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For years I did the dance. "DM for pricing." Which means a week of polite emails with someone who was never going to buy anything, while I pretend the number is a secret worth protecting. Nonsense. The number is the number. So in March I started putting it in the caption. This panel, 40x60, smalti and salvaged marble, 1.900 euro, four to six weeks. That simple. No "investment" language, no "collections start at." Two people unfollowed. Fine, they were never my people. What I did not expect: three inquiries in the first month, and one of them bought. A woman in Kalamaria who said she had been following me for a year and always assumed my work was "for museums or hotels." She thought the mystery meant expensive. It was the vagueness that scared her off, not the price. The other thing nobody warns you about, the asking is the exhausting part. I have spent years answering "how much for something like this" with nothing to look at, and the whole time we both knew I was guessing at a wall. I am not going to pretend it fixed everything. Some people see the number and go quiet, and that is information too, it saves us both a month. And yes there is a small guilt, like saying money out loud in a room where nobody else has. Greek thing maybe. Anyway. If you have been hiding your prices to seem more serious, I would look at that. The hiding is usually doing the opposite of what you think.

So I finally did the thing everyone says you should do and put the price right in the caption, not "DM for price," just there, 450 zł for the A3 pastel portrait, framed, shipping in Poland included. I sat on that edit for two days before posting it, which is embarrassing to type out. Anyway. Four people asked about it before I did that. After I put the number up, three people asked and then two of them went quiet the moment I answered. Not rude, just gone. And weirdly I felt better? Because I stopped having to perform the little dance where someone says "so beautiful" and I say "thank you so much" and we both pretend nobody is thinking about money. One woman did buy. Paid full price, no haggling, and then told me she'd assumed I'd charge more. I don't know what to do with that information, honestly. I've been undercharging for two years partly because I was afraid, and now I'm scared I've taught everyone the wrong price. Is it normal that the silence after the number is worse than a no? I can handle a no. The quiet is what gets me.

Against every bit of advice I've ever been given, I started putting the price straight in the caption. Not "DM for details." Actual number, in kronor, no apology around it. Three pieces sold in eight days. Before that I'd gone about five months with the vague-DM approach and mostly got people asking if I ship to Germany and then nothing. I think the vague version was me protecting myself. A number in public can be refused, and a DM feels like a conversation where nobody has to say no. But the people who actually buy are the ones who want to know before they get attached to something. One woman wrote that she'd been looking at the piece for a month and had assumed it was out of reach. Small sample, I know. It might just be December. But I'm not going back to "message me."

Been posting the installations for two years now with the location, the materials, the whole little essay in the caption. Museum tags, artist tags, the works. Everything by the book. Last month I put up a photo of one room with nothing but the date. No title, no name, no hashtags except the gallery's because they insisted. I forgot to finish the caption, honestly, phone rang. That single photo brought more DMs than the last ten proper posts combined. People asking where it was, what it was made of, if they could come see it. Questions I would have answered in the caption nobody read. Not a lesson. Probably just the algorithm being tired of my voice too. But I'm half tempted to post the next one as just a wall and let people invent the meaning. That's what I do with found objects anyway. Let them find it.

Not a strategy, more an accident. I put up a piece in March with four words: "torn pages, 12 by 16." Because I couldn't think of anything and it was late and I wanted to go to bed. It got more saves than the twelve posts before it combined. Most of the comments were people asking what the paper was, which I answered, and then a woman in Oslo asked if she could buy it and did. Since then I've tried writing "properly" again. Two paragraphs on the process, the source book, why I left the right side empty. Numbers went back down. So either the algorithm punishes effort or I am a bad writer about my own work, and I suspect the second one. When I explain the work I am explaining it to myself, and that is not interesting to anyone else. The awkward part is I don't want to become someone who refuses to speak about their work as a bit. I like reading what other people say about theirs. I just don't think I have anything true to say about mine beyond the size and the paper. Curious whether this holds up for other people or if it was a one-off and I've learned nothing.

I spent a full afternoon last month staging a still life, fighting with the light until it did what I wanted, photographed it six ways, wrote a caption I actually labored over. It did fine. Fine. Meanwhile the post that got me two commissions and a workshop enquiry was a photo of my palette at the end of the day, all the dirty mixes half-scraped off, with a caption like "today was a long one." No thought in it. I almost didn't post it at all. There's a lesson in there somewhere about people wanting the evidence of the work rather than the work itself, and I keep circling it. The polished thing reads as finished, and a finished thing doesn't invite anyone in. The mess does. Everyone can see themselves in a dirty palette. I still can't quite bring myself to lean into that deliberately. It feels like a trick the moment it's calculated. So I just post the leftovers now and let the careful posts be the rare ones. It's the reverse of every piece of marketing advice I've ever read, and it keeps working anyway. Bof.

Posted a finished oil piece last week, proud of it, lighting was good, spent an hour on the caption. 47 likes. Barely a blip. Three days later I threw up a half-finished charcoal study at 2am, no caption, just two words and a period, basically a scrap. 4,000 views and it's still getting saves. People are DMing me about it. I don't know what to do with that. It's not even a good drawing, the hand is wrong, I was tired. But something in the mess of it hit people and the polished thing didn't. I've known this for years and I still chase the wrong thing every single time. The grid wants the raw and I keep giving it the framed. Anyone else find the stuff you almost didn't post is always the stuff that lands?

so i posted a finished piece last week, 12 hours of work, layered flat color, the whole thing. caption about process. it did fine, like 40 likes, some "so good" comments from other painters and my aunt. then yesterday i'm about to scrape down my palette and i take a photo of it first, dumb reason, just liked the colors sitting there. unwashed, dried up ultramarine next to a muddy pile of something that used to be vermilion. no caption, no hashtags, posted it at like 1am. it's sitting at 3x the engagement and two people asked if it was for sale. i don't think the audience wants the painting. i think they want proof a person was there. which is annoying because the painting IS the proof, but fine, i'll go take pictures of my trash now. the part that stings: i've been painting worse for the camera for a month. arranging the easel, wiping the edges, pretending i don't clean up. all of it did less than a photo i took by accident because i was too tired to wash a tray.

last month i posted a piece i almost didn't photograph. warped rim, glaze crawled on one side, a face half sunk in. i called it fea in the caption, half joking. sold it in two days. then three people asked for a version of it. so i made the mistake of listening to them. posted the same shape again, cleaner this time, better light, nice caption about process and intention. nothing. twelve likes, zero messages. turns out what sells is the one where i'm clearly not trying to sell you something. the crooked one, photographed on my kitchen table with the light all wrong and a coffee cup in the corner i forgot to crop out. i've been doing this for enough time now to know that's annoying and true and i still can't make myself do it on purpose. the moment i try to be casual it reads as a strategy. because it is one. not asking for advice really. just putting it here because i spent all morning shooting a bowl and hating every photo.

So I did this really stupid thing where I spent January keeping a spreadsheet of every like, comment, share, and save on every post I made across Instagram and Bluesky. I thought I'd find a pattern, you know? Something to reverse engineer. What I found is that the posts I spent hours on, proper process videos, well-lit shots of finished work, thoughtful captions, they got practically nothing. Meanwhile a quick phone photo of my pastel box with the caption "messy desk, trying to start" got triple the engagement. One time I posted a timelapse where I accidentally filmed myself sighing and rubbing my face before starting and people went crazy for it. I don't know what to do with this information. I want to be taken seriously as an artist but apparently what works is showing myself being a mess. Is the answer really just... performative struggle? Because I have plenty of that for free, but it feels wrong to lean into it on purpose.

Spent two and a half days on a piece, photographed it perfectly, wrote a caption I actually thought about for once, posted it at a "good" time. Crickets. Like 40-something likes, mostly my mom and my partner's aunt. Then yesterday I was mid-wash, my brush slipped and I stabbed the paper, and I just took a photo of my palette with paint all over my hand and the mess everywhere with a caption like "we don't talk about this one" and it's already doing better than that whole careful post did. I don't even know what to do with that. I keep telling myself the algorithm is just random and I shouldn't optimize for it, but also... I need groceries. There's a version of me that's about to start faking messy palettes for content and I really hope I don't become her. Anyone else feel like the effort is actively hurting them out here?

Okay so this is going to sound like I'm about to sell you a course and I promise I'm not. I deleted the app off my phone nine days ago. Not the account, just the app, because I was opening it while the kettle boiled and then the kettle would boil for eleven minutes and I'd be watching some guy in a loft in Berlin explain underpainting to me. My actual painting time was like 40 minutes a day and my scrolling was two hours. Do the math, it was ugly. Then three commissions came in. From the same two people who've bought before, plus a woman I met at a market in March who said "I'll think about it" and I fully wrote her off. And I keep trying to figure out if this is causation or if it's just that the work I made in those nine days was better because I wasn't painting with half my brain doing caption math the whole time. I think it's the second thing. The commissions might be coincidence. The work is definitely not. The part that bugs me is that the "post every day" advice isn't wrong exactly, it just made me a person who was making content about painting instead of making paintings, and I didn't notice the swap happening. It was slow. Also honestly the account's fine, I'm not quitting, I just check it on my laptop now like a Victorian. Anyway. Nine days, three commissions, one very smug partner who told me to do this in June. Has anyone else taken a step back from posting and had it go weirdly okay, or is this just a lucky streak I'm about to be humbled by

Vale, real numbers because I'm tired of vague advice. My last three glaze process reels: 340, 210, 180 views. A story I posted from the studio at 23:40 with a photo of the kiln door and the words "esto va a salir mal, lo sé" (this is going to come out bad, I know it): 1200 views, and 9 people replied asking what I was firing. So the thing that "works" is me admitting I don't know. Not the finished piece. Not the timelapse. Me at midnight, in a dirty apron, betting against my own work. I think this is because everyone can smell when a post is a shop window. And a kiln at night is just a kiln at night, no selling in it. The problem is I can't schedule genuine dread. I've tried. I posted a very constructed version of the same thing last week with nice lighting and a caption I wrote twice and it got 90 views, which honestly is what I deserved. Also my firing did come out mostly fine, one small crack at the foot, so even the dread was a lie in the end. Do any of you post the actual middle of the process, the ugly boring part, or am I just going to keep accidentally making content out of being anxious

My daughter talked me into it. Filmed me dressing a limestone block with a point chisel, one hand, no talking. Forty seconds. She put a caption on it. Three years of posting finished pieces got me maybe two comments a year. That clip pulled more replies in a week than everything else combined. Most of them were asking what the tool was. A few asked what stone. That part I don't mind, I'll talk about a point chisel all day. What bothers me is that nobody asked about the piece. It's a 400 pound block headed for a commission in Vermont and all anyone wanted was the noise it makes. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not going to start filming myself sweating for an algorithm. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking about doing it again.

I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with half the printmakers I know. Last month I finished a mezzotint. Rocked the whole plate by hand, which honestly took longer than I want to admit, probably 40 hours across three weeks. Edition of 25. It is the best thing I have made in two years and I would defend that claim in front of anyone. I posted it once. And then I posted a photo of the copper plate itself, still inked, sitting on the scuffed bit of the worktable with my thumbprint in the margin. No caption, no price, nothing. The plate photo got about six times the reach. Someone messaged asking if the plate was for sale. Nobody asked about the print. I've been sitting with this for a week and I don't have a clean point about it. My instinct is to say the algorithm rewards process over product, we all know this, be more human, show the mess. Fine. But I think that's too easy. What that photo showed was the object after labour, the residue, the evidence. What the mezzotint showed was a finished thing that looks like it came from nowhere. And people cannot desire what has no visible cost. That's not an algorithm problem, that is just how wanting works. Maybe I should have been showing the cost all along and I was too proud about the mystique. The uncomfortable part: the prints are not selling. Three gone, and one was to my mother. So now I have 22 of them in a drawer and a decision about whether I keep making plates that take 40 hours, or whether the thing I actually like doing is the part nobody wants to buy. I don't think I'm going to stop. But I'd like to hear from anyone who found a way to make the slow version legible without turning it into content.

I do a market in Galway most Saturdays, small stall, prints in a rack and a box of seconds, and I've been half hearted about it lately because the online thing is eating the hours and giving back less every month. Last Saturday a woman picked up one of the hare prints and said "I have this already, well I don't, my sister does, it's in her chipper in Kinvara." I'd sold that one two years ago at a different market to a fella who bought it for cash and never gave me a name. Never saw it again. Turns out it's been hanging above the fryers in a chipper in Kinvara for two years, in the steam and the grease, and it's still up there and people are looking at it while they wait for chips. Anyway she bought two more off me, one for herself and one for the sister, because the sister's one was "gone a bit grey at the edges." So the steam did eventually get it. I don't know what the lesson is, if there is one. I spent a fair chunk of last week building a carousel of studio shots with a caption about process and it got 12 likes. A chipper wall in Kinvara sold two prints. I'm not going to go chasing chipper walls, I'm just noting it. Somewhere in the middle of that there's the actual answer to this whole carry on and I keep missing it.

Sunday I set the phone on the easel arm and filmed a glaze session on the second figure. Two hours of footage, cut down to ninety seconds, the whole thing about how a thin warm layer over a dry cool one makes flesh breathe. I was pleased with it. Real information, no music, my hands in the frame. 340 views. My mother-in-law liked it. This morning I posted a still of the finished panel, just standing against the studio wall, bad light from the window, no caption beyond the title. 1,800 views and four messages, two of them actually about the painting. I keep telling students that the work is the thing and I keep believing it, but I also keep filming my hands. The algorithm wants the doing, not the done. Except it doesn't, apparently. It wants the done, photographed badly. I am not going to become a content person about this. I would rather paint. But I am curious whether anyone else has noticed that the process content that supposedly performs just quietly does nothing, and it's the flat dead photograph of the finished piece that brings people to the door.

I took the "oil on linen, 30x40" caption out of my posts for a month. Not the hashtags, not the process videos, just that little line at the end. I've always put it there out of habit, like a signature. Collectors want to know what they're buying, I told myself. The change was not dramatic but it was real. People started commenting about the light in the room, the mood of the thing, what the woman in the painting was thinking. Before it was mostly "beautiful work" and other painters asking about my medium. I think the technical note was giving people permission to look at it like a spec sheet instead of letting them just feel it. Once the frame of reference was gone they had to meet the painting on its own terms. I put the information back when the piece sells, obviously. But the post itself, the first encounter, I leave it bare now. The gallery can do the talking about dimensions and materials. My job on social media is to make someone stop scrolling because something in the image got under their skin, and I was undercutting that with my own footnotes. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe we all over-explain ourselves online because we're afraid of being misunderstood, and the fear itself is what keeps people at arm's length.

I spent 60 euros boosting one of my best still lifes a few years ago. Got about 800 new followers in three days. Felt great for exactly one afternoon, like finally the machine was on my side. Then I posted the painting being finished, the one people actually respond to, and maybe thirty people saw it. The 800 were just bodies passing through. They liked the ad or they didn't, and they were gone. I think some of them never even unfollowed, they just stopped existing. Meanwhile I put a blurry photo of my badly lit corner of the studio where I mix my palette, no caption worth reading, and it did more for me than the whole 60 euros. There's no logic to it. You can't buy the thing that works because the thing that works is accidental and it doesn't scale. I still teach students who beg me to explain the algorithm to them, like I'm hiding the formula. I'm not hiding anything. I keep a notebook of what landed and why, and the reasons don't repeat. Bof.

I spent all last year trying to crack the algorithm. Filming my process with proper lighting. Voiceovers about the "meaning behind the work." Scheduling posts at optimal times. The reel that got me actual sales? Me, 11pm, exhausted, propping a half-finished painting against a wall in bad kitchen light, no audio, just a 5-second clip of me adding charcoal lines. Caption: "this isn't working yet but I like it." That's it. 14k views. Two commissions. I don't know what to do with that information. It makes me want to stop trying at all, which is probably not the takeaway, but also maybe it is?