Do you email galleries or walk in with the portfolio? I did both and only one got an answer

Right, settle this for me because I've had two very different experiences and I'm still not sure which was the fluke.

First gallery that ever showed my linocuts, I walked in off the street. No appointment, no email, just a folder of prints under my arm and a fair bit of neck. The woman behind the desk was mid-something, clearly not in the mood, and I near talked the ear off her about a hare. She gave me four minutes and a "leave the folder, we'll ring you." I thought I'd blown it. She rang me eleven days later.

Since then I've sent maybe nine or ten properly composed emails with the website link and the nice photographs and the polite paragraph about my practice, and I've had two replies. One of them was a no.

So my honest theory is the walking in did more for me than every tidy email since, and I'm not sure if that's because of the neck or because a print you can actually hold does something an attachment can't. Could also just be I write a desperate email.

What's yours? Did you get in the door by emailing, walking in, or the third thing nobody admits to, which is knowing somebody? And if you're an emailer, tell me what you put in the subject line because mine are clearly being eaten alive.

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Gloria Mae Jackson·1w

Child, that four minutes probably did more than all ten emails. I've been sewing most of my life and it took a long while for anybody with a gallery wall to look at my work, but the ones who did, they wanted to put a hand on the cloth. You can't do that through a website. Your hare story is exactly it. She could hear you cared, and that's the thing a folder in an inbox can't carry.

Now I won't say email is a waste, some folks do prefer it tidy. But if it's not working after nine or ten tries, I'd trust what already worked once. Walk in again. Just time it better than mid-something. 🙂

Niall DohertyOP·1w

Ah you're right about the cloth, and it's the same with paper. A photo of a print flattens the whole thing, you can't see where the gouge dug or the bit of ink left sitting proud on the surface. Sure half what I sell is people picking one up and doing that thing where they hold it up to the light and run a thumb along the edge.

The "time it better" bit is the hard part though. I've no notion when a gallery is mid-something. I'm half tempted to just lurk outside one for a morning and see when the tea goes on, that's usually the sign the panic is over. 🙂

Karen Wessel·1w

I'd guess the walk-in wasn't a fluke exactly, it's that she actually got to see the prints in her hands and hear you talk about the hare. I've done a couple of local fairs and the pieces that sold were always the ones where I stood there and talked about them. A website is a nice thing to look at but it doesn't put anything in front of a person. That said I'd never have the nerve to just turn up with a folder, so fair play to you. Did any of the ten emails ever come back at all, or was it all silence?

Niall DohertyOP·1w

That's it exactly, the thing in the hands business. A print under glass on a screen is a photo of a print. In the hand it's got weight and a bit of bite off the paper and you can see where the gouge went in. Can't email that.

On your question: of the ten, four came back and three of those were the same "not taking submissions at the moment" line word for word, which I'd say is a template they keep in a drawer. One was a real reply from a small place out the county, said she liked the heron but she was booked two years out and to try again. I did try again, and got silence that time. So it's not that emails don't work, it's that they work about as often as a decent day in February.

Fair play on the fairs though, that's the same muscle as the walk-in. You've more nerve than you're letting on if you can stand at a stall all day and talk to strangers about your work.