 19:23
all right, well, you need to do what you want to do. And I came out of the radio industry and we had radio names. And you know, like you’d have a guy or a lady who had a really difficult to name, last name, you know something, you know, heavily ethnic or something and, and so they’d say, Okay, well your sandy beach or you know, or, you know, your french fry or whatever, they come up with these names and jingles for him and the reason they do that is because they’re memorable If you have a name that is not memorable, then it makes your life much more difficult. And it makes their life much more difficult. You know, we have a company that we acquired little little art instruction video. And we kept that name for 10 years, before we stopped using it and combined it into one name of paint tube TV. And it and we kept it alive, because a lot of the people who knew them, you know, we wanted that consistency. But as those people kind of aged out, and then we started getting them more familiar with their other brands, we put them together. But we one of our slogans was, you know, difficult name, great training. And but if, if I were starting from scratch, I would consider, you know, coming up with something that’s easy. Now, there are a number of artists who will just use their first name, or their last name, or maybe they’ll come up with something. I, my brother calls me brick, because my, my first name is Bruce. So there’s the B, about my family. And my middle name is Eric. And my family always calls me, Rick. So he calls me brick. And I was thought, well, that’d be a great name for if I became a abstract painter, I just become brick, right? So because I wouldn’t want anybody to know who I was anyway, because I don’t do that. So you, I think, if you’re going to do something, pick something and stick with it, whatever you’re going to do. I have a friend that’s here, I don’t know if she’s in the audience. But she, she decided that she she was using a her maiden name and her married name, hyphenated for many years. And she got known as that for many years. And then she decided she was going to change her name. And I said, You’re stupid. Don’t change your name, you know, you’ve got 30 years of branding. And now all of a sudden you want to become whatever it was, I said, Don’t do that. You’re just throwing away 30 years of equity, and brand equity. So in your particular case, if you’ve been known as your maiden name, then I would incorporate that. And I would, I would add your last name if you want to do that. But if your last name is tough, maybe stick with your maiden name, you have your dairy farm business, you can easily be who you are for that and be who you are for your artists. And I’ll tell you something, I I’m on a board of directors, with 15 other companies. And one of the people on my board is an artist who makes $5 million a year as an artist, by the way. And he has different brands. So he has his name as a brand. But he has also he’s created names. He’s made up names of other brands with different styles of art. And, and he never puts his picture on it. So I mean, it’s no different than then a cosmetics company saying okay, well, let’s come up with the essence of Jasper, right? You know, so you could do something like that if you like. So we have a lot of artists who have these like, the questions are like, Well, I’m known as a portrait artist, but I really also want to be a sculptor. And so it’s like, do you confuse your audience or not? And so those are ways to overcome that. Tell me your name again.

Unknown Speaker 23:44
Caitlin Lee line hatch.

Eric Rhoads 23:46
Caitlin Lee line hash hatch hatch. Well, that’s easy. That’s fine. It’s very elegant sounding. And it might be hard to write all of that on a signature. But I think that’s fine. Okay. All right. Did I answer your question? Yes. Okay, great. Terrific. Next question.

Speaker 4 24:07
Hello, my name is Gabrielle istok. And this is my first physical time so it’s nice to finally meet everybody and you in person. I would like to know, back to our first question, that gal asked about marketing. What is some software that you use? I could definitely use some good calendar software. What is something that you recommend to help artists in now this more digital age?

Eric Rhoads 24:40
Oh, well, what kind of help?

Unknown Speaker 24:44
Like what what? So I still use

Eric Rhoads 24:47
I understand AI can make the art for you. Is that what you’re looking for?

Speaker 4 24:51
No. I don’t think so. I’m, I’m referring to you know, I still use the good old paper have, you know, calendar? Are you using software to schedule things? Well?

Eric Rhoads 25:09
That’s a loaded question. The answer to that is yes, and no. So I’m a bit of a tech nerd. But I’m also a bit of a Luddite. So I have, I have tried different programs and spent money on different programs and apps, and so on to manage my to do list. And I do my to do list every day on paper. And the reason I do it is because I have a system, I have a book, I buy these hard bound books at the office supply. And the left side, I write the date, the left side is for notes, the right side is for my to do list. And I take my to do list and I prioritize it by A, B, or C. A is the most important, B is kind of important. C isn’t really very important right now. And I list everything by A, B, and C. And sometimes there’s 50, or 75, things on that list. It’s not uncommon. And then I also go through and I put an asterix next to something if it’s urgent. So it could be a C, but it has to get done because it’s urgent. And then, so I put that Asterix there, that means I gotta get it done today, then the next thing I do is I go through my list and I go, is there anything on here that I can delegate, and unit probably don’t have anybody to delegate it to. But if you did, I go through and go, You know what, this is really something I shouldn’t be doing, I shouldn’t waste my time doing it. So I’ll cross it out. And I’ll send a quick email to Carrie or somebody or ally. And I’ll say, do this. And then I go through and N A is 80%. Those are the big things, right? I, I try to knock out my A’s first. And so how do you know which one so if I’ve got five A’s, I go through it. And I said based on today where I am, and what’s the most important thing to me, that’s going to be the most important to what I’m trying to move the needle on at this time. So it might be a new product, or it might be a different project, or it might be a money. So like, if I know like I have to sell out the plein air convention by, you know, within three days, and I’ve only got three days to do it, that becomes a one and then the next thing becomes a two. And so that’s how I do it. So I do that manually. Now, there’s software that will do that for you to do a better job. But I’ve never been able to I just you know, because I’ve been doing it for 30 years, it’s just works for me. And we’re using a piece of software we were using. Let’s see where it is called up up. Upwork. Right? Is it Upwork. Anyway, we now build all of our projects in the software, click up, click up, thank you. And, and we put every detail every step of everything and every person who’s involved with it into that. And then it sends us reminders of what to do and how to do it. So my whole company operates on on clickup. Now, we were using another piece of software until about six weeks ago. And so I get email notices, and it tells me when I need to have something done. And that is a really great tool for you. It forces you to plan. But once you plan once, if you have like a typical week and you want to repeat that, you can it’ll just automatically you just regenerate it for the next week. So it says okay, spend spend two hours on marketing starting at two o’clock on Thursday something but you know, I just use Google Calendar and and what’s in my iPhone that’s convenient for me. I use AI a lot not to create paintings. But I have aI up all the time. I recommend spending the money for chat GBT for it costs you like a couple $100 a year but it’s better. And so now you can have it write emails for you. You can have it write promotional pieces for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. And just to give you an example, I told Christina, who’s our social media manager that I wanted to do quotes from Sunday coffee, and she said, Okay, well get me some quotes from Sunday coffee. So I went into AI, I said, go to my Sunday coffee blog, find 50 Motivational quotes and put my name at the end of them. Two minutes later, I had 50 of them. And so I and I sent her that and then we also learned how to use a software called Canva. That is for graphics. And there’s a way you can automate that. So she was able to take that automation that I had In two minutes, she automated it in Canva it spit out in another 10 minutes spit up 5050 different graphics for it. So that’s, that’s where you can save a lot of time and and AI is going to be very valuable for marketing for all artists. I anytime I have a hard problem I’m trying to solve, I’ll go into AI and I’ll say, here’s the problem, what would you do? And it’ll give me a list. And some of the things are correct. And some of them aren’t. Some are things I haven’t thought of. So it can be very valuable.

Speaker 4 30:32
And nice. I also enjoy it. It’s called vid IQ and they have a chat GBT thing that links to your YouTube. So everything you’re saying in your YouTube connects, and you can do that same thing, like, what did I say over here? And they’ll bring it over and write what you said. So it feels more genuine? Because it took what you were talking about in your own YouTube channel. And then one other question I had, is it is it a is a new fad that’s going on right now. But I noticed when people are on camera, and they’re addressing people that might be watching them on camera, they’re saying friend, like, hey, Fran, I want to tell you about this thing. Is that a good marketing strategy?

Eric Rhoads 31:20
I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t know why it’s a trend. There’s no, there’s nothing I’ve seen that indicates one way or the other. I think that general rule of thumb is whenever you can be personalized, it’s better. You know, if you’re sending an email, and you have a system that allows you to do this, whether it’s MailChimp or some other thing, we use Agora Pulse, you know, you’ll get an email that says, hey, Gabriel, that’s more powerful than saying, Hey, friend, but sometimes there’s a moment when you want to say, Hey, dear fellow artists, or whatever, but anytime you say anything like that, you immediately go, your radar goes at, and Oh, me, and you hit delete, right. And this I do this all day, every day, we all do. And so, I mean, the best rule for all marketing is tested. You know, test test one doing Hey, friend and test one without it. The most important thing is what you say it when you’re talking about YouTube, I paid a huge amount of money for YouTube training. I hired a consultant on YouTube. As you know, I’ve got 100,000 followers on my YouTube channel now. And the most important thing is the first three seconds, and also the titling. I went through and changed all the titles of the my top 50 viewed art school live shows. And I put the word secrets and every one of them and viewing went up. And it’s stupid, but it works. And so you know, Secrets of watercolour painting with Gabriel Stockton, you know, kind of a thing. And but the first three seconds of your show, determine what it’s like you’re driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour, in your case, 85 miles an hour, you’re driving down and you see a billboard. And you’ll see two billboards, and one says McDonald’s next exit, and the other one has like 500 words on it crammed in, and you can’t even make it out, right. And you might make it out if you drive by it every day going to work. And so you’ve got to put a billboard out front of your YouTube, or anything you do your emails, if everybody in the room would just start saying, okay, what can I say that people want to hear? That’s going to get attention. And I’m going to put that at the front of emails. I have a friend is a best selling author. And he said to me, he was coaching me on writing my Sunday coffee. And he said, Now when you write it, write everything and then take the first two paragraphs and throw them away. Because nobody gets to the point until the third paragraph. And so I’ve now learned to get to the point right away. But the idea is you want to get their attention because they’re deciding am I going to watch this? Am I going to read this? Am I going to open this? What’s going to get their attention? Alright, good question. Thank you.

Speaker 5 34:36
My name is Frank Gonzales. I live in Mexico. I keep Jalisco Mexico and this is my first time as you know. Yes. Okay, so I have two questions. One is kind of an awkward one. I have been teaching in San Miguel de Allende, watercolor and oil. I love that. Yes, I know you were there at some point.

Eric Rhoads 34:57
I’ll tell you a quick story. Okay. Very quick. All right, COVID hits, Art School live starts, we get millions of viewers. And I’m walking down the street in San Miguel. And my wife says, Don’t look now, but that guy’s staring at us. And you know, you hear these stories about people getting kidnapped and all this stuff. So she’s like, be careful, be careful. And I said, just don’t look at him. So we walked by the guy and he starts walking towards us. And she’s like, holding on to her purse. And he says, Are you Eric Rhoads? Yes, I took us on a tour. So anyway, I’m sorry.

Speaker 5 35:37
Okay. Well, my question has to do with the so I started teaching there. I’ve been teaching for quite a few years now. 20, to be exact. But the thing here is that when I started teaching in San Miguel de Allende, and I used my name and friend, Gonzales, then they say, you’re no different Gonzales. They say, Well, you are not every Gonzales. And I said, Of course I am. It happens to be that there’s another artist there who has the same name. And I’m trying to kidnap him, but I haven’t really. So somebody said to me, you should change your name. And I said, No, he needs to change his name. I don’t know, what do you think about that?

Eric Rhoads 36:15
Well, what I would do, first off, I would go meet this guy, and get your picture taken with him. And then I would tell the story on social media about how that you’ve got this confusion thing going on. And that just be kind of a fun thing to do. But the only thing you can do is figure out another way you can differentiate yourself. Now, when you’re attracting audience to come to you and San Miguel, they’re probably coming from other places. I know from also from San Miguel, they’re all coming from San Miguel, not all of them. Okay, but so you have to figure out, first off, what I would do with your marketing is I would put your name and then put where, where you’re from? Okay. Okay, so like DaVinci? Yeah. Okay. And then I would put your photo that way. The people who know the other guy are gonna go, that’s a different guy. Right? So there are obviously lots of people with different names. It’s a very difficult marketing dilemma. And you only run into that in San Miguel.

Speaker 5 37:45
Okay, so the second thing, the second thing has to do with the so I paint a lot I paint fires. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. But so I have this idea, this strategy, which actually, I want to explain a little bit so that you can tell me what you think. So what I’ve been doing other than painting, and you know, selling my work in different galleries, I, I became a promoter of art. I also became an art auctioneer. And I paint a lot of public art in my town, because many people cannot buy my art, but I still want them to enjoy it and to have it. And also, I use it obviously, as a strategy for marketing. And last year, we founded an art museum in our town. Yeah, we have over 500 600 pieces of art that, you know, a lot of people from different parts of the world come to, to our little town, I actually learned to speak English there. So I mean, doing all of these things besides painting, thinking, you know, this is a nice, a nice way to put myself you know, in front of people. But the idea is to do that publicly and socially. Until 55. I will become 51 next year. So it’s like, Okay, so once I get to that point, then I do nothing but painting. So it’s like a, like a ladder. I want to think to get to a point where I’m known in my area, but then I can just do what I love, which is painting. like to know what you think about that.

Eric Rhoads 39:20
I think it’s a really good idea, but it’s also very stupid. Okay, and I’m not calling you stupid. So here’s the problem. We have this misconception, that when we become famous that all of our problems are gonna go away. All right, so I’ve known some pretty great artists, some of which are no longer around. I won’t use any names. But I had a conversation with one of these famous artists over dinner one night, and I said, you know, it must be really nice to be you because you don’t have to mark it anymore. He said, What are you talking about? He says if I’m if I’m not seen all the time, everywhere they forget me at you have to be seen all the time. If you look at the great artists alive today, let’s look at like David LaFell. Do you think David LaFell doesn’t do any marketing? David LaFell does marketing every day of his life. Richard Schmidt and I talked to him about this, Richard Schmidt did marketing every day of his life. Now, it may not be marketing in the traditional sense that you think of I mean, maybe you weren’t seeing ads, with Richard Schmid, talking about his paintings or something, but you would see books come out, you would see shows you would see stories or articles, everyone needs to adopt an attitude that if I’m selling my artwork, if I’m in a business, which you are your small business, then if I’m in business, you have to devote a certain amount of time to your marketing. And that never ends. Marketing is a lifetime commitment. If you think you’re going to get to a high point of awareness, you will, and you’re doing all the right things to do that. But here’s the problem. Once you get up here, the minute you stop promoting, you start sliding down the scale. And so remember that there’s a concept called attrition, right? So if, if I owned a gallery, in a typical year, 10% of my customers would die, move, retire, not have any more wall space, lose their jobs run out of money, I’d lose 10% of my customers in a typical year, in 2008, the attrition rate for art galleries was 60%. That means in 2008, most art galleries lost 60% of their customers, and most of them didn’t survive hundreds of art galleries went away, not the smart ones, in 2008, actually increased their advertising, even though everybody said, you know, we’re in a recession, nobody has any money. And those people survived, and they’re still around today. Because they realized that if you stay top of mind, you’re gonna get the customers that are spending, there may not be as many people spending. But if you can get some money in the door, then that will help you survive. So here’s what’s going to happen, you’re going to make yourself famous in your area, but 10% of them are going to die, move, whatever. And then there’s going to be 10% new people who come in and they don’t know you. And, you know, five years from now, 50% of those people are gone. And five years from now, 50% of the new people don’t know you exist. So you are constantly having to replace that 10% that’s going away with a new 10%. Okay,

Speaker 5 43:04
no, but I guess what I meant is, you know, the public card, the social work and all of that I don’t I know that I can’t stop doing my publicity. I mean, that’s, that’s a certainty for me that I know that I have to invest in my own publicity. But I just, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you know, I’ve been doing all these things, and everybody gets when they think art, the first name that comes to their mind is my name. Well, except with that other guy who doesn’t same name as me. But when I’m saying 55, I’m saying 55, to do all the work that I do all the teaching, all the auctioning, and all of those things, and stop all of that paint and still continue with my publishing Academy. That would never stop, I can’t do it all.

Eric Rhoads 43:47
So what you have to do is look for leverage. And what I mean by that is, so I’m kind of in the same boat, I can’t do it all anymore. I used to do it all. I used to be a one man show and do everything. Now I have 5050 people and I still can’t keep up. Right? And, and so the first thing is if you can get some help some volunteers, somebody to do some work with you. Maybe it’s some paid people from time to time, that to help you do some of those things. But the other thing is to leverage other people and that is to look for somebody else who’s aggressive in your marketplace that wants to be involved in those things. And then see if you can do collaborations with them, you know, they have marketing that’s going on, maybe they can include you in their marketing in exchange for something you do for them. Look for ways to collaborate look for ways to be interacting with other people. You know, I have a this is gonna sound really, really arrogant, and I don’t mean it to sound arrogant. It’s just you get to a point where you have so much demand on your time. You have to be picky Right. So if I did every art competition that I was asked to judge, if I did every show opening that I was asked to attend, I physically couldn’t do them all. I mean, there would be something every weekend. And so I have to turn down most of it. If I did, all the speaking engagements I’m asked to do, I would have to turn them down. So I, I set a let what I call my leverage rule, and that is, okay, I will only accept a speaking engagement, unless if there’s a minimum number of people in the, in the crowd, usually 1000 people or more, because, you know, I’m gonna get on an airplane, I’m gonna fly across the country, it’s gonna take me a day to get there, I’m gonna have to stay in a hotel, and I hate hotels. I’m going to have to get up at four o’clock in the morning to go to the airport. And then I’m going to go and I’m going to speak to 50 people. And no, I would love to speak to those 50 people, it’s just not productive. So if I’m going, I have something that I want in return, right? I want them to sign up for my email list. I want them to buy a product I want them to know about a blog or a podcast or something that I do. And so I, I look at that. And I say, Okay, what’s my goal? If I accept, I turned down, there was a big art convention for art materials people in in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago, Columbus a few weeks ago, and they asked me to be on a panel with three other people who were my equivalents in other industries, I mean, for for other publications, and and I said, No, I’ll come if I’m a keynote speaker, but I won’t come if I’m on a panel. Now, why would I do that? Because I didn’t want to be one of three. I thought, if I’m gonna fly across the country, I want to stand out, I want to have control of the conversation, I want to be able to talk to the audience. Now that sounds arrogant. And it might be and that’s not my intent. But if I’m going to take my time, I want to get value out of it. So you have to look at that and say, How can I get value? How can I leverage my time? What else can I do? Thank you. All right, next question.

Unknown Speaker 47:23
Hello, my name is Laura Lee, I’m from Texas.

Eric Rhoads 47:26
Can you get a little closer to the mic? Yeah, you could pull it up if you want to tall or handheld.

Speaker 6 47:32
Okay, no, that’s okay. I’m fine. I wrote out my question, because I wanted to make sure I did it. Right. So in doing emails and social media posts, how important is it to be on the camera myself? And what would you say about photos versus videos?

Eric Rhoads 47:48
All right, well, and we’ll get into a dialogue about social media here from this. First off, in, you know, the, the world has changed so dramatically. It you know, the, we have people on our team who do nothing but social media and video and, and I have a producer for my show, and we take my show, my daily show, and then we make shorts out of that. And then we put captioning on it. And we take my podcasts and we do shorts out of that we put captioning on it, we actually now have just discovered an AI tool that does all that for us. We have, we have one company that we pay a couple $1,000 a month just to do that for us. And we found this AI tool that does it for like $10 a month or something. And so this guy is gonna probably lose his job. You don’t work for us. It’s a company. And we do it because Facebook and YouTube and Instagram are fighting for their lives because Tik Tok is crushing them. And so they’re if you do reals, if you do shorts, they will reward you. And the way that social media works first off, most people think, Okay, I have 10,000 followers. If I write something, all 10,000 people are gonna see it. Anybody in the room believe that? No. So three years ago, the number was 7%. Facebook will push your posts to 7% of your followers only 7%. Today, the number is 3% only 3% of your followers are going to see it. So you have all these people who think Well, I’m gonna do my marketing on Facebook and on Instagram and I don’t need anything else. I’ll just push it out to my 100,000 followers, you know, and, and so what Facebook does is they look at at your engagement rates And the first thing they reward is if you’re doing video, they reward that. And so rewarding means if we have good engagement, people watching it, then we’re going to show it to more people. If they watch it more than the first three seconds, then that’s good. We’ll show it to even more people. If they watch it. Halfway through, we’re going to show it to even more people, they watch it all the way through, we’re going to show it to even more people. Right? So that means that you have to be thinking about what I talked about earlier, how do I get them to watch what’s what’s the first thing I can say that’s gonna stand out, be controversial, get their attention, whatever. And then what can I say that’s gonna make people watch all the way through you, if you pay attention to Instagram, you’ll see people doing this very effectively. You know, at the end, I’m going to show you how I, you know, did this magic trick, whatever. And the whole goal is to try to pull you through, you know, these people do these things where they turn the paintings around, and they’re trying to hold people longer. And that’s why they do this stuff. And so video is very highly important. And if you’re branding yourself as an artist, in today’s world, brand yourself, and that means they need to know you, they need to know your face, and you need to have your look. And your look needs to be your look forever. I told Eric Koppel when we did our first video with him, I said, What’s your look going to be since I don’t know he had this cap on. I said, Don’t ever take the cap off. This is now your look. And so you’ve seen everything you see him in on his social media for the last 10 years, he’s got that cap on same cap probably stinks by now. And the idea here is that you need every artist needs a brand. They need something that you know might be your haircut, it might be your glasses, it might be your jacket, it might be everybody’s got to look, you pay close attention to Jane Seymour, you know, she’s always got the scarf on. And she’s you know, we’re about to take a picture with something. She said, Oh, wait, let me put my scarf on. Right. So everybody’s got their look, you need to kind of figure out what is my look, you know, when I’m on art school life, I wear a black shirt every day, this my look that I that I wear there. And so you have to kind of figure out what, what do I want to be how do I want people to perceive me, and you need to build your brand. And you need to show your picture. So I think it’s important. Thank you. Okay. Other questions?

Speaker 7 52:40
I can. How about that. I’m Doris MIDI. And I’m from Tarrytown, New York. I’m 80 years old. And when I walk into certain places of certain galleries, to find out if I can set up an appointment to show my work or whatever. I believe sometimes I’m totally eliminated because I’m not a young artist who might be selling their paintings cheaply, or have a certain amount of years to be in the industry. And I’m wondering, how do you combat that?

Eric Rhoads 53:14
Well, I think the very first thing that came to mind, tell me your name again.

Unknown Speaker 53:19
Doris VAD, Doris, yes,

Eric Rhoads 53:22
the and forgive me for saying this. But the first thing that comes to mind is you have to ask yourself, am I telling myself a story? Or is this really true? Because we all get stories in our heads about the way things are. And sometimes those things happen, because we have those stories in our heads. And that may not be the truth. I mean, if Andrew Wyeth walked into a gallery, and he was 80 years old, what would happen?

Speaker 7 53:53
Well, he had a reputation that preceded him. Okay, he would be welcomed.

Eric Rhoads 53:57
Sure. All right. So it’s not about age is no, what is it?

Speaker 7 54:04
It’s my ad, my actions possibly

Eric Rhoads 54:08
is about reputation. Okay, right. So what does every gallery want, they want you to make their job easy, right? That a gallery owner wants to know that your work is going to sell that you’re going to be easy to sell. I mean, some artists are easy to sell. I mean, if I had Jeremy lifting, I could sell that all day long. Right? So I think that what you need to ask yourself is it might not be an age thing. It might be in some cases. You know, as I get older, I notice how some people respond. You know, people start calling me sir, you know, things like that. So there’s gonna be some of that ageism stuff that takes place but you know, screw you’re gonna just go forward anyway and do what you want to do. and you will find a way to overcome any obstacle because that’s who you are. And, you know, I have had people in my life that have, I have made, I’ve judged them. And they’ve, I’ve had impressions in my mind, and I would have discounted them. I hate saying it, because it’s, it’s just something I don’t like about myself, but it’s true. But there are some people who live up to that. And then there are some people who are like, not letting you get away with that, you know, I’m gonna plow through and I’m gonna change your mind. And you have met people who are 80 years old, and who are fireballs and energetic and can get things done, and you’ve met people who are 50 that act like they’re 90, right? So, you know, just manage your mindset mindset is so critical. How you think about yourself, listen, I look at myself in the mirror every day. And I wonder, you know, how did that happen? And so, I have to constantly say to myself, that, you know, we let this stuff creep into our heads, you know, oh, you know, nobody wants to hear from me, because I’m, you know, over 40 I mean, or over 50 or over sick, you know, I mean, think about when you turned 30 What a big tragedy it was. And then when you turn 40, it was a tragedy, then when you turned 50, it was a major tragedy, then you returned 60 It’s like you’re almost dead. And then you turn 70. And you look back at 60 and 50, and said, Gee, I wish I were 50. Right? It’s all head trash. So you have to manage your head trash.

Speaker 7 56:46
Well, most people don’t take me to be as old as I am. Well, you don’t look old. And you know, I I have like four businesses I’m running and all that. But it’s just when I walk into the galleries, it’s what happens and I don’t, maybe that’s what I’m trying to rationalize, because I know you can’t

Eric Rhoads 57:04
do cold. Maybe they just maybe your work just isn’t something they like, and they haven’t

Speaker 7 57:08
even seen it. Yeah, I’m just cruising to see what the gallery has to offer. Yeah. And, you know, find out who the principles are just see the thing, okay. And if I’m not buying, I’m kind of like, well, what do you want to do here? And I said, I’d like to show a portfolio. Oh, we only buy from Europe or something.

Eric Rhoads 57:25
Yeah, but it’s a it has nothing to do with your age. Okay. It has to do with with the idea that if they took 10 minutes for everybody who walked in for it with a portfolio, they would never get anything else done. And, and you are the fifth artist has walked in that day. And the 50th That’s walked in that month, and the 900 That’s walked in that year. And so they have set their standards, and they’ve said, you know, we’re not talking to these people, right? So you have to ask yourself, alright, if I want to be in this gallery, how do I get in there? And so maybe the question isn’t, I’m an art, maybe you’re not saying I’m an artist? I’m, you know, I want to be in your gallery. Maybe the question is, tell me about this artist. And then they tell you about him say, how do you find people like this, these people are this is amazing. And they’ll Oh, you know, while we were really watching this, or whatever, I had an art dealer tell me that he said he has a secret, Instagram and Facebook account. And he follows artists with a secret name because they don’t they everybody knows his name. And he said, I watch their behavior. I watched how they not only what they post, I watch if they post good things or bad things I watch if they post things that are uncooked, I watch if they’re showing party photos with their head in the toilet, you know, things that are gonna get in the way he says, and I watched their progress over a number of years. And sometimes when they get to a certain point, I’m like, Okay, I want to bring them in. I had a gallery owner tell me that one of her customers came in the other day, and and brought the painting that she had just bought. And she said, I can’t own this painting anymore. Because I saw the artist on Facebook and him doing something so disgusting. I just don’t want to own his work anymore. So she traded it for something else. That’s how important this stuff is. And so you got to do your research. You got to do your homework. And you know, the concept of marketing is really when everybody else is doing this. Do this Zig when everybody else zags. And rather than being one of 9000 people that year that go into that gallery. Why don’t you figure out a strategy that you’re going to be the one they’re going to pick this year. And so you know, use your brain Get to know the other artists that are in the gallery try to figure out what you can do that is going to get you invited in. Because if you’re invited in you have more strength, more power. And by the way, they see your work. They’re not going to care about your age. The only thing they’re going to care about your age, I had a gallery owner tell me one year, he said, he saw younger artists who was really hot, he said, Oh, this is great. I can get 40 years of sales out of this guy. Versus I can get 20 years out of sales of this person. Right? So that’s how people think sometimes it’s it’s cold and cruel, but it’s true. Okay. Thank you. Good job.

Speaker 8 1:00:44
Hello, Eric, how are you? So my, my name is Luis Sackett, I’m from New Mexico. And I’ve been painting a long time. Now I sell occasionally on Facebook, or Instagram. But I noticed that they were throttling back the amount of people that were watching, I check the statistics, the statistics on Facebook to see how many interactions I’ve had how many views I’ve had. So trying to figure a way around, not boost having to pay to boost something.

Eric Rhoads 1:01:17
So complete waste of money, don’t ever hit the boost.

Speaker 8 1:01:20
That’s just what I was gonna say I did that one time, I saw less interaction than when I didn’t do it. So that really teed me off, I thought, me I’m not doing that one again. So I sat there, and I tried to figure out a way to get more exposure without any monetary outlay on my part, I had a painting in my studio, that was a failed painting. And I have occasional killer or curate days in my studio, where I’ll pick something up that has displeased me, because you know, your site advances faster than your abilities. And so I looked at him, and I thought, I’ll give it an hour. Let me see if I can turn it into something. And it turned into a pretty credible little eight by 10 painting. And I thought, you know, I didn’t have this painting. When I walked into the building, what would I lose if I gave it away? So I created on my Facebook page, a share contest, that if you shared my painting publicly, and then let me know that you did it, I put your name and a hat. And on Mother’s Day, picked out a name. And somebody when the painting, it wasn’t framed, I could stick it in an envelope send it so the postage was no big deal. And I had a bunch of names people I didn’t even know. And I checked the interactions the end of that week. And where I had had something like 58 interactions the week before I was up 2000 interactions. I had a whole bunch more people that followed me. And it didn’t cost me anything but an hour of my time. So I thought that was pretty good. And somebody who knows me pretty well said, why don’t you do it around Christmas time, too. And I thought, What is your thought about repeating something like that? I think it was fairly successful the first time out. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea to create a pattern of that or to do it for a short time or to not do it.

Eric Rhoads 1:03:18
Well, that’s very creative. Congratulations. I think that I have two answers to that question. If if something works, keep doing it till it doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t work, keep changing it until it does work. And if that doesn’t work, then try something completely new. So we will sometimes we send out emails, and sometimes we’ll send out two emails, we’ll send out 1000 emails, we’ll send 500 with one subject line, and 500 with another subject line, and one subject line, we’ll get 60% response and one will get you know, and you never know what it’s going to be. And so we’ll pick that subject line, then we’ll send the email out to everybody else. So you know, test everything, try things. I think that’s remarkable. I think the thing that we all get hung up on is, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, those are called vanity metrics. And it’s really easy to get sucked into that, you know, because you see this. This artist has 100,000 followers on Instagram, and I don’t and you go, Oh, well. So I hired a guy. I have a guy that works for me on Instagram. And I said, you know, this guy’s got 100,000 followers and I don’t and I want 100,000 followers and so he got his special software. He looked into it and he said he bought them all. You can buy you can buy you know you go to these farms and you can buy names. and you can get 100,000 followers in Iran. But who cares?

Speaker 8 1:05:04
I wanted to be able to sell so well.

Eric Rhoads 1:05:07
That’s the point. Yeah. Right. So the game is not to get followers. followers don’t matter. If you have 100,000 followers, who don’t make $5,000 a year and can’t don’t have any expendable income for buying paintings. What do you have? You have vanity metrics, it’s all ego. Right? If you have five followers, who spend $5,000 with you a month that you don’t need any more followers, right? So what the key is attracting followers, the key is attracting valuable follower.

Speaker 8 1:05:47
I had two people inquire about paintings and and that’s good. Yeah. So we’re, I’m in the process of communicating with them whether or not that saucer works, I don’t know. But that was two people more interested in my paintings than were the week before.

Eric Rhoads 1:06:02
That’s right. And so that’s, I mean, that’s really the game. And maybe it’s a numbers game, and you get as many as you can, and hope that you get some people who are actually going to do it. The thing that we tend to get hung up on as artists is we we are talking about things that collectors don’t care about. Now. I think there’s two categories. I think there are collectors and I think there are people who buy art. I met a woman yesterday, she’s got 700 paintings in her house, and sculpture. She’s a collector. There are a lot of people in here who buy paintings that are not collectors, they just happen to buy paintings. They love paintings. So you know, the big artists, by the way, buy a lot of paintings. Yeah, they do. Okay, so if you’re talking to artists, that’s okay. And you might sell paintings to artists, because they buy paintings. But if you’re not talking to people who buy paintings, then you’re it’s, it’s all ego, if it’s if you’re trying to sell paintings, so you have to figure out how do I find people? What’s the messaging that is going to appeal to somebody who might buy a painting, and maybe it’s talks about art history, or maybe it’s talks about things that how to protect your art collection. And if you wrote, one of the best things that everybody’s ignoring, is LinkedIn. There are groups, I’m in groups on LinkedIn, that are art collector groups, and Art Gallery groups. And if you are in those groups, and you’re posting you post a story on five ways to make your art collection more valuable, and then they start following you. Who are you getting? You’re getting people who are in those groups who want to know that kind of stuff. If your store posting stories about five ways to make Cadmium Yellow tastes better. It’s right. So anyway, thank you for that question. All right. We have time for one more. Okay, one more question. And then we’re out. So you’re on tell us your name. And where are you from?

Speaker 9 1:08:18
Mansi from Arizona. And first, I want to tell you, I love your Sunday coffee. It’s your fabulous writer. I kind of a two part question. But one is, how important is it to have a particular niche in your painting? Because I like to paint, you know, from the East to ask from people, the landscapes and you know, oceans. I mean, should I zero in on one particular thing?

Eric Rhoads 1:08:46
Well, it’s a tough question, I think. I’ll tell you a story. So I have this buddy, is a brilliant painter. And he got known for painting. Trying to figure out how to say this, so it doesn’t reveal who he is. He got known for painting a particular subject. And he was really, really great at it. And he sold lots and lots of paintings. And then he decided that he wanted to shake it up and try something new. And he take took this trip, and he did all these paintings that were a completely different subject matter. And his gallery supported him on it, and they did the show, and the show bombed. And because they asked all these people who were used to his paintings to come in, and it wasn’t so much the artists that they valued, I mean, they did, it was the subject matter, plus the artists that they valued, and when he changed his subject matter. It was a tough, tough thing for him. Now, that’s not always true. I mean, you know, we’re gonna be announcing a trip this week. Maybe I announced that already, but you know, so we Do shows like if we go to Cuba, we’ll do people do shows their Cuba stuff and things like that. I think that when you’re getting established, you want to stay in terms of what you’re promoting, you want to stay relatively narrow. And narrow can be pretty wide. I mean, landscape painting is pretty wide subject. But if you’re doing like, landscape painting, and still life painting and portrait painting and other things, you can confuse people. And so what I oftentimes will tell people is get yourself established. And then once you’ve developed a good collector base, then you can start experimenting and expanding. And a woman call me one time she advertised, and she said, I didn’t get one call from my advertisement, nobody’s reading your magazine, this is fine art connoisseur. And I said, Hmm, because this other galleries called me and they sold, they sold a $500,000 painting. She I said, so it’s not a matter of somebody’s not reading. And I said, what, tell me exactly what you’re promoting. She says, while I was promoting my commission portraiture, I said, Great. Let me see the ad. And I looked up the ad, and I said, Okay, I’m gonna go to the website, went to the website, and it had her name, and it said, landscape painter. And I said, Okay, how do I, how do I find that portrait? She said, Well, if you click on this button, and then you look at subjects, and you click on that subject, and then you look at this, you’re going to find my portrait sirs. And I said, you’re throwing your money away, you know, if the website that you’re putting on your ad, needs to take them right to that painting. And she said, Well, what if it’s sold, I said, take it right to that painting anyway, and say, sold, here are five others that you might like, because they’re going there to scratch that itch. This happens to me all the time, it really irritates me, because you have, you know, you’re spending money to get people to something you like, and then it’s not there. And this happens more times than not, we caution our advertisers not to do that. But when you if you put too much out there, you’re risking confusing your market, figure out what you want to do, and what you want to promote first and foremost, and try to get known for something, and then you can start expanding and, uh, you can do whatever you want to do, it doesn’t matter. But you kind of I think people kind of need to be known for something, you know, Thomas Kincade, was the painter of light. And, and now everybody, for a few years after that everybody became the painter of something, you know. So I think the idea is just kind of get known for something. And if you want to be broad about it, then you know, maybe you become the bold brush, stroke painter, you know, and now everything you do is in bold brushstrokes, and then you can kind of encompass everything. You just have to experiment and try to protect.

Speaker 9 1:13:07
So then the part two of that would be I only have time for so much. To get a marketer it would that be a good idea? Because I mean, there’s all kinds of things online that says learn from me how to market. I don’t even have time to learn other stuff I’ve tried. But so is it important to find a marketer? And how would you do that?

Eric Rhoads 1:13:28
Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of stuff I’m seeing. I’m seeing things, courses from people who I’ve never heard of that doesn’t mean anything, but I’m seeing people out there who are pushing things that I’m not sure what they have to offer. I never marketed any art. I’m not you know, I teach art marketing and I never marketed any art. I just I did marketing, I learned marketing principles. You know, there’s some of them are going to be good, some are not going to be good. You can spend a lot of money on something. And ultimately, you just have to decide what is it you want to be? The best possible solution is just to take well the best possible solution is to have a an agent or a someone you know a lot of people have a spouse who becomes their marketer Kathy Odom’s husband, Buddy is her marketer. I think he’s helping other artists market their work now he’s very good. But the idea is that if you can have somebody who’s helping you so you can pay if you know you don’t have the marketing skills and don’t want to learn them. That’s okay. You know, not everybody’s gonna be that way. Be able to market some of us, you know, Camille pres wattics She’s a brilliant artist. She’s a brilliant marketer, she’s a brilliant businesswoman. She’s got that mixture Some of us need help, you know, I I have big muscles in some areas, and I have giant weaknesses and other areas and I have big muscles in In, in marketing, I have no muscles in bookkeeping and accounting. So I have to surround myself with people. And I’m in a position I can do that because my business is has been built up. But you know, you can find somebody to help you with something. There are there good people out there, there are bad people out there, get references. I spent last year I spent, I’m embarrassed to say how much money it was a big amount of money. It was a full time salary for an employee on an ad agency that gave me all these promises, and thankfully, I was marketing one of our online conferences, and I wanted them to help us boost it. Thankfully, I kept my own marketing going anyway, they sold 20 seats. I sold 1500 seats. They charged me, you know, $200,000 to sell 20 seats. I, you know, I fired him. And I’m embarrassed by it. But you know, thankfully I didn’t because they said oh, don’t do your own marketing. Let us do it all if I had done that. And the problem is, I got it. The problem is you can never if you’re in control of your business, you always have to stay in control of your business. You can never let go entirely of your marketing. You can delegate you cannot advocate. Yes. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you guys.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads answers questions about planning to be a premier painter, and what to do when someone says they can’t afford one of your paintings.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
Our goal is to help you learn to sell your paintings in one form or another. And if you learn marketing, you embrace it. It will help you we have questions that you send in sometimes we record them if we get a chance, you can send them to [email protected]. And we have a great website you can look at artmarketing.com, which is a terrific place for lots of stories on how to market your art. Okay, what’s our first question, Amandine?

Amandine
The first question is from Joanna Pyramind. From Glenwood Springs, Colorado. My goal is to be the premier local landscape artist in my Colorado ski town in five years. But my art isn’t ready yet. How would you work smarter to improve your art if you knew your art wasn’t ready. I also want to use this time to plan, save and understand marketing so that I’ll be ready when the time is right. What should I be doing? Lastly, with selling “underbaked” art be a bad idea.

Eric Rhoads
All right. Well, Joanne, thank you. I love the fact that you have goals. And I think it’s important to have goals. But you know, it’s a, it’s potentially a big, audacious goal. And I think it’s good to have big, audacious goals. But if you are not selling your art today, and you think that five years from today, you’re going to be the best artist in your town, you better hope the best artist in your town is someone you can easily overcome, right? I mean, there are painters out there who’ve been painting for 40 or 50 years who are brilliant. And brush time does matter experience does matter. And we want everybody I want to encourage you, we want everybody to dig in to study to learn, and to practice. So, you know, there’s there’s a lot of issues here. So I’m going to touch on some of these things. But first off, you got to do the best thing you can to make yourself as good as you can. And I don’t know what that is for you. Because I don’t know where you are. But what I like to do, I, I don’t just ask anybody, because my mother would tell me how good my paintings were even when they weren’t. And you know, it’s like, no, I need to know what I’m doing wrong. And so you need to get your paintings in front of somebody who will tell you the truth. And you’ve got to give them permission to tell you the truth. And the only way I do that is I say look, I don’t want to hear anything good about it. I just want to hear what’s wrong with it, tell me how to fix it, tell me what I need to be working on. Because you know, when I go and study with somebody, oftentimes they’ll say bring a couple of your paintings or some slides or your work or something some you know pictures on your phone, because they can instantly see where your weaknesses lie. And you know might be composition might be values might be brushwork might be who knows what, so you need somebody to give you some feedback. So you need a couple of trusted people to give you feedback. And I include in that somebody who would be a gallery owner or to not to not to get into their gallery, just be upfront say look, I you know, maybe I’d like to be in here in the future. But right now, I just need to know what I need to work on from their perspective. Now they’re gallery owners aren’t painters, but they can see things because they’re around art all the time. I think that the most important thing for you to do after that is to say okay, well what’s my target look like if your goal really is to be the top painter in your, in your small ski town in five years, you know, where’s the bar and what do I have to be? And who’s going to be judging that how are you going to know when you’ve accomplished it? And so, you know, I think studying I don’t really think in terms of competition and painters because you know, I don’t look at my goal isn’t to try to beat another painter out at its you know, or to be I just want to be the asked I can be, and, you know, I think what you’re really saying is I want to make a living equal to or better than the best painter in my town. And that’s a handsome goal. So you need to kind of get the details, you know, if, if that’s your goal, why is it your goal? Why is it important to you? And then what are the specific keys to that goal? What do I have to do to match it? Well, you know, what kind of sales? Do I have to do, you know, yearly, monthly, weekly? And is that really the right goal? I mean, it might be, but you got to figure that out. Now, if you are not ready, and you know that you’re, you’re on the right track, I mean, sometimes I painted for a lot of years, and I still struggle. And I know I’m not as far along as I could be, if I if I could find the time. And you know, if you can put in 810 hours a day, just painting, it’s gonna, you know, I’ve watched Richard Lindenberg, who went from a full time job to a full time painter, two years later, by painting eight hours a day, he was phenomenal. And he just continues to get better and better, you know, and is he had a level of some of his mentors. He’s pushing on it, but he’s not there yet. But most of us aren’t most of us, you know, we’ll never get to those levels, because those mentors are always pushing themselves and getting better and better. So, you know, don’t don’t compare yourself to other people, I think that’s the biggest way to get frustrated. If you’re not selling, and you want to be selling, I will tell you this, there’s no second chance to make a first impression. And if you, if somebody perceives you as a bad painter, they’re going to hold on to that for a long time. And so before you start putting your work out there, make sure that you’re comfortable with it, make sure others who you trust are comfortable with it, because, you know, nobody expects you to be John Singer Sargent, or under Zorn, but they do expect you to have a certain level of quality. Now, different galleries have different levels of quality, different buyers have different perceptions of quality. So you know, you can kind of ease your way in, get used to it get known by some people develop an audience. And you know, just continue forward as you grow, but just be ready. That’s the best advice for you in terms of marketing. You know, marketing takes planning, it takes strategy, I think, you know, really, if I were to bring it down to a nutshell, number one, be the best painter you can be. Number two, be the kind of person that people want to help, you know, some people come in and say I deserve to be in this art gallery will look at you. And that’s not nice, you know, people want to help nice people. So work on that, if you’re not, because you need people to help you out along the way, I wouldn’t be where I am. And others wouldn’t be where they are without the people, they’re helping them. You need people. So start working on relationships, you know, if you if you target a gallery in five years, start getting to know them, help them out, hang out with them. But don’t ask for anything, just help. You know, I think that matters. And then what’s number three, ultimately, it’s about visibility. Visibility gives you a critical advantage be everywhere in network and involved, when the time comes advertise like crazy and never let up. Once you decide to be a professional painter. Advertising is a cost of doing business for the rest of your life. You have to admit that and but advertising is almost like cheating. You can’t cheat painting, because you got to learn it. But you can cheat advertising, I don’t mean to be dishonest. I mean, the fact is that you can if you do it, right, you have really great creative, and you have really great buying, and you spend the right amount of money to hit the right audiences. You know, we do very targeted audiences at my magazines, you know, with rich art collectors, for instance, a fine art connoisseur. So the idea is, you gain every advantage from visibility. So you got to enter every show, you got to win as many shows as you can. Even if you win as a finalist in something, you got something to talk about on your website, you got something to talk about to other people. All that builds up into becoming your brand and who you are. Getting into the right shows is a big booster. You know, some of the shows that one big artists told me he applied nine years in a row to get into a major show and he didn’t think he’d ever get in and boom, one time he was in and now he’s in forever. Winning top awards is going to build visibility. You just got to do a lot of different things. Don’t focus on tactics, focus on strategy, you know, learn where you want to be. Learn what you need to do to get there, and then figure out what the steps are. Next question.

Amandine
The next question is from Judy app from Canada. When a person says I can’t afford that when they have expressed interest in a piece, what they are really saying is, I disagree with the value given to it with dollars. How do you make a person understand what those dollars are really paying for in original art?

Eric Rhoads
Well, Jody, I think that people say a lot of things when they’re trying to get out of a purchase. And you may be assuming that they’re saying I disagree with the value given to it in dollars, right? They may not be saying that at all, they might be saying, I just want to get out of here. I got lunch in five minutes, I gotta get out of here. You never know people, people tell you things to get out of purchases. There are Little White Lies We all tell. You know, like, when you’re shopping and a salesperson approaches you can I help you, you say what, I’m just looking right? Little White Lies. And it’s just because you don’t want to be bugged. You’re gonna find what you want. And sometimes you’re going to ask, sometimes you’re not people have excuses they use including the excuse if I can’t afford it. And that’s a pretty hard one to come overcome. Because if you if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. So that doesn’t mean they don’t value your work, it means that they can’t afford it, or they’re lying to you. So you can’t necessarily change people’s minds. Now, selling begins with the word no, or I’m not interested. Because if you push a little further, you might help somebody break through, you can’t change their mind, but they can change their mind. So if you ask questions that help them change their mind that can help. I like to understand, do they really want it? And can they truly not afford it? Or can they afford it? And so how do you get there, you ask questions, I don’t ever want anybody to feel pressured. But you can lead them to a solution that works for them. Sometimes I can’t afford it might mean I’m looking for a better price. Or it might mean I’m just not fully committed yet. Or it might mean I need a creative solution, like a payment plan or something. So I might say, you know, Mrs. Jones, I hear that a lot. Some people say they can’t afford it, because they’re really looking for a better price. Other set, because they really just don’t want to say no and don’t want to hurt my feelings. But you know, either is okay. Because after all, not everybody’s a buyer and you know, I have thick skin. So which are you? Are you really looking for a better price, you really can’t afford it, or is this just not for you, that sometimes flushes it out, pause and listen, if they say it’s not for them, thank them for being honest, tell them that you hope to have a great day and that you hope they’ll find something eventually. And by the way, if you send me your email, I’ll put that on my newsletter. And that way, if you see something you like, eventually, maybe it’ll come back in and get something you know, just very low key, you know, only 20% of the people are ever ready to buy at that moment. It’s that continual exposure and contact that brings them back in eventually. Sometimes that takes years. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes it takes days. And you know, you can give them a postcard or calendar something to remember you by if you want to. If they say I truly can’t afford it, then you can say something like this, I understand that that’s not unusual, I find that sometimes I have to work with people. And I do it when I can. Sometimes people just need to put it on their credit card and make payments that’s planting that idea. Sometimes they make payments to me, sometimes they pick it up once it’s paid off, you know, whatever works for you, you know, I’m pretty flexible. If that route doesn’t work for you then simply ask, well, what can we do together to make sure we can hang this in your home tonight? Ask him you know, where do you think you’re gonna hang out, get them visit, envisioning that a little bit and listen, don’t talk. And then they might add, let them make an offer. And you know, if you’re far, far apart, you say, well, that doesn’t work for me, but this works for me. And understand that whatever you say they’re going to come back and come back with half of that. So, you know, I really can’t make that price concession. Now, anytime you do give a price concession always give an answer a reason. Because if you just give a price concession, it feels a little dirty sometimes. But if you say like, well, you know, my accountant has told me I can never discount prices. But once in a while, I really see somebody that I know they really want it and I just want to help them out a little bit. So he has given me or she’s given me leeway, I can do it three times a year, but I can only do it three times a year. And I haven’t done it this year. I haven’t had to but I’d be willing to do a little bit of a concession if if that’ll help you and then you know, maybe pay me in return in the future by buying something else or you know, whatever. So sometimes little things like that, you know if the if the number is too low, say here’s here’s what I can live with. And sometimes you just have to say I can’t take that I apologize and walk away And you know what, I’ve walked away from deals, thought about him come back and bought things I have. Sometimes I thought about him for weeks and come back and bought things you just never know. So I think it’s, it’s a good idea to just get some practice. Now some of us just are not good at that we’re uncomfortable with it. So a really good way to do it is if you have a friend, like have them work at your booth at an art show and have your and you work their booth so that you’re talking about them that way. You know, I can’t give you a discount because the artist isn’t here. But you know, here’s what I can do. Here’s what I’m allowed to do. They’ve allotted me 10% or something like that. Anyway, I hope that works for you. That’s the art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, addresses whether or not you should do art prints, and why or why not you’d advertise in group ads.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 126 >

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FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
Great living as an artist, the thing that every artist needs to understand is that marketing and understanding marketing and understanding the business aspects is really critical. Because like it or not, you are a small business and you need to develop some muscles in different areas of business. Like you know, like you’ve had to develop muscles in shipping and framing as an artist, right? Same thing. You can send your marketing questions into me email [email protected]. And the first question comes from Kate. I’m gonna botch this name Kate, ha run tests in Garden City, New Jersey. She says I’ve been invited to place an ad in a magazine because my work was accepted into a juried exhibition. I think it’ll be part of an article talking about the participants in the exhibition. And the ad will cost $550 For a quarter page ad. I’m new to this, and I’m not entirely sure can I afford to lose $550 Yeah. But however, I’m not at the point in my career where I will start advertising on a regular basis. So my personal goal at this time is to build up my name, my brand, and I’m listening to your podcast and reading marketing books, I’ve entered my most recent drawing into four competitions I’ve placed in all four of them, which I’m so grateful and happy about at this time, I’m looking for professional validation, and recognition that hopefully will play into my success in the future. That being said, I do not wish to waste my $550 I understand that you do not possess a crystal ball and obviously cannot guarantee anything. What would you do if you were me? Well, I do have a crystal ball, actually. What’s your name? Kate. Kate. Okay. So my crystal ball is called experience. I’ve been marketing for decades doesn’t seem like that’s possible. I started marketing way before I got into the art world, building businesses and learning how to market and I did that by making a lot of mistakes. And by spending a lot of money I didn’t need to spend. But you know, the problem is you don’t know what you do. And you don’t need to spend which is what you’re going through right now. I’ve wasted a lot of foolish money. But I’ve also made a lot of money based on some things I thought were foolish. That turned out to be a good thing. So I’m very qualified to be the closest thing to your crystal ball. Before I answer this, though, I want to tell you one thing and that is you know, my business does this. We sell ads. We sell ads, my company streamline has fine art connoisseur, plein air magazine, multiple newsletters, you know, et cetera. And so we you know, I have a conflict of interest. So if I tell you something that favors my feathers, my own nest, you’re not going to believe me anyway. So I have a bias. I’ll tell you that upfront. I’m going to tell you this and my sales team would probably shoot me Don’t do it. Yeah, don’t spend the $550. Why? Because you do not yet have Kate, you don’t yet have a marketing plan or a specific strategy. So running an ad with no strategy has no value to you, or anyone else. If you run that ad and you have high expectations, you’re going to be disappointed. And then who are you going to blame? You’re going to blame me or whoever you’re advertising with. The reality is that publications like mine, always, always, always deliver the audience that we have, we always deliver them. But we can’t control if somebody picks it up and reads it. And we can’t control if they’re going to respond to it, we can’t control if they’re going to flip by it. And so there are a lot of things that we can’t control. But there are things you can can do that will help you control it. Typically, ads fail, because there are no readers. That’s why you got to be careful who you’re buying. Ads fail because they don’t stand out, ads fail because you don’t have a specific strategy. Ads failed because they lack a call to action. And ads fail because they don’t get enough repetition. All advertising requires repetition. Otherwise, you would see an ad on TV One time, and you never see it again yet, you know, you see a Nissan ad over and over and over and over and over again, you’re sick of seeing it, they keep running it. Why because it works for a certain group of people every time you know, I don’t know how many times I saw my pillow ad probably 1000. And then one day, I picked up the phone and bought one. And so I mean, you know, you just you got to reach people at the right time, you never know when the right time is you got to be in the right mood, you know, repetition sells single ads typically do not. Now, if you had a strategy, maybe you could run an ad in a group session. Or maybe you could run it to support the group to show your support of it to be visible in there. But let’s dig a little deeper. This is nothing about more than an ego stroke. At this point. If you buy an ad, you’re thinking, wow, you know, I’m in the head and then 10,000 People are not going to call. That’s the reality. So you got to have a strategy. So the other thing you need to know is who’s the audience? Who do they reach? Is it part of my strategy. For instance, let’s say you know that all your buyers are muscle car buyers, maybe because you paint classic market muscle cars, I just made that up. Anyway, if you advertise in a gardening publication, you’re not likely to reach a lot of muscle car buyers, right. But if you advertising a muscle car buyer publication, then you’re likely to reach him. Alright, so that’s where the audience fit matters. There’s a thing called Media Marketing, media fit, marketing, fit and message. So, you know, you’ve got to know where you’re advertising. And you got to know what the topic is. Now, we do these special sections. They’re designed to sell ads, and they’re designed to also help people get highlighted after being in a group show. And that’s good, because sometimes people will track a group show they liked the show, they want to know more about it. But there are a few things to think about if you’re going to run it. First off, what do you want in return for your $550? And what is the realistic possibility you’re going to accomplish that goal? Now, the reality is, you don’t really want more than one buyer, right? You want to sell that one painting. So even though there may be you know, 10s of 1000s of people who see it, you really only want one of them to buy it, but you got to help with that process. Most of us will convince ourselves that we’re going to sell several paintings from one $500 investment, that’s a pretty big ask, you know, if if you sold a painting through a gallery, you would pay that pain, that gallery 50% of the cost of that painting. They mark it up 50% You’re paying them 50% To get you a sale. $500 is a lot less than that. 50% I’m guessing unless you sell your paintings for $1,000. So here’s what I think in terms of strategy. Artists need strategy. Ads are designed to fuel your strategy and nothing more ads can do the following. They can build your brand recognition, branding takes time takes repetition, one ad will not brand you you know like let’s say that out of 10,000 people, only five people noticed your ad or looked at it or read your name, but the other people might not see it till the next time and then Next time in the next time, one small ad, will brand you a lot less than a big ad, right? A big ad stands out more than a small ad because a big ad just naturally does. And you might not get noticed with a small ad. And you also can when you’re running small ads, you can get pigeonholed by the artists who run small ads. I know that seems crazy. But friend of mines a marketing guy, a big, big author, he says you get known for the smallest thing you do? Not the biggest thing you do. Because as you get known as the artist who runs the small little tiny ads, that’s who you become, and what does that say about you? Are you a full page quality advertiser? Are you a two page quality advertiser Are you the you know, whatever. Now if I run small ads, I by repetition, you know, so sometimes I’ll buy three or four small ads in one thing, because I want those small ads to stand out because they see him four times, sometimes that can be more powerful of a strategy. And a small ad is going to brand you less than a big ad. So anyway, in a group ad, bigger, let’s see, the group ad will bring you’re in a group,, you got a lot of artists in there. Let’s say there’s 50 artists in that group, add those pages, what do you want to do to work to your advantage? Well, the section is going to bring attention to you. And all the people in the ads, people are gonna flip through it, but the bigger ads are gonna stand out more. And you might want to make a statement that you’re one of the bigger artists in the group or you might not. But if you want to make a smaller ad stand out, then you have to have exceptional creative. You know, Debra Huse was talking about that, where she said she worked for an ad agency. In the creative department, their whole job was to get people to read ads to stand out to come up with headlines and graphics that stand out. You know, headlines make up 80% of the success of an ad. Did you know that? And you don’t want to do what everybody else does? What does everybody do in their ads, picture of painting and their name? whoring All right now sometimes you can’t do more than that if it’s a section, but you can look for ways to stand out with headlines with colorful graphics with something different, or at least a really, really, really powerful painting. Now, when I can only get smaller ads, like I said, I’ll go for repetition. Another strategy is how do I use my ad to get people to look at my work in the future. So that’s when you go into the idea of building a list. So maybe your ad has a picture your painting, and as a little tiny call to action that says, join my newsletter by coming here to this website or get a free ebook by coming here. That way they get on your list, they see your newsletter on a more regular basis, your repetition. That way, you’re getting people to join your list. And that’s going to help you a lot. That’s what I recommend in all things. But sometimes it’s so small, you can’t do it. So but usually, you need an incentive in there anyway, what can I offer to help people want to give me their name in exchange for something. So let’s do the math. Let’s say that you’re willing to spend $10 to get a name knowing that you’re gonna get that $10 back and more over the course of the next two years, how many names will $500 bring you? Well, that’ll bring you 50 names to break even if those 50 names are interested in your work, get on your list, and you talk to them more frequently, they’re more likely to get you your $500 back, it’s not necessarily immediate. It’s not about selling that painting. It’s about selling a painting that eventually speaks to them that they see in your newsletter. So that’s how a spine tiny ad space can work to your benefits hard it can be done though. Another strategy to sell paintings. Most ads don’t sell paintings, they sell artists, they sell an artist’s brand. There are very specific words you need to say to sell paintings, including calls to action to get people to buy and making sure they understand you’re assuming just because it’s in an ad, people think that that painting is for sale. But they’re not assuming that because the research has been done. A lot of people look at ads as part of the editorial content. Oh, that’s a pretty painting and they move on. But if you say this is a beautiful painting available from Debra Huse gallery, Huse Skelly gallery, that all of a sudden, they’re gonna go Oh, I thought of that. Okay, I know. It seems like people should be smarter than that, but sometimes we’re not. Anyway, the goal is build your reputation your brand, your value to the market depends on your brand. Which would you rather own? Would you rather own a job On Singer Sargent painting, are in ERIC Rhoads. Of course, it’s going to be sergeant. Which would you rather have? What are their own? Would you rather own a Debra Huse painting? Or John Singer? So I mean, John Singer Sargent painting. Sorry, Debra, you’re gonna want John Singer Sargent, but which would you rather have it Eric Rhoads or Debra Huse, you’re gonna pick the Debra Huse because she’s more visible. She’s out there. She’s known as a great painter. So the idea is you’re building reputation that takes years and lots of repetition. But that’s how you do it. Now, you can also sell your appearances at an event, you know, like your ad could say, Hey, I’m going to be at this event. Make sure you come by my booth, make sure you come visit me, I’ll be at this gallery show. is buying the smallest, cheapest ad the smartest thing? Not necessarily for me, I’d buy the biggest ad. And I’d buy a second smaller ad to reinforce my bigger ad, in case you didn’t see it, you know, just reinforces it. That’s a very effective strategy. Group ads can be very effective. But the be the biggest you can be if you can, if you can’t, you got to decide, is it going to be worth it? And yeah, it could be worth it. But it’s not always worth it anyway, I think they’re effective, but you need to know what you want out of it before you spend $1 and anything, don’t spend $1 in anything until you know what it’s going to do for you.

All right. Next question comes from Veronica Brown in Missouri. The pros and cons of licensing your work for printing. All right. So I made for prints. Okay. Veronica, one of my core principles in marketing is to sell when you are sleeping, meaning if others are selling my work while I’m sleeping, then you’re making money while you sleep right now. That’s why you want to use an art gallery. That’s why you want to have an automated online strategy. That’s why you do licensing, right? Licensing is a big deal. Thomas Kincade. I had dinner with him one night, and he told me he was the most licensed painter, artist of all times, exceeding Norman Rockwell. He, he held the licensing record at the time. I don’t know if that’s still true. And of course, Bob Ross is everywhere. And that’s through licensing. You see jigsaw puzzles. You see, bobbleheads Bob Ross company isn’t producing those. They’re licensing his name and his images. So my friend, I won’t use names, but my friend is licensed by a big printmaking company. And they also license his paintings on mugs and mouse pads and puzzles and prints and other things. And then he worked with a big licensing firm who got him this deal. And he sells images all the time to these companies. Now you don’t get much you get maybe one or 2% of what’s being sold. But so what you know, somebody sells 100,000 mouse pads. That’s real money. And so you can hire licensing firms, there are licensing lawyers there to licensing conventions that artists friend of mine, I just sent to it is going to be licensing his stuff. Most artists don’t get rich, doing licensing, but you can get extra income my friend, Charlie, you know, he’s making some extra money. And so why not make that extra money every month? Okay. Now, this brings up the subject of prints. Many print companies will license work, that’s good money for you. And then of course, there are companies that sell prints to hotels and stores and corporations, separate companies, typically sometimes they buy licensed prints. You want to reach out to those companies, should you do prints Well, you know, if you go to an art show, a tent show, you know, city city art show, you want to have a bin of prints because you got the big original on there, and a guy like me might go I really liked that. I’d like to remember that. And you don’t want to take a picture of it. And you would like to have it but you want to buy the $50 print not the $5,000 painting, so at least you’re making something off of it. And you may never sell the print the painting but you might sell enough prints to make it up. Now Thomas Kincaid told me his biggest regret ever was selling his originals and not retaining the licensing rights. That’s tricky. But he spent the last decade of his life trying to get all of his originals back for his museum. You put the time into creating an original you can sell it if you want, but you know if you get the better stuff, you might want to sell it but you want to make sure whenever you sell things, you have the proper copyright information on the back of the painting that says copyright 2023 Eric Rhoads all rights reserved that way they can’t sell the licensing on Got it. And if they do, you can go after not that you would but you might. So selling prints yourself, you can make some money I think that’s fine. But if it depends, you know some galleries don’t like it if you do it so talk to your gallery owners see how they feel about it you know there’s a whole whole bag back industry discussion going on about prints so you’ll have to find out you know, if it doesn’t work for you, you can sell Giclees which are bigger reproductions on Canvas, in a lot of things like that. I don’t know I don’t sell my prints. I mean, I don’t make prints. I don’t sell them. I only sell originals, but I don’t sell enough paintings. You know, I I have another job full time. So I only provide a few paintings to a few galleries and they sell what they get. But I you know, I don’t. I don’t want to get into prints. That’s just a personal choice, but I don’t see any downside. Anyway, I hope that helps. That’s the art marketing minute.

Announcer
This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, addresses pricing your work and getting into galleries, and mistakes that could quickly make you irrelevant.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 125 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
So my goal is to help you I’ve been marketing my entire life, which is a long, long time. And I learned a lot about marketing and I did not learn about art marketing. And so the principles that I teach really are not art marketing principles. They’re just standard marketing principles, right? I mean, I have picked it up over the years helping a lot of artists helping some of them become just super successful hopefully. Anyway, if you want to make a great living art marketing minute is a good place to help you do that you can email your questions, Eric at art marketing.com Or if you you want to send in a video we have a video first timer All right, we have a video. Let’s let’s run with it.

Speaker 1:
Hello, Eric and Amandine. So from Canada, I started painting in February 2017 to work on my phobia of painting. But four months after I started painting, I was commissioned for an art piece just by showing random little projects I was working on after selling that first piece the idea that I could eventually maybe make a business with my art. And so I decided to do this I sold two small eight by eight paintings for $1370 I have a website where I sell prints and and merch And those two, but it’s not really, it didn’t really get started. The problem is I’m getting self-conscious. It seems I was more now even doing things more spontaneously. But as I go, I realized that I’m selling at higher prices than than most would do, and hearing our professionals saying that you can’t sell for higher than that when you start. And so I’m wondering, is it can it be detrimental for me to sell at those prices?

Eric Rhoads
Don’t let them get you down. The one of the first and important principles that I learned in business, is that everybody always tells you all the things you can’t do. You can’t do this, because it’s not done that way. You can’t do that. Because nobody does that. Just ignore it, you know, just follow your heart and do what you believe in. There’s not a right or wrong. There’s not a manual. I’ve tried to write one. But you know, there’s really not a manual, most. Most importantly, is you put yourself out there, you started out at a higher price. You’re getting a decent price for first time paintings out there. You mentioned, I think you said 900 or more, and you’ve sold some. So what’s wrong with that? There is nothing wrong with that. Now I can understand why some people might say, Well, you got to start out slow, it is start, you know, edge up. Why? Why edge up? Why should you have to do that. Now, a gallery might want to say, look, we have to edge you up and build a collector base, and then increase your prices over time. That’s where that thinking probably comes from. You’re not selling through a gallery, you’re selling direct. And if you don’t want to sell in the gallery, I’m gonna talk about that later. But that’s, that’s just fine. So you said that, that in your original comment, I don’t think you said in the video. But I read your question, too. And that is you said that $900 is a lot of money? Well, it is a lot of money to some people. But it’s not a lot of money to other people. Right? So we tend to get hung up on perceptions of money. A lot of artists do this. The big problem that I have constantly, I’m constantly coaching artists to say, Look, your prices are too low. I had a world famous artist staying in the world famous artists cabin recently. And I said how much are these paintings? And she told me and I said, wrong, that you they should be selling for four or five, six times this amount of money? And they’ll sell? Well, I don’t know, I don’t think so. And I said no, no, no, you you have to have that confidence. They’re fabulous, you don’t realize the the importance of your, your ability and your career. So we get hung up on these perceptions of money. If especially if we never had money, right, so the one thing that we as many of us as artists never grew up with anything. And so, you know, so to us, you know, spending $900 on a painting may not be possible or may not something we want to do. And yet there are people who will drop 900 bucks like you and I would drop a 10 And so you have to understand that now the key to this is environment environment plays a huge role in selling if you’re selling at a flea market you know, you’re gonna have to attend dollars is a lot at the flea market, right? You’re not going to sell a Rolls Royce. at the flea market, Rolls Royce is going to be where they’re going to be at the Palm Beach art show or the LA art show or they’re gonna be where the money hangs out at the country club or whatever, you know, they’re looking for environment environment makes a difference. Well, why aren’t you looking for environment? Sounds like you already found it. You found people willing to spend money. So there’s lots of different levels in money, right? So you know, my cardiologist is probably a really wealthy guy. But he’s not wealthy, compared to Elon Musk, right? I can’t imagine. But he’s still a wealthy guy. I mean, this is different levels of wealth. I have a buddy that I grew up with who has become, I’d say probably a billionaire or pretty close to a billionaire. You know, he’ll he’ll drop 40 $50,000 Over dinner with movie stars and people like that. And you know, buying $10,000 bottles of champagne. I mean, it’s just money to him. And so it doesn’t affect him. You know, I’m not doing that. But that’s why hitting money targets is so important if you’re selling works that you want to price well, I’ve had dealers tell me that my magazine Fine Art connoisseur has sold million dollar paintings. And because we have, like three 400 billionaires who read it. And I sold, I had a real estate company sell a $20 million house from two ads in that magazine. And the person who bought responded to the one of those two ads, and ended up it was $20 million house that was 10 years ago is probably equivalent of $100 million house today. And it was, by the way, a billionaire. So you just never know you got to be in the environment. So where you advertise matters, where you hang out matters where you, you know, they always talk about the people you hang with influence how you are, you know, if you want to sell to rich people, you need to learn about him, you need to hang out with them figure out you know, go go do a lessons at the country club or something. So you know, rich people don’t need bargains, everybody wants bargains, but they don’t need bargains. Some people need bargains. So your question, is it detrimental in the long term? No, probably not. I think, right now, you’ve only sold 234 paintings at these prices. But you’ve got a consistent track record. So now what you got to do is figure out how to sell more paintings, if that’s important to you. And it might not be but to increase volume, you might lower price. But there’s something people don’t understand. There’s a great book, I wish I could remember the name of it, it’s on pricing. And it says that if you reduce your price by 10%, let’s say you have something that’s $100, you reduce it by to $90, you have to sell 18% more volume to make up the amount of money. So be careful with that because otherwise you’ll price yourself out. I think higher prices are generally good. You need to build a brand, a brand helps you get a higher price. Now brands have different meaning McDonald’s is a brand that’s a low price brand. Louis Vuitton is a high price brand. So you need to figure out what brand do I want to be where do I build my brand? How do I build it? Where do I stand out where where do I want people to see my my ads, my stories, things like that, because you want to be where the rich people are, if you’re selling to rich people, if you want to, you want to sell to school teachers and you know who who are not going to spend $900 Sorry, I don’t mean to be a little school teachers, not my point. But the idea is, you know, then advertise someplace that they’re reading. But the idea is that you want to you want to go where the standard, the money where the river is flowing is always say, Look, you need to feel that you deserve it. And you did that you set a price because you feel you deserve it, Bravo for you. You tried it, it worked. Congratulations. Now raise your prices more keep going up and see how see where you get price resistance, you know, if you, you go from 900 to 10,000, you might get price resistance. I was once in a gallery, I said I want to be the most expensive person in the gallery. And they said, but nobody knows who you are. So I know that but somebody’s gonna walk in there and they’re gonna see two paintings and they’re gonna see one that’s $10,000 in one that’s $2,000 in aid like them both, but the one that’s $10,000 must be better. I couldn’t get the gallery owner to agree to it. So I don’t know what what would have happened. Anyway. Good job. Congratulations. I’m proud of you keep it up. All right, next question, Amandine.

Amandine
The next question is from Laura, from Berlin, Maryland. How does one get into a gallery when you’re not an already established artist? I’m told not to approach a gallery but how else can one do it?

Eric Rhoads
Well, you know, again, just because I say something doesn’t make it true. And I have some strong feelings about this. And I have strong feelings because I was sitting in a gallery one day. gallery owner said Do you mind while we talk I go through the mail and he’s going through mail. It was actually kind of rude actually. Now that I think about it, but he’s going through mail so what are you looking at is he look at peeking something and throw it away peeking something, throw it away, and he had a stack a big status, what are you going through? He says, Oh, we get 50 100 submissions a week. And I feel obligated open them in case there’s something in there that I should see. But he says, I don’t even look at the artwork. You know, I can’t do it. He says, I get hundreds of emails soliciting the gallery I people, he says I was the other day I was in front of a customer, the customer is ready to buy. in walks this guy, he interrupts us. And he says, hey, you know, I’m kind of interested in being in your gallery, I’d like to talk to you about that. And meanwhile, the customer walks off, he loses the sale. Alright, he says, I don’t want somebody walking into my gallery to talk to me about this stuff. You know, the reality is that galleries are they’re a business. Right? They’re busy. And what questions to galleries ask themselves? Here are a couple of them. Is this artist good? Is this artist consistent? Do they have a body of work? And they do one good painting? Or can they do hundreds of good paintings? Because I have to sell a lot of work. I can’t make a living from one artist and one painting typically. Will it sell? What price? Will it sell for? Is it a price that fits my price point in the gallery? Is it too low? Is it too high? You know, and how much is my wall space worth, you know, shelf space and wall Smith space is worse something I got. If I have a small gallery, and I got to meet a you know, let’s say $100,000 a month, I and I can put 10 paintings up, I know I have to be able to get $10,000 a month out of each of those paintings that are hanging there. That’s wall space. Right? So can I make it with this artists? Can they do it? Do people know your brand? Do they know who you are? Is this artists selling well elsewhere? What’s the evidence of that? Can I make a lot of money on her? Can I make a lot of money on her over the next 510 20 years. And I had a gallery owner say, you know, I told him about an artist. He says yeah, I’m aware of that artists. But quite frankly, you know, he’s good, he’s very good. But I don’t think I can get 20 years of business out of him. So I would rather invest in somebody that’s going to be around for 20 years. Sad, but true. So you know, everybody thinks differently. So now, if you do want to go through and being a gallery, by the way, there’s no rule that says you have to be I like the idea of having a gallery, I have three of them. And I like it, because they’re talking to me, they’re talking about me, they’re selling me when I’m sleeping, right. And I don’t have to do all that work. Now, I don’t sell anything direct on time, I barely have time to paint for the galleries, I have scarcity, I have that because I don’t have much in the galleries, and they probably don’t push me very much because they know they’re not gonna, I’m not gonna give him enough stuff. But if you want to be, then keep in mind a couple of things. First off, you are handing your future over to a gallery, which I think is stupid. Now, I’m not an anti gallery live galleries. But what I mean is, don’t rely 100% on any gallery. First off, you want to spread your risk, you want to have two or three, ideally, minimum, some people don’t. But if if you’re going to have exclusivity with a single gallery, you know, then you want to be in someplace like forum in New York, or a kta Gallery in New York, because they are gonna make you a lot of money if they get behind you. And so you want to make sure that you still have control, you want to make sure you control the circumstances, the deal, the stakes, you got to motivate them, you got to help them, you got to cooperate with them, you got to brand yourself, still control your branding, you got to have other outlets to sell if they let you some artists will have like a certain category or a certain amount of money. So you’ve got to control everything, because the minute you lose control, if they all of a sudden they stop working for you, you’ve got a bigger problem, right? So you don’t want to have that. So I would say if you want to be in a gallery, I like the idea of getting invited in and the way to get invited in. I go into excruciating detail in my book, but the the essence of it is find somebody who knows them. Ask them to evaluate your work, ask them if you feel that you would be a good fit for their gallery. And if they do ask them if they would be willing to mention you to somebody don’t push it. You know and you have to your call it a favor. So you got to be kind of careful about that. But that’s overall one of the best ways now. Here’s the other trick that nobody realizes which is probably the biggest way that galleries find artists. Well It used to be just ads. Now it’s Instagram, Facebook. That’s why I always say don’t post unfinished paintings. And don’t post your bad paintings. You know, we all do bad paintings don’t post your bad paintings. Why? Because not, you know, people are flipping through and they see a bad painting and they see your name, what do they do? They say, Oh, Eric does bad paintings. So put your best work out there. And then, of course, we have I had a dealer, I interviewed one time and he said, I watch who’s advertising in your magazines. And I said, why? He said, because I want people who are committed to their career, they’re so committed that they’re willing to spend money to brand themselves to try and sell on their own. And also, they’re going to eventually keep spending money. And they’re going to mention my gallery and their ads. And I’ll mention them in my ads. And so it’s it’s a win win. And he says, I’ve got this one guy, I’ve had my eye on him for five years. Since I’m about to go with him. His work was a little inconsistent. But it’s getting better and better. And now I’m about to go with him. So be patient, you know, there are people watching, you don’t know or watching. So I’ve also seen galleries and this is the thing I alluded to earlier. And that is that I’ve seen galleries who have decided not to work with established artists, what why would that be? Well, there are people out there who established themselves, you know, 1020 years ago, 30 years ago, they became big deals, they were known they were household words, were household names in the art industry. And they’re no longer keeping up. They’re no longer promoting themselves no longer doing shows no longer doing ads. Because they were, they thought they could rest on their laurels. But the reality is that unless you stay at the forefront, you’re no longer going to sell. I heard from an artist who called me one day since you know, five years ago, 710 years ago, he says I was making so much money I was selling just I couldn’t believe it. And I said, Well, what are you doing now? Are you doing ads? No. Why? Why should I do ads? Everybody knows who I am. I said, are you doing shows Nice. Too much work. Everybody knows who I am. You know what, through the whole thing. And, and I said they forgotten you, you know there’s a thing called attrition. Right? So every year, a gallery loses 10% of their audience. Every year, artists loses 10% of their buyers, right? attrition. People die, people move people retire, people don’t buy paintings anymore. People get sick people change their tastes, you know, there’s a lot of things that happen. And so that’s 10% a year in 2008. When a bad economy happened, it was like 60% in one year, right? So you have to constantly be bringing new people in and galleries have to do that. And that’s why people keep advertising because you’re always bringing people in. You know, if you lay low for 10 years, you’re gonna feel it. You’re gonna feel it after a year, quite frankly, you feel it after six months I I have a very well known artist who, who advertised with us. And the discussion was, Well, I think I’ve been advertising a long enough time. I’m just going to stop and I said, Okay, that’s fine. Here’s what’s going to happen. Oh, no, that’ll never happen. Everybody knows who I am. I said, Okay. Six months later, phone rings. You’re right. phone stopped ringing gallery stopped calling sales stopped happening. I said right out of sight, out of mind. Anyway, those are some thoughts on galleries. Bottom line is you got to build your brand. You got to control your brand. You got to get invited. That’s best. Don’t just barge in. If you do decide you’re going to go that route, at least email call, try to get an appointment and explain to them the answers to those questions, why you’re a good investment, why they’re going to sell give them evidence. Let them watch you. And also make sure you’re producing the best possible work. You can you know, some of you are not gallery ready. And some of you think you are you know, it’s just something you’ve got to get advice from other people to find out. Anyway. It is today’s art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, shares creative strategies to sell online and ways to bring new business to you as an artist.

New in 2023: this podcast has been named one of the “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web.”

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 124 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
So there’s poetry in marketing you know, it’s it doesn’t need to be ugly, it doesn’t need to be manipulative. It doesn’t need to be awful you know, you’re not selling used cars, you’re selling beauty and if you can use your marketing to help people find you and and if they can find you, they can have the pleasure of having your artwork hanging around them. And so that’s why marketing is so important. So if you have questions for the art marketing minute, email me, [email protected]. And remember Feedspot just gave artmarketing.com A high marks top 25 Art Marketing podcast. Let’s strive for number one. Amandine, my producer, what is your first question?

Amandine
The first question is from Greg Mayer from Wisconsin. I am following your book as closely as possible. It is now time to set up a website. When doing so I plan to send original watercolors with an option to buy two different sizes of limited edition prints. What I’ve noticed is that many many artists may have a price listed for their original art, but they do not have a convenient way to purchase the art online when the potential buyer is interested. They add an extra step of contacting me to purchase this art or something similar? My question is, is there a compelling strategy or tactic behind this in art sales? Like negotiating the price? Or upselling? Or are they just too hesitant and don’t want to deal with managing technology? And online sales?

Eric Rhoads
Okay, well, Greg, thank you for that. Thanks for getting my book. Glad to see you taking action, glad to see that you’re paying attention. Action is the key to every problem, you know, and, and you just got to be proactive, and you’re being proactive. So I think that’s good. I can tell. Look, there are no right or wrong. Like painting, there really are no right or wrong. It’s about feel it’s about testing. I test everything. You know, what may work for you may not work for me, vice versa. So you have to test everything. There’s not a right or wrong, but I do have an opinion, because you know, usually I do. So just for kicks, when I was preparing for your question, I went on Amazon and I actually Googled, what is the most expensive thing for sale on Amazon. I was just curious. And what do you think the most expensive item would be? Well, turns out from what I found, it’s a rare one of a kind hockey card, kind of like a baseball card. That was $818,000. Just click here to purchase? Hmm. Yeah, you wonder if those things sell or they’re there just to create attention? I would imagine they sell. So imagine if every time that you decided you wanted to buy something from Amazon, you had to call them first. You go, oh, you know, I like this color wheel. Instead of clicking to buy, you have to call them first, would you do it? No, of course not. You wouldn’t do it, you would never buy anything. So there’s a big debate about this. And it goes something like this, an artist, or a gallery will say, Well, I don’t want to list the price because I need to talk to them first to find out if they’re a legitimate buyer. Or if they think the price is too high. I have to help them overcome their price objections on the phone. I think this kind of thinking is completely like antiquated. It’s 1920s thinking. It’s like the early days of the web. I had a friend who worked for a newspaper. And he started the websites for his newspapers, a major newspaper in America big name. And they said to him, don’t put the story on the website until the newspaper has been out for two hours. It’s like, Yeah, but we haven’t now and we can beat everybody to it. And no, you gotta wait for it to print overnight, and then it gets delivered. And then you know, and so like, he couldn’t make them change their minds. So he left them and went to somebody who would say, look, let’s put these stories out now. So that’s kind of antiquated thinking, right? It’s the same kind of thing. So I am sitting up at two o’clock in the morning, because I can’t sleep and I see an ad for your gallery or for your artwork in let’s say, in Fine Art connoisseur magazine, which I own. And you want to buy that painting or you want to learn more about the painting or something so you don’t want to wait till midnight to buy it I mean until daylight to buy it right. So I want it now I want to buy it now I don’t want to go to any effort. I want to buy it my change, my mood might change by morning, right? So this is called creating friction. Don’t make people think or work. Have a buy button have a buy this now button. You can explain the shipping or it is or isn’t included. Or you could say ally any purchase over a certain amount of money, you’re gonna have to wire the money if you’re worried about that. But quite frankly, if their credit card goes through, why do you worry? Then they have a way to buy it. You solve all their problems, don’t make them work. Because if you do, you’re going to increase the friction and you’re going to lose more sales than you gain. People are impulsive. Use that to your benefit. I if I’m watching a television show, and I google something, or I’ll see something I was watching a show the other night I saw something I thought well that’s cool. And I put I put it into Amazon and I flipped through and I found it and I bought it. You know if that had been the next day I would have never done that I would have not waited I would have forgotten about it. I would have lost interest. So I know this dealer no names. This dealer had a call me policy online. Now this was kind of early stage of internet, so I understand it. And he was dead set against the idea of a direct sale online. So I challenged him, I said, Listen, this is a stupid policy, no offense in the nicest possible way. You’re not stupid. It’s a stupid policy. And I said, you need to put the price of your expensive paintings on the on the website and have a buy now option. He said, I will never work, I got to talk to these people. I said, Look, just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s always going to be that way. So to his credit, he said, Well, I’ll test it. So he went in, and he put everything available online for sale, including some very expensive things a week went by, he did not get a single purchase. And so we talked. And he’s like, Oh, this isn’t working, you’re wrong. I said, just give it some time. Just hang in there. Let’s see what happens. A week later. He came in in the morning, and he found an order for a piece of art. Get this a piece of art, it was a piece of major sculpture from a major sculptor, it was $650,000. And the email up and he had put it on there, you have to wire the money, the email came in, that they had wired the money overnight, he had $650,000 in his account, because he had a buy now option, he would have never got that never would have gotten that or might not have gotten that anyway. And so you know, you’ve got to find a way people do not worry about that today. Now, there’s one thing that’s really, really important in this messaging, and that is, if I’m going to put my credit card in or if I’m going to wire money. And by the way, I don’t want to wire money. Because that’s too much friction. But if I’m going to put my credit card in, I need to know your legitimate. I need to know you’re not a scam. And that’s why you need to have things that are credibility builders and testimonials on your website. give people confidence. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this. But there’s a term called the term is con man. Do you know what con man stands for? Confidence man, they would build confidence with people so they could fraud them out of their money. Now you’re not a scam. But competence is important. You need it no matter what you’re doing. So you need to send things that show that you’re being trusted. So sell online direct be where your customers want to be, you cannot buy a Tesla by going into a dealership unless it’s a used car dealership. You can’t buy a Tesla by calling. You have to go online, you go in and you pick your colors. You pick everything, and you click the button and you put a deposit down. It takes 10 minutes to buy $120,000 car. Why would you make me go through something for a piece of art, that’s a fraction of that price? Probably. Now, don’t assume there’s a limit on prices online. If I’m a billionaire, and I have a platinum Amex card and I can buy a Bentley online, I should be able to buy a Sargent painting or a Rembrandt for millions. And if I know who I’m buying from if it’s a trusted source like Sotheby’s or Christie’s or bottoms or heritage. I’m not going to have a problem with that. All right, next question.

Amandine
The next question is from Gary from Minnesota. I have a prospecting question for you. Since we’re all basically in sales, we should be continually prospecting, as you say, stand in the water where the money is flowing. I have an idea to approach the high end homebuilding arena, upscale homes are in a nice river of flowing money. I’m connecting, I’m connected with a few artists and home builder here in town. They build big, beautiful homes with blank wells walls just begin from my artwork. My thought is, the contractors pride themselves on really getting to know their clients on a personal level. Many clients are art collectors, what a perfect personal gift it would be to purchase art from an artist to present at the final walkthrough of the home. Since it takes several months of or more to build the home. It could also be a good opportunity for commission work as well. My question is, how would you approach contractors for an idea like that Do you have a script or an outline for setting such a conversation?

Eric Rhoads
Gary, you’re a good student, you’re paying close attention. Thanks for reading my book, let me talk about the concept of the river. So everybody understands it. You don’t catch fish in a dry riverbed, I always say stand in the river where the money is flowing. Or the equivalent would be stand in the river where the fish are flowing a fish are customers in the art world, and all world’s rivers dry up, and new rivers flood. And what I mean is that, let’s say you’re in an area where business is booming, people have more money than ever imaginable, money’s flowing, you know, it’s 1980, again, and you need to be where the money is flowing. So, sometimes you have to move to a different river, you know, like, the money could be flowing. So let’s use an example. I don’t know if it’s a relevant example, I’m just kind of making this up. But let’s say you live in Silicon Valley, and everybody in Silicon Valley is just flush with cash, everybody’s making money, there’s tons of jobs, everything’s happening, people are buying everything, right. They’re just buying lots of stuff. So if that’s where the money is flowing, then I want to be in an art gallery where the money’s flowing, or I want to be an art gallery, where they’re going, you know, if they’re going to why I want to be in that art gallery, right. But six months later, there could be a crash in that sector and people getting laid off and massive layoffs and nobody’s spending, maybe the billionaires are spending. But do you give up? No, you move to a different river, you might keep that river, keep fishing there, but you move to a different river. So what if all the rivers dry up while they never do? Even in the past recessions, I had a friend at a New York gallery, he said, you know, the billionaires are still buying paintings, they’re just not spending as much on paintings. They’ll only spend 50, or $100,000 instead of $500,000. Okay, so he had to adapt, he had to have a lot of $50,000 paintings, people who have money, still have it add in recessions. There are people who get really, really rich. Not everybody is struggling. And not every community is struggling, some parts of the country are fine. Some people spend crazy money. And so you know, there’s like, there’s a movie, I can’t think of the name of it. But it’s about the wealthy people, and how they live in China. And these mansions in these Bentley’s and fancy cars and fancy art, and they’re spending money. So you know, one of the places where the river is flowing in money is China. Right? So how do you get yourself into that river? How do you stand in that river? How do you get there? So I like the creative thinking that you’re you’re coming up here with Gary, and I think you’ve got a great idea. I think it’s not a new idea. But I think you’ve got a new twist on it. So let’s say that, first off, there’s an old marketing principle principle, it’s Zig when others zag. So if everybody else is standing in this river, you know, how do you get? How do you get the fish, when you go up river before the fish get to them, you know, a more inconvenient spot, you have to work harder, you have to work differently. You Zig when others are zagging. You don’t want to be in the same place everybody else is, right. So you know, if you’re in if there’s a millions of fish in the river, and there’s 5000 people fishing for him, you’re not going to get as many fish. But if you go up river, you’re going to be all alone. So you want to be upstream, you want to be standing in a different place, so to speak. So I’ve advised some artists to do this exact thing. And here’s exactly how to do it. First off, study your market and the builders. The level of cost matters because if it’s $100,000 House versus a million dollar house versus a $10 million house is a big difference. And so you talk to some builders and you ask their advice. Don’t try to sell them right now. Just say how much do you spend you give gifts to homebuyers? How much do you spend on that? What do you give them? What have you done in the past? What do people love? What do they not love? Trying to understand your marketplace. Understand the level of spend, you know, some will do $100 gift basket. That’s a whole lot different than a $2,000 painting. Once you’ve identified your prospects, figure out who your best prospect is, and have a painting delivered to that owner of that company. In gift wrap, the big beautiful bow around it beautiful, elegant gift wrap with a note attached. And it says in the note, dear Mrs. Builder, I’ve been studying new home developments in the area and have chosen you because of the quality of your work and your design. I’ve taken the time to visit homeowners in your community to find out about their art preferences. And I’d like to give you this painting as my gift. And I’d like to propose a meeting no more than 20 minutes. So I can show you how I can help you stand out over all the homeowners in the area and sell more houses and create buzz. And you can keep the painting no matter whether you take the meeting or not. I painted it just for you. But I would love for you to take the meeting, I’m going to show you how you can explode your business even more. Now, if you really have your act together, then you’ll actually find out where the builder lives and do a painting of his or her house and send that to him, that’s going to really get their attention. Because you know, not everybody likes what you’re going to paint. But they’re all going to like what you’re going to paint if it’s of their house. Now, there’s a couple of things going for you here. First one is the law of reciprocity. If I give something to you, you’re gonna feel obligated to give something back to me. So I give you a painting, I’m probably going to feel obligated to give you a meeting, right? I’m not going to maybe nothing more than that. But I’ll probably give you the meeting. So here’s what you do. You go in you say listen, I have a lot of big corporations that buy my paintings as retirement gifts. Now I have friends who have this happening. And my friend, I can’t mention the company because he asked me not to. But there’s a big corporation in his town, he went and did exactly this, he sent a painting to the CEO of the Corporation. And he said, This is my gift to you. And I want to show you how you can use paintings as retirement gifts. People love them. And so this company, as 30, or 40 people retire a year, and every single one of them at an executive level gets a painting with a little plaque on it say, you know, to Bob and Mary, thanks for 30 years of working at a company X will remember you always and you know signed James Jones, the CEO of the company, right? So that, you know, he’s leaving them with a nice memory and nice gift. People love it. People love it. And no, of course words travels to other employees. So you could say, you know, I do this for corporations, if you do, we can do the same thing, somebody buys a house, they get a painting with a little plaque with your builder name on it. So it says to camera commemorate the roads, new home at 123 Green Street, presented by XYZ homes. All right, that little plaque goes on that painting. And you hand it to them when they turn over the house. So imagine how it feels to a customer, you say this to the client. Imagine how they feel when they close on a house and you hand them a wrap box. And you say I want to thank you for your business and congratulate you on your new home. Now you don’t have to have them open it in front of you. But when they open it, they find a painting of the new home that they bought. And you’ve done it in advance. And then they say to you, Hey, listen, you might stay in this home forever, or you might move on and a few years, but you’re always going to remember it with this painting. That is so cool. Now, here’s the other thing I have taken, I’m the home builder, I’ve taken the liberty of emailing you an image of the painting, and with the artists name and contact information. So you can post it on social media and say, Hey, here’s our new home. Here’s a painting of our new home. And here is a beautiful gift box with 50 note cards with a picture a painting of your house on the cover. And on the back. It says you know the new so and so home at 5311 Indiana Avenue. That’s my old address. And and you know, built by just so and so builders, right so now they’re sending cards to their friends, thank you cards, they’re sending invitations to their parties, because what do people do when they buy a new house? They have parties and they invite their friends and their friends get to see the new house and they get to talk. They see the painting and they’re going to talk about the painting. How do they get them in the house they send them an invitation on the painting card right? They put the image on the cards and so when you send a note cards, your names on it, the builders names on it your names on the painting, you’re creating buzz and your career getting more customers because they now want to deal with somebody like, you know, I visited a new home of a friend. And everybody was buzzing about the new flat screen TV, which was a big deal in those days because nobody had them, the real estate agent had bought them a new TV for their new house. And everybody’s like buzzing about this real estate agent. And they, they contacted that real estate agent we did, we contacted that real estate agent to list our house, right. So that’s a really cool thing you could do. Now, you could also do just paintings, instead of customized paintings. But you’ll have a higher likelihood of this being successful if you do paintings of their new house. Second thing you can do is you can say listen, I would also like to decorate your models with my paintings, no charge as many paintings as you need. For however long you need them, all I want you to do is to have a small sign somewhere that says they’re my paintings. And, and of course, if you’re giving away paintings, I’d like to be able to send a note to them about you know, congrats on their new house, and congrats on my new painting that way, maybe they’ll buy more paintings from me. And, or you could say when they close on the house and you you could say come into the model, and pick out any painting you want. And I’ll give it to you as my gift to you. That’s another option. And of course, then the builder pays you for whatever they picked out. So it’s a way of selling paintings. You can have your little art show there your QR code and people can instant purchase. You know if they see your work when they’re going through house. Most people who go through house don’t buy a house. But you know, my wife and I are always going through houses just for entertainment. We see paintings we like we take pictures of them. Wouldn’t it be cool if we bought something people will do that? Anyway, this has been a really great discussion. I think it’s been a lot of fun, Greg, and congratulations on that. I want to hear the results and we’ll feature it in the future when you tell us. Okay, these have been good questions today. Fun stuff. That is today’s art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art,  addresses the practice of comparing yourself to other artists and overcoming the fear of being judged; and his thoughts on making the leap to becoming a professional artist.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 123 >

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FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
If you want to make a great living as an artist, you need to listen to this. You know, I don’t have all the answers. But I have spent my life learning marketing and like most of us didn’t know anything about it until I learned it. And I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of very expensive mistakes. And so my goal is to share some of that with you, and to help you with your career. So if you have questions, email them to me, [email protected]. Or you can do video upload if you want to as well. We’d love to see that. Amandine, my producer is going to read the first question.

Amandine
The first question is from Jenna Boyz from North Carolina. It is not exactly a marketing question. But it is a question that you do receive a lot. How do I overcome the fear of being judged? Comparing myself to others?

Eric Rhoads
Well, Jenna, get a therapist. Next question. No, no, wait, just here’s my take on this. Because your head has everything to do with your art marketing. Oh, I’ll take this on. But you know, if you have deeper issues, go see a professional. I am not a professional. I went through this and mostly overcame it. I have some of those issues. Still. I’ll explain in a minute. One day artists, Michael Ringer was visiting me at the Adirondacks and a really great painter, really great guy, very, very high level at the time and higher now. And we were kind of walking through the house and I had a lot of paintings out and I you know, he’d stop and look at a painting and we’d move on but I was, you know, I would make excuses for things once in a while. So when he was leaving, he said, Eric, do you mind if I just give you a little bit of feedback? I said, Sure. What is it? And he said, every painting we walked by that you created, you apologized for it? He said stop it. Just stop it. He said you’re doing good work. You’re where you should be. You’re gonna get better and except where you are, except the fact that you are gonna grow and stop making apology for your work, you just have to understand that this is where you are at the moment. And if you’re comparing yourself to me, Hey, I went through this too. So that was one of the sweetest most considerate things anybody’s ever done for me to actually take the time to say something to me about that. So I caught myself. Four years after that, I would start to make an excuse, you know, somebody be walking by a painting, I’d say, oh, I need to redo that. Or oh, I don’t like the clouds over. Oh, you know, you know, I wish I were better and, and I just would bite my tongue and stop it. And it felt better when I bit my tongue. And I got to the point where he stopped making excuses. Most of the time, once in a while, I will still do it. But I have to catch myself and stop doing it. I look. We all started out. We all did paintings we didn’t love we we have to look at each painting as progress. We’re learning something from each painting, you know, not every painting is going to be perfect. By the way not every painting, every artist who’s well known is perfect. You know, you’ve just got to get the practice, you know, Kevin McPherson talks about, you know, go out and paint 100 plein air painting small ones in 30 minutes or less just to get practice. So you just got to stop the negative self talk, you got to stop apologizing. And I looked this up just curious. I went to Psychology Today. And they said this measuring yourself against others is modus operandi of the human mind. And in some ways, it can be helpful. The inspiration you feel about someone else’s achievements can either rev you up to improve your own life. Or the recognition that your abilities are a notch above someone else can actually give you a boost your self esteem. But comparisons can be harmful when they leave you feeling chronically inferior or depressed. People aren’t uniformly at risk of negative social comparison. Surprisingly, those with low self esteem are more likely to feel that they don’t stack up. When we’re relying on others for our sense of self only feeling good if we get positive feedback or markers of status. We’re at risk for depression. So let that be a lesson go get a therapist, if that’s the case. But look, the worst that can happen is that you are judged. I mean, if you enter an art show what happens, you’re judged, and you’re judged fairly or unfairly or badly or good. But you’re judged. If you compare yourself to other artists, you know, who are you comparing yourself, you’re comparing yourself to Rembrandt or to Edgar Payne or to somebody at that level? How do we ever get there in our lifetimes? Some people do, some people don’t. But, you know, are you comparing yourself to Monet? You’re comparing yourself to another painter and your friend group. Who are you painting comparing yourself to? I sat up and painted two different times next to Richard Schmidt, the great artist, one time was in the garden, and I sat up next to him, so I could watch him paint, but I he wouldn’t let me watch. You wouldn’t want me just watch him paid. He said, You got to paint. And I want to see what you’re doing. Well, there’s nothing like pressure like that. And sometimes that pressure is good, because I felt like I really did for myself at the time a pretty decent painting. I look back now and maybe it wasn’t good. And then another time I painted a portrait standing right behind beside him, are behind him. And I was kind of monitoring what he did. And I do what he did and, and then he came up to me afterwards. He said, I know you’re such a good artist. And that was a nice compliment. And and while I said Well, it’s because I copied every brushstroke. He said nonsense, you were able to pull this off. It’s really nice. So you know, I was a little reluctant to let him see it to let him do it. But I did it and you got to put yourself out there and what I find I get a wonderful opportunity to paint with a lot of artists and I find that it can be intimidating, but what I do is I do not go look at their work while I’m painting. They may come over and look at mine I don’t go look at theirs because here’s what happens I’ll go oh, I liked the way they did that lead in and then I’ll come back and change my painting and that’s the kiss of death you don’t want to do that. So I just you know I will look at their work afterwards once I’m done but I don’t do it in the meantime. And I think that you know sometimes comparison is a real good thing it drives you you know when you know there’s a good painter next you I had some buddies of painting this past summer I wanted to really pull up my best because I wanted to look good right i That’s not unusual, but nobody was critical and and you know once in a while somebody come up say hey, I’ve got some ideas for you or some Sometimes I go up to them and I say, I’ve got some ideas for you, you know, we can all see things in other people’s work that we can’t see in ourselves. So help strive to be better, you know, try to set yourself to a new standard to get to a higher level. But don’t worry about it. Don’t compare yourself to others in a negative way, embrace it. As an artist, you are unique. You’re a unique individual, embrace yourself, embrace your struggle, embrace the hard work to get better. And know that people that are better than you went through this, they struggled, they did paintings, they weren’t happy with their painting stuff. And they probably compare themselves to others at the time, too. It’s a real natural thing. It’s okay, unless it’s hurting you in some way. You know, for instance, if you decided to stop painting, because you felt so bad about what you were doing, that’s just stupid. Alright, so I was in the studio the other day, and I messed up a painting I’ve been working on for two years, a big painting. And, you know, I had, I got a little too bold, and I was tired, and I started making some big mistakes. And I really screwed up this painting. So I wiped all the paint that I had just done down. Well, thankfully, of course, the dry painting underneath it was still there. And what ended up happening is that paint smeared, created this incredible atmosphere. And then what I did is I was just able to wipe out parts of it with my paper towel and retain some of the parts that I wanted. And then I painted on top of that, and I ended up doing one of the best paintings I’ve ever done. So you know, it’s gonna happen, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have mistakes, and sometimes mistakes lead to better things. Don’t beat yourself up, manage yourself, talk, treat yourself with respect, you would not tell someone else that they’re painting was awful. Don’t tell yourself that your paintings awful. Just tell yourself, look, I can do better. That’s fine, I will get better. This is their learning experience. I know that every artist, even the best ones, have messed things up from time to time. That’s part of the deal. Just deal with it. All right, next question.

Amandine
The next question is from Richard Mark Stone. Sorry about that from Colorado. For people with successful non artistic jobs, careers, who would love to make art for a living, but are fearful? What would you say to them?

Eric Rhoads
Okay, so what would I say to somebody who is not an artist but thinks that they’re already successful? They think that they would like to become a successful artist, I’d say go for it, go for it. This is kind of like head trash day, right? That we’re dealing with the heads. Why be fearful rich? Let me ask you this. If you decided to switch careers, I don’t know what you do for a living. Let’s say that you’re a woodworker. And that you decide you want to become a fireman? Would you fear becoming a fireman? Or you might a little bit What do you fear? Really, you fear the unknown you fear? Because you don’t know what you don’t know. But mostly, you would simply tell yourself, look, I don’t know this, but I can get trained on it. And once I’m trained on it, I can practice it once I practice it, I’m gonna get good at and you’re gonna apply for a job and you’re gonna get a job as a fireman, right? Well, what’s the difference really, as an artist, it’s no different. Except you’re not applying for a job because you’re self employed all the sudden. So what you might fear is quitting your existing job to become an artist when you’re unproven. Not knowing if you have the ability to paint or sculpt what you do, it’s just a matter of time, and not knowing if you can sell your work. So in my art marketing videos, and what I have often taught at the convention, plein air convention is, I often talk about being practical, practical about these things. In other words, you know, if you decide you want to quit your job and become an artist, you know, you’re it’s gonna take you some time to learn to be an artist and to get good. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take you everybody’s different. But let’s say it takes you five years, you don’t want to quit your job. And let’s say you have a job and a good job and you’re learning to be an artist and you have to take the time to do that while you have your job. And then you don’t want to just say okay, now I’m good at it are good at being an artist. I think now I’ll go start selling my paintings. Don’t quit your job. The goal is get used to painting, get used to selling paintings, get some proof that your stuff is going to sell consistently. And then get to a level of income that you’re comfortable even though you’re working hard because you’re really working two jobs now. Get to a level where you’re comfortable and that you know you can reproduce that level of sales month after month after month after month. And once you’ve proven it for six months or a year, if that’s when you want to quit your job. Maybe don’t do it. Maybe go to part time say okay you know I’m going to a friend of mine did this friend of mine was a physicist is Brilliant painter, and he had a good job. But he said, Okay, I’m gonna go to, I’m gonna start taking a quarter of my time off from work and then putting that towards painting. And then after a while it was half of my time. And then after a while, it was three quarters of my time. And eventually he stopped the one job by the time he got the other one go. And he was making plenty of money doing 3040 workshops a year, making, you know, making bank and so he was stable. And that’s what you want to go for is you want to be stable. So anyway, if you have the passion to become an artist, don’t tell yourself that you don’t have the talent or the skills that’s crazy. Everybody can do this, you just have to learn it, you have to get taught I have trained for my company has trained hundreds of 1000s of people through our our video library called paint tube.tv. We have trained millions of people, or at least a million people on the art school live daily on YouTube, we have taught a lot of people to paint who didn’t think they could, who figured it out because they got the proper training. You know, doing it on your own is okay, a lot of people are self taught, but you can burn a lot of time. That way you can speed it up and you get somebody good to teach you if you can get a good local instructor. That’s the best way. You get good national instruction, good workshops, good videos, things like that, that’s going to make a difference. And then get good at learning to sell and learning to market yourself. Those are critical parts of the process. Well, this has kind of been head trash day, so I guess I should be getting $100 an hour for each of these. Next patient. Okay, look, you’re your head is your worst enemy. And it’s also your best friend. Your brain wants to default to the negative, it’s natural. But you have to stop it. You have to constantly tell yourself that’s not like me. I am not a negative thinker. I am not going to think negatively. I’ve got some great books to recommend they’re classics, they’re really still true. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, psycho cybernetics maxwell maltz. Unleash the Power Within Tony Robbins go to a Tony Robbins event. It’s not what you think it is. It’s not all positive thinking. There’s a lot of science behind it. I’ve been to a couple of them, they’ve been very helpful to me. Look, we’ll put links to those in the show notes. But take time to learn how to become a positive thinker. You know, your body reacts to your thoughts. And your body or your mind finds what your thoughts are saying. If you say it looks like it’s gonna rain, you’re gonna find rain. If you say it looks like it’s gonna be a beautiful day you’re gonna find a beautiful day. Now I you know, you’re not going to change the weather. But the if you get the point here is you’ve got to look for the positive spin on everything. You can’t be telling yourself you can’t do this. You can do this, you know, you just don’t know how. All right, anyway. Your mindset controls your success. These are things that will control the course of your future and your action and help you become what you want to be. Little prayer never hurts either, too. Okay. That’s today’s psychology minute. I mean, art marketing.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, shares thoughts on submitting art to virtual galleries; and how to price your art.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 122 >

Click here to listen to the Art Marketing Minute!

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What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
You can send your questions by email to [email protected]. Or you can send a video question artmarketing.com/questions. All right. My producer Amandine is going to give us the first question.

Amandine
The first question is from John Tez from Georgia. I explore many galleries online and see they accept submissions virtually. Has your usage Do you believe those are taken? And as an emerging artist, Is it professional to apply to multiple? I know the best way to get in is being invited. So is applying virtually a good option worth devoting time to? Two different known galleries from overseas averaged out to feature my artwork, but required that I ship it. Is that the industry standard? And do you think the exposure is worth the exponential logistics? How would I verify that this is a legitimate gallery and not a scam?

Eric Rhoads
All right. Well, that was a great question. John Tez. I’ve got some opinions on this. They’re probably wrong. But first off, when galleries are saying they have they accept submissions online, I question that. Now, I think that there is a reason they might do it. And one of the reasons they might do it is because they’re trying to keep you from calling them emailing them or showing up at the door. Because most of the gallery owners I know, absolutely hate that. Because, you know, if they had 100 artists show up a year, and it took 10 minutes each or 20 minutes each, you know, they’d never get anything else done. I have a gallery owner who told me that he gets 150 to 200 emails a month. And he doesn’t even open them and look at him, if he can tell what it is he gets that many or more packages, unsolicited, they, you know, they have to open them because they don’t know what’s in the packages. And then they’re just throwing them away. If they’re a good gallery, they have plenty of artists. And every good gallery is always looking for another and maybe the idea of having submissions is good. But most of it’s probably just to kind of make you not call or email, I will tell you that there are a lot of galleries out there that operate differently, they have a different model. A lot of galleries operate, most of the galleries operate on a consignment model, where they pick artists invite them in, and they keep a certain percentage of the work in exchange for selling it. I you know, for instance, you know, a standard for a lot of galleries is is they keep 50% of the markup price, which is legitimate because they’re doing all the heavy lifting the work in the marketing, the lighting, the salespeople, the phone calls, you know, everything that goes with it, they’re earning their keep, usually, not always but you know, there are galleries out there that will look for artists that they can prey upon. And prey upon they do we have one particular gallery no names, who, every time an artist appears in our magazine, in a story in an ad anything, they pick up the phone, and they say we want you in a special gallery show in our in our gallery, and the artist gets all excited. And then next thing you know, they’re saying, Well, you know, it’s only this much money to be able to do that. And some of them do it. And some of them have given us feedback that it hasn’t been terribly productive. You know, usually, if somebody’s going to do a show of your work, they’re going to do a show of your work, because you’re already fairly established, you have a brand branding has a lot to do with everything. And you know, it’s like nobody really wants a brand new startup artist. You know, you don’t want to hear that because it’s easier to sell somebody who’s established. Now once in a while, they’ll take a chance and they you know, legitimate galleries do that too. But there’s got to be some good indicators of success, I believe, for that to happen. So I think you know, there’s a lot of different things now you asked a question about shipping going overseas. First off, how do you know it’s a legitimate gallery? I got a call or an email from somebody one time. This was not about my artwork, but they said, Yeah, no, we, we want you to be an influencer on Instagram, you got all these followers and, and we’re going to pay you for doing some ads. And I kept saying no to everybody, I get 10 of those a month. And for some reason, this guy got my attention, he got me on the phone, he did a pitch, he showed me a website, it was very, very in depth, it was very credible. And I ended up signing with him so to speak, turning over control of my account, right then and there. So they could do the first thing. And they took it over and took it away from me. Luckily, because I spent a quarter million dollars a year or more in Facebook at that time, I was able to get to Facebook and get their attention to get my account back real quickly. But you know, there are galleries out there, there are people out there contact you all the time that are going to say, hey, you know, it’s my wife’s anniversary, and I want to buy something nice. I saw your art and you know, they, they legitimately pretend to be buying it, you ship it out. But you know, the check doesn’t clear etc, that there are galleries out there who would do the same thing I want to put you in my gallery that might have a fake website, and then you ship them a painting? Well, my question is, do you need it hanging in the gallery? You’re going to sell it online and you’re going to feature it, I would legitimately look into a gallery? How do you look into a gallery? First off, you know, Google search it ask around, look for reviews, look for the artists that are in the gallery and find out if any of those artists happened to be willing to talk to you and tell you if it’s legit, did they get paid? Are they selling work, etc. So there’s a lot of things like that you need to be watching out for, you know, you can submit artwork to anybody and I, I you know, I don’t want to discourage everything, I just think it’s best to get invited because then you’re not begging. And then you’re in a strong position. But also because the gallery really truly wants you. They’re gonna work hard to sell, you know, if you’re pushing yourself on somebody, they may or may not push you on somebody else to try and get you to sell. So there’s a lot of little nuances to it all that I’m sure there’s exceptions to every real, every, every situation. So, anyway. That’s kind of the gallery thing. Next question.

Amandine
The next question is from Linda, Lydia, from Burg Virginia. The questions the most frequently comes up, especially with new artists is how do you decide how to price your art?

Eric Rhoads
Lydia, Lydia, Lydia, it’s the biggest question everybody asked us the hardest thing to answer. I don’t know. I mean, I have some feel for it. I’ve done it. I have coached people. Some of it has succeeded. Some of it is not. Pricing is all over the map. First off, pricing is a mental issue. What you have in your head as your value is your been a beginning point. And some of you have an inflated value in your head. That’s unrealistic. And some of you have a value in your head that’s too low. So you got to be thinking about that. Everybody has to start somewhere. Usually, you start modestly. If it sells, you start where you sell some more in this start building a collector base and you grow it that’s what galleries are really good at a good gallery will answer the question for you because they’re going to say, here’s what I think I can get for this. Now. I had a gallery who I believed How can I say this without getting into trouble? I believe they were underpricing my work. And I wanted to be more expensive and they would not agree to it. I was able to prove to them that I could get that amount of money and sell a painting at a higher price. And that convinced them but ultimately, they gotta believe it if they’re going to sell it. So that has a lot to do with a bit pricing. You know, if you got a good gallery trust the gallery if you’re selling direct, then you know there’s a lot of different things first off research, comparable artworks. Now the problem with that, of course is what’s comparable, you know, is an eight by 10 painting by Richard Schmid comparable. No. Why? Because it’s by Richard Schmid. Right. So before pricing, your work, research similar works and your genre your style, see what people are getting for it, check the prices, you know, some subject matters sell better than others. I know that seems crazy, but it’s true. Similar things you know, look for things that have sold find artists who are equivalent to You Be realistic, and see what they’re selling for and then Study? Do they have a big brand or not? You know, are they promoting themselves heavily? And because brand makes all the difference in pricing? You know, why is a Bentley a whole lot more money than a BMW, right? Well, it’s a perception issue, mostly, you know, you’re gonna say its quality, and there is some difference. But the reality is, back when I studied this, it’s been a few years. But back when I studied it, the difference to build BMW versus a Bentley on the same chassis was 18 $20,000 difference, but the price differentiation was 100, or $200,000. More. So you know, it’s about perception, a perception of, of a lot of things, elegance, and so on. So consider your experience, your reputation, your brand, that has to be factored into your pricing, if you’re well known. That’s one thing, if you’re emerging, that’s another it’s more appropriate to start with a lower price. More experienced artists are more likely to get bigger prices. But I got to tell you, I know experienced artists, who are brilliant painters who have not kept their brand alive and can’t get the prices they used to get. And they don’t understand that one guy called me said, Eric, why is my painting not selling anymore? I said, Well, are you doing the things that made you successful? He said, Yeah, I’m doing them all. I said, are Have you done any shows in the last five years? No, I haven’t done those. They’re a hassle. I said, Have you advertised in the last five years, he’s now now now everybody knows who I am. I said really? Well, you know, 10% of the people as attrition every year 10% of the people who know you don’t know you, in a year, five years from now, 10 years from now, nobody knows you. Five years from now half of the people that knew you don’t know you anymore. And you wonder why your works not selling because you’re not advertising you’re not, you’re not promoting yourself, you’re resting on your past your laurels. You’ve also got to factor in things like the production cost, the cost of the canvas, the materials, the frame, the time calculate how much money that went into each piece. And you know, I know an artist who gets a very large price for his money. When I asked how he gets it, he said, Well, I factored in, I could do this many paintings a year. And this is how much money I need. I divided it equally, you know, I could do this many paintings. And so that’s how he said his price. It works for some people. But he also had a big brand. And so he’s getting, you know, 100 $200,000 for pieces. Also, you know, you got to factor in the price per inch, you know, there’s ways you can figure that out. But you’ve got to have realistic prices, and prices are all very emotional. Every decision and purchases are emotional. And sometimes a low price equates to low quality. And I’ve told this story on here many times about a woman who came to an art show, she said, How much is the painting they artists at 4000. She said I’ll take it, she writes a check for 40,000. He says no, ma’am, that’s 4000, not 40. And she ripped up the checks, it must, must not be any good. So price does have an impact on perception. You increase your prices over time. You know, if you study pricing, there’s some great books on pricing. If you study how companies launch products, some people launch products at a high price. And if it doesn’t sell they back off until it does sell and that becomes their price. Others start at low and if it sells too easily, they move it up faster and up and up and up. So there’s a lot of different things. It’s experimentation is practice. You’ve got to communicate value and pricing your work, you’ve got to communicate the value of the uniqueness of the piece, the time that went into it, the value of your brand, etc. And I know painters who will charge more for one nine by 12 painting than another nine by 12 painting because this one took them two hours or four hours and this one took him took him 60 hours. So you know, it’s just kind of depends. And of course you have the opportunity in some cases to negotiate with buyers. And negotiation is a really great fluid tool. Because if if they want to buy something from you, but truly the price is too high. I start by saying hey, you know, that’s the price I’m sorry. And if sometimes they’ll say okay, and sometimes they’ll walk away and you know, you might be able if you’re willing you say okay, well you know what would you be willing to pay and then you try to find a middle ground, something that works for everybody. Don’t forget that pricing is emotional. Now the other thing I want to just tell you this is not about pricing, but it’s about average sale price and that is McDonald’s, you drive through the drive thru what are they always say? Do you want fries with that? Right? And why do they say that? Because they know If they can get everybody a drive thru to buy fries or to up up upsell to a different package, they’re going to make more money on it. So when you sell a painting, it’s the best time to get another painting sold because somebody is into you, they’re into your painting. And you can easily say, if it’s true to you, you can say, hey, you bought this painting, I have a rule that because anybody buys a painting for me, they’ll buy the second and third painting at a 20% discount. Here are two would you be interested in these? Or pick one of these five, and oftentimes, you’ll have an upsell and that’s an opportunity. Anyway, that is the art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.