Cold calls: what do you actually put in the email?
I'm asking this because I'm bad at it. Sent one last month, three sentences, two images, a line about what it's made of and how much it weighs. Never heard back. Not upset about it, that's the norm, but I don't know if it was the length or the fact I mentioned the weight.
So. When you email a gallery cold, what's in it? How many images, how many words, do you put a price in the first email or not.
Mine: nothing over 150 words, dimensions and material, no price until they ask. Tell me I'm wrong.
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The weight isn't what lost it, and neither is three sentences. Most cold emails go unanswered because the gallery can't place you in one glance, not because of the length.
What I'd want in the first paragraph is the thing that makes the decision easy: what tradition or context the work sits in, and one line of credentials that says someone else has already vetted it. "Botanical watercolour, [school or teacher], shown at X, Y" does more than a paragraph of description. A gallery is asking two questions, whether it fits the wall and whether it will sell, and neither of those is answered by material and weight alone. Weight I'd keep for a follow-up, it's a shipping detail, useful once they're interested.
Your word count is about right. Two images is right, and one of them should be a full sheet with a bit of air around it rather than a cropped detail, so they can see how you compose. Price: I'd leave it out of the first email but be ready to give it immediately, not to deflect. Galleries read hesitation around price as uncertainty about the work.
One thing worth checking is whether the gallery takes unsolicited submissions at all. A good number of the ones worth approaching state their process on the site, and an email that ignores it reads as someone who hasn't looked. That alone explains a lot of silence, and it's the cheap thing to fix.
I understand the credential point, but it makes me uneasy. Half the people making the most honest work I know have no school behind them and nothing on a wall yet. If the first paragraph has to be a pedigree, then the letter is doing the gallery's job for it, which is deciding fast rather than looking. Maybe what "places you in one glance" can just as easily be a sentence of what the work is and where it comes from. My tradition is the Atlantic and a father who fished it, and that has never fit neatly into a line of credentials anyway.
You're not wrong to be uneasy, but I think we're talking past each other. "Places you in one glance" doesn't mean pedigree. It means the gallery knows what pile to put you in so they can decide whether to keep reading. A fisherman's son working in the Atlantic tradition does place you, fast, if you say it. What kills an email is ambiguity, not lack of schooling.
I have no degree either. My line was "apprenticed under X, stone and steel, twenty years of fabrication before I showed anyone." That's not a credential, it's a fact about the work. Yours is the same thing.
It's not a pedigree contest. It's a sorting problem. Galleries get fifty of these a week and they sort before they look. Give them something to sort on that isn't a lie about who you are.
Fair enough, and the "place you in one glance" part lands. But I'd push back on credentials doing the work. I have no school and no gallery history, so if that's the first paragraph I've got nothing to write. What I do have is thirty years of fabrication and a body of work that's been standing outside in weather for a decade.
The weight line was me trying to give them that physical reality without a photo doing it. Maybe that's the wrong instinct for an email. But I'd rather be placed by what the thing is than by who taught me.