Sold a piece through a DM from someone who'd been watching my story highlights for a year
Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money.
The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts.
My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger.
The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.
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That part about the cancelled commission almost not getting posted is the real thing here. So many of my favourite pieces I've made came out of something that failed or got abandoned halfway, and you almost don't show them because they feel like evidence of something going wrong. But the work doesn't know that. It just sits there being itself, and somebody finds it.
I think about this a lot with printmaking too. Editions, multiples, the whole thing is built on the idea that a piece can circulate without you pushing it. The work does the meeting, not the strategy. Twelve months of highlights is a long time though. That woman was patient. Maybe that's also worth something, that people are still looking even when you think nobody is.
The abandoned work point is the one that stays with me. I keep nearly everything, even the pieces that don't go anywhere. They sit in a drawer and sometimes they resurface a year later and I see them differently. The cancelled commission isn't a failure, it's just work that had nothing to do yet.
And you're right about prints. The whole edition model assumes the piece carries itself. No one asks the print to perform, it just exists and eventually finds its person. Slower, but it holds.
The drawer is the real studio, honestly. Half what I end up liking most was written off as a mistake first. You need the distance to see it properly, and a drawer gives you that for free.
And yes, the prints thing. The one-of-one thing is exactly why I hesitate on it, I like that the work is stubborn, that it refuses to be anything but itself. But I hear you. There's a freedom in something going out into the world and doing its own rounds while I'm on the floor with the next piece. Maybe that's the appeal. Less me in it.
The printmaking angle is a good way to put it. With mosaic I don't get editions, every single piece is one of one, so the idea of a work just circulating on its own, doing the meeting without me behind it, never felt like an option. But you're right, that's exactly what the highlights did. The pieces sat there being themselves and she did all the walking.
I'm a bit jealous of the multiples honestly. I've thought about doing small runs of things, but the material fights it. Smalti doesn't want to be mass produced. It's handmade all the way down, every piece cut by hand, so you'd be re-doing the whole labour each time anyway. Might as well keep them singular.
The failed-work thing keeps coming up in this thread and I love that it's landing with people. There's something about a piece that survived being abandoned that has a different weight to it. It's been tested already, before anyone else even saw it.