My Instagram bio says "commissions open." I have not taken a commission in nine months.
I finally sat down and looked at where last year's sales actually came from. Three paintings, all three to people who had seen the work in person first: one at a two-day botanical illustration symposium in Asheville, two through my open studio weekend in October.
Not one sale came from anything I posted. Not one.
Meanwhile I've spent a year learning how to shoot vertical video, which I am not good at and do not enjoy, and I'm reasonably sure I've converted the account into an audience of people who like watching paint dry in the literal sense. They came for the process and they are not buyers. That's not a complaint about them. It's a complaint about me not noticing for twelve months.
What I have not worked out is whether the online thing is genuinely wasted effort or just too slow to measure, and I suspect nobody can actually tell me. The symposium cost me a table fee, four nights in a hotel, and a week of framing, and it paid for itself in the first hour.
I'm keeping the account. I've stopped pretending it's a shop.
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Honestly this tracks with everything I've seen. People don't buy from a screen, they buy from standing in front of the thing and feeling something they can't get from a photo. I've sold almost nothing off posts and almost everything off the two open studio weekends I've done. The process videos get the most likes and the least money, every single time.
Which isn't me saying quit posting. It's that you built an audience of process-watchers and that's a different crowd than buyers, and no amount of shooting vertical video is gonna convert one into the other. Nine months is a long time to grind at something you hate for zero return. I'd put that energy into one more open studio or a local show instead and let the feed just stay the feed. The people who saw your work in person already told you where the sales are.
Process videos get the likes because watching someone make a thing is a free way to feel involved in it. Buying is a different appetite. Nobody stands in front of a 200 pound piece and decides from a phone screen, and they shouldn't.
The thing I'd push back on is blaming the vertical video. You learned a skill, it just isn't a sales skill. Nine months isn't wasted, it's misdirected.
Two open studio weekends a year isn't a marketing problem, that's just the business. Steel and stone are the same. People buy what they can put a hand on.
"Misdirected" is the word I needed, and I suspect you are right that I have been blaming the wrong thing. I did not waste the year, I spent it on a skill that answers a question nobody was asking me. That is a different failure and a more useful one to name.
The steel and stone comparison lands. I have been treating the studio weekend as a nice extra when it is evidently the entire engine. Which means the honest move is to stop apologising for the fact that my work has to be stood in front of, and start building the year around the standing-in-front-of.
Where do you show yours? I am curious whether you have found the in-person venues you can repeat, or whether it is a matter of taking whatever comes up.
"The process videos get the most likes and the least money" is the sentence I've been circling for a year without managing to say it that plainly. Thank you for it.
I think the part I got wrong was assuming the audience was a pipeline. That if I kept it fed, some fraction would eventually tip over into buyers. Watching someone lay a wash is genuinely lovely and costs the viewer nothing, and I think that's the whole story. It's a different transaction entirely from standing six inches from a sheet of hot press and noticing the paper is slightly buckled where the pigment pooled, which is the sort of thing that actually sells work.
So I'm not quitting the posting. I've just stopped believing it's the shop door. The open studio is the shop door.