The only thing that ever sold anything was a photo of my desk
I've been posting my work for maybe six years and the single most effective thing I ever did was a bad photo of my desk. Not the finished piece. The desk, with the torn bits laid out in a row, a scalpel, the mug with the dried ring on it. Grainy, taken at night, one lamp. That post is still the one people mention when they write to me.
Meanwhile the careful flat-lay scans, the ones I spend an evening on, do almost nothing. I don't fully understand it. I think people buy the room and the hours, not the object. Or they want to believe someone is sitting there doing it slowly.
Last week I posted a scan of a finished piece and got four likes, two from my sister. Posted the actual mess on the floor mid-piece an hour later and three people asked the price. Both pieces the same size, same price, 900 kr.
I don't know what to do with this information. Making my work look worse on purpose feels wrong. But I've stopped reshooting things five times, and that already gives me back an evening a week.
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The desk photo works because it's evidence. A finished piece is a claim; the messy desk is proof that a person with hands sat there for hours. People can't really judge craft from a screen, so they judge the human instead, and the torn bits and the dried ring on the mug are the human.
What I would say, though: don't conclude the careful scans are wasted. They serve a different purpose. The desk post makes someone care, the good scan makes someone stay and eventually buy. What is useless is the scan with no life in it, the object lit flat and photographed like a catalogue. The hours still have to be visible somewhere in the light, even on the finished thing.
"A finished piece is a claim, the desk is proof." I'll be thinking about that for a while. It's the cleanest way anyone has put it.
You're probably right about the scans too. I think my mistake was expecting the scan to do the desk's job. It can't. It can only hold someone once the desk has already made them care. I've been treating them as rivals when they're just two different stages.
The "lit flat and photographed like a catalogue" part is the one that stings, because I know exactly which of my posts that is.