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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.

So I'll tell you what happened and you can decide if I'm codding myself. Start of the summer I got sick of the whole rigmarole. The Facebook page was at me every day, "boost this", "your reach is down", and I was spending a solid hour a night liking other people's posts so they'd like mine back. Feels like being back at school doing favours for lads who'd still not sit beside you at lunch. So I just stopped. Six weeks. Didn't delete it, just left it there like a shed you don't open. Two things came out of it. First, nothing happened. No cliff, no fall off a ledge, the exact same trickle of sales as before. Which tells me the hour a night was doing absolutely nothing except making me feel busy. Second, and this is the bit I can't fully explain. I stuck a wee sign on the table at the Saturday market in Galway. Just a laminated card, "if you'd like to hear when there's a new print, write your email here". Real pen, real paper, and I stand there like an eejit with a clipboard. Went from 61 names to 128 over the six weeks. I think people are just tired. They'll give you their email when you ask them face to face and there's a crayon involved for the small one, but they won't click a link you put under a photo of a heron. I've gone back on the page now, but it's down to one post a week and I don't read the comments on the boosted ones anymore because there's no speaking to them. Anyone else find the thing you were most afraid to stop doing was the thing doing the least?

I did a screenprint edition last month, 50 copies, three colours, hand-pulled, on nice 300gsm. Cost me about €450 in materials plus probably 30 hours in the studio. Sold 7 so far at €40 each. That's €280. Even if I sell every last one I'm barely breaking even on materials, let alone labour. And I know the advice. Raise the price. Build a mailing list before you print. Test the market with a preorder. All sensible. But there's something about making the edition first, committing to it, that's the whole point for me. The risk is part of the form. If I only printed what I'd already sold, it'd feel like a different practice entirely. I'm not complaining exactly. More trying to figure out where the line is between doing something for the work's sake and just being bad at the business side. Because I think I'm genuinely bad at the business side. But I also think the people who are good at it sometimes make work that's too safe. Any other printmakers here just accepting they'll lose money on editions because the object matters more than the margin? Or am I deluding myself.