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just spent three hours down a rabbit hole figuring out why one specific reel absolutely tanked after three days of killer engagement. turns out, i used the wrong trending audio and the algorithm apparently threw a tantrum and buried it. lol. its wild out here trying to appease a ghost in the machine for like, 500 views. anyone else get blindsided by a sudden drop after things were going great?

I keep two lists on my phone. One has the collectors who actually buy my paintings, the people who have been following me since 2016 when I posted a blurry photo of a studio wall. The other is what the algorithm tells me to make: flat lays, process timelapses, "how I paint skin tones" voiceovers, all the content that performs but that I feel slightly sick making. The uncomfortable thing is both lists matter and neither one respects the other. The timelapse of me mixing a flesh tone got four times the reach of the finished painting itself, and most of those new followers have never looked at my actual work. But I sold a triptych last month to a woman in Berlin who found me through exactly that kind of video, liked the person, then went back through the archive and bought the real thing. I've started treating the process content as the shop window and the paintings as what's inside. The window has to be well dressed or nobody comes in. But I also stopped pretending to myself that the window is the art. That distinction was costing me more than the algorithm ever has.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

For ten years I kept a paper notebook of every piece I sold. Who bought it, how they found out about me. Back when that was mostly gallery openings and word of mouth. Two marriages and three studios later the notebook is still around, coffee stains and all. Last month I finally put it in a spreadsheet because my son was tired of watching me flip pages. And there it was, plain as day. The single biggest source of sales over a decade is not the gallery, not Instagram, not the fairs. It's people who came to a studio visit once, years ago, and then told one other person. I don't know what to do with this information except keep making work and leave the studio door unlocked. But it is funny how much time I've spent the last two years feeling guilty about my social media presence, when the numbers say the algorithm has never once sold me a room. A colleague in Berlin once told me the market is just a slow conversation. I think about that more than I should.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

Hired a social media manager back in January. Young guy, sharp, knew all the algorithm talk. Two months, 400 dollars a month. He got my follower count up by about 900. Sold exactly one small piece out of it, and that buyer told me later he found me through an old gallery listing, not the account. Meanwhile I've sold four pieces this year to people I met at shows and studio visits. Not a single one looked at my Instagram first. The account is a business card at best. Somewhere to point people so they know you're not a scam. I'm not saying the internet is worthless. I'm saying paying someone to make it look active while the actual work sits in a studio is backwards. The work is the marketing. Everything else is just where you point people after they've already decided they want to look. Dropped him in March. Account's been quiet since. Nobody's noticed except the algorithm, and the algorithm was never buying anything anyway.

The algorithm pushed my old Mysore palace sketch from 2019 to 40k people this week. Four hundred likes on a painting I did sitting on a park bench with wobbly perspective because I was too lazy to walk around to the other side. Meanwhile the piece I spent six weeks on, the one where I measured everything twice and worked the light properly, is sitting at 31 likes. Three. One. I know the answer is supposed to be "just post more, the algorithm is random, consistency consistency." But I've been doing this long enough to notice a pattern now. The stuff that lands is never the stuff I sweated over. It's the throwaway morning sketch, the wobbly bench one, the half-finished thing I almost didn't scan. I don't know what to do with that honestly. Do I keep painting for the craft and accept the algorithm doesn't care? Or do I get smart and start churning out the loose quick ones that perform, and keep the serious work for prints and shows where it actually gets seen properly? Right now I'm doing neither and it's making me a bit cranky. Anyone else found a way to hold both, the work you care about and the work that works?

everyone in these threads keeps blaming the algorithm and i get it, reach is down, but i keep watching artists post the exact same stuff that worked in 2021 and act confused. you posted your palette knife and some paint swatches 40 times, of course it stopped doing numbers. i killed my reach when i stopped and just started posting works in progress with zero caption and actual process, no hashtag spam, and the engagement went up. not because i beat the algorithm but because the people who follow me actually wanted to see the ugly middle stage, not another "here's my cozy studio corner" shot. the algorithm is not your enemy, your content being boring is. posted that with my full chest. come at me.

A reel of my hands pinning wet paper to the line did more reach in three days than a year of finished prints. I watched the numbers climb and felt nothing but a small cold dread. That's not the work. That's me doing chores in front of the sun. I know the argument. People buy the maker, the process, the story. And part of me wants to believe it because the audience is real and they write kind things. But the thing I actually sweat over, the arranging of the seaweed, the waiting for the right light, the fixing that goes wrong and I bins it and starts again, none of that translates to a phone screen. So what's left is me standing there with a squeegee. Maybe I'm old-fashioned about what counts as showing the work. But I don't want to become a person who performs making because the performance is what performs. The prints keep coming either way. I just wonder sometimes whether I'm building an audience for the wrong thing.

Spent three weeks on a portrait of an old woman holding a cup of tea, every strand of hair, the reflection in the glaze, really proud of it honestly. Posted it, 140 likes. Then yesterday I threw up a 20 minute sketch of just a hand, not even finished, thumb still muddy, and it hit 12k. I don't understand this platform at all. The frustrating thing is I know exactly why. People see a sketch and they feel like they're peeking at the process, the honest part. The finished piece is intimidating, it's closed. The sketch is open. But I can't bring myself to feed the machine the unfinished stuff on purpose, it feels like performing. Yet here I am, thinking about how to sketch more just so the real work gets seen at all. Is everyone else doing this dance where the thing that gets attention is the thing you'd never have chosen to show?

Sold a small piece at the flea market on saturday. Lady asked what the torn paper was about, and I told her it was from my brother's old notebooks. She bought it before I even finished the sentence. No reel, no hashtag, no "link in bio." Just me standing there with cold coffee and my actual story. Meanwhile I've got 40 something posts on instagram this month, maybe three genuine interactions. Someone called the same kind of piece "cluttered" in a review a while back and I've been second-guessing the layering ever since. The lady at the market didn't care about composition rules. She wanted to know whose stuff it was. I keep thinking the market is the hobby and the feed is the real thing. It's backwards. The market is the only place people actually look at the work with their eyes and take it home. The feed is just me performing being an artist for strangers who scroll past. Don't really know what to do with that besides keep hauling the tent on saturdays.

Every time I give in and post the thing I almost didn't, the rough etching proof with the wiped plate mark still on it, the screenprint that misregistered and made this weird ghost double, that's the one that travels. The pieces I actually spend weeks on, the editions I pull clean and sign, they sit there with forty views. I know intellectually the rough stuff reads as "process" and process is what the feed wants. We're all supposed to be celebrating the handmade and the imperfect now. But there's part of me that resists being rewarded for the thing I'd normally throw in the bin. It feels like the medium itself is being flattened into aesthetic, the mess as decoration, and the actual conceptual work I'm doing gets no airtime because it doesn't photograph well. Also I'm aware that saying "my spontaneous casual posts do better" is itself a strategy now, and posting about posting is the most hollow loop there is. I tried leaning into it. Posted a genuinely failed proof, ink disaster on the plate, told the truth about what went wrong. It did numbers. And I felt weirdly used, like I'd sold the accident instead of the labour. Still don't know if the answer is to gamify it deliberately or to refuse and accept the smaller reach. Anyone else caught in that particular trap?

People keep asking me how I sell paintings, and they seem disappointed when I tell them it's not the social accounts. I run a modest Instagram for the studio, maybe 4,000 followers, and it's pleasant enough. But the collectors who have actually commissioned work from me over the past few years nearly all came from my newsletter. The plain text one. No templates, no design, just a note every month or two about what's on the easel and which pieces are about to be released. I started it back in 2016 out of frustration, because I was tired of watching a carefully composed post disappear into the feed after an hour. Today it has 700 subscribers. Last year three commissions and two gallery introductions came directly from those emails. That's a better conversion rate than every platform I'm on combined, by a wide margin. The social accounts are fine for visibility and for students finding my classes. But if you want someone to spend real money, you want their inbox, not their feed. The feed is a hallway. The inbox is a sitting room. I'd rather sit with seven hundred people than wave at four thousand.

A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem. So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero. The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something. I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I. I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.

My son helped me put some of my paintings on Amazon last year. Small things, mostly, fish motifs, a few Lakshmi pieces for Diwali time. We thought it would be good, reach people outside Bihar who don't come to the melas. Six months now. What I notice is, if I put a painting with very fine line work, very detailed, the kind that takes me four days, it sits there. No sales. But a simpler piece, one I can finish in a day, with brighter colours and a big bold fish in the centre, that one sells within a week. Same size, same paper, same story behind it. I don't understand this. The detailed one has more of me in it. More tradition. But the simple one is what people want to buy. I am grateful for the sales, do not mistake me. But I wonder if Amazon is showing the simpler paintings to more people because they get clicked on faster. Or maybe people see a very detailed Mithila and they think it will not match their home. I am not complaining ji. Just trying to understand. The folk artists I know in Madhubani, we all sit and wonder about these things. If you sell online also, has this happened to you, what you think is your best work, nobody wants, and something you made in one day, that one moves? 🙏

I don't understand these algorithms ji, my son tries to explain but I think it is a different world. For months I was posting reels, using hashtags, doing everything the年轻人 (young people) tell me. And yes some likes come, some comments, but serious order? Hardly. But there is this one WhatsApp group, just a small group of art lovers from Patna and Darbhanga, maybe forty people. One of my old students added me. I share a photo of whatever I am finishing that week, with a price. No editing, no hashtag, sometimes just in the evening with bad light. And from that group only, I have sold maybe twelve paintings in the last two months. One man came all the way from Muzaffarpur after seeing a photo of a fish motif I posted there. The platforms want us to dance for them. But the real thing is just people who already know what they like seeing. I am thinking maybe the old way is best, find your people, even if it is a small group, and show them your work directly. No algorithm needed.

I keep reading these threads about which platform is dead and which algorithm is punishing you and I have no insight to add because the only actual sale I got from social media this month came from a throwaway reel of me sharpening a palette knife. Just a plain knife and the ring of it against the sharpening stone. No music, no talking, 11 seconds, shot on my phone propped against a mug. A woman from Pune messaged asking if I could do a similar one of her grandfather's old house before it gets demolished. Paid a deposit before I even sent her a sketch. Meanwhile the carefully staged studio shots I spent an afternoon on, the ones with the good light and the composition I actually thought about, got maybe 40 views between them. I have stopped pretending I understand any of this. The algorithm wants what it wants. Sometimes I think it's just picking the videos where I'm clearly doing something and not performing. The minute I set up the ring light it knows and punishes me for it.

this is going to sound like one of those "the algorithm is stealing your soul" posts and i hate that but hear me out. i was obsessively checking which reels got saves vs shares vs whatever and it was quietly steering what i painted. not in a big obvious way, just little nudges, oh that blue got more likes, paint more blue things. oh this style of video tanked, don't do that again. after a while i realized i was basically optimizing for a graph that doesn't buy paintings. so i turned off all the metrics. can't see likes, saves, follows, any of it. just post and leave. been a month and i've painted more genuinely weird stuff in that time than the previous 3 months combined. some of it is probably unsellable and i don't care. the irony is engagement went up because i stopped trying to game it. or maybe that's just the algorithm rewarding me for not caring. who knows. anyway i'm gonna go back to not knowing what a "share rate" is and i recommend it.

The Instagram crowd has gone very quiet the last few weeks. Likes are down, new follows are a trickle, and sure, part of me checks it more than I'd like to admit. But here's the thing I keep coming back to: I sold eleven prints at the market on Saturday. Eleven, cash in a tin, most of them to people who'd never seen my page at all. They just stopped at the stall, picked up the hare, had a chat about it. I see all these posts about algorithms and growth hacks and I'm not saying they're wrong, exactly. But there's a version of this job where the internet is the whole conversation and the person with the money is somewhere in the middle of it, and I think we've all got that backwards a bit. The algorithm doesn't buy prints. It doesn't frame one and hang it in the hallway. Not a big take. Just noticing that I spent the week fretting about a number that doesn't pay the rent, while the actual paying customers were at the end of a table with a till roll and two cups of tea. Anyway. Back to carving. The dog's had enough of me staring at my phone.

i spent like three years trying to do instagram right. good lighting, process videos, consistent posting, the whole algorithm courtship. and it got me... some likes from other artists. nice, but nobody buying. then last winter i was in a total meltdown about a piece that wasn't working. snapped a picture of my studio floor covered in torn scraps and charcoal dust and coffee rings, wrote something like "well this isn't going anywhere" and posted it without thinking. that one post got more replies than anything i'd done that year. two people commissioned work from it. so now i just send the ugly stuff. the failed experiments, the half-finished things i'm unsure about, the mess. i think people want to see the struggle, not the finished product. they want proof you're actually in the trenches, not just curating a highlight reel. my engagement is down by every metric that matters to an algorithm and my actual sales are up. make it make sense.