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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.

There's a Saturday market in Galway I've been doing on and off for maybe twelve years. Rain, hail, the odd glorious day where everyone's in great form. And I used to think the point of it was to shift prints, which it is, but the real thing it taught me is how to talk to people about what you make without sounding like you're selling. You get all sorts at a stall. The tourist who wants something that says Ireland without being a leprechaun on a toilet. The local who stops because they recognise the pier or the mountain. The person who clearly loves the work but hasn't got thirty quid and stands there turning a card over in their hands. And you learn, quick, that the ones who buy aren't the ones you try to convince. They're the ones you just talk to, normally, about the carving or the ink or the hare that lives in the field behind your house and won't let you get near it. The thing that stuck with me is this: I've never sold a print by telling someone how good it is. I've sold plenty by telling them the story of the night I carved it and nearly took the tip of my finger off, or how the block got dropped in a puddle and the crack became part of the print. People want the thing behind the thing. They don't want a pitch. Anyway. The market's grand for that. But online, I still catch myself trying to sound like a proper business instead of just a fella in a jumper with ink under his nails. And the minute I do that, engagement drops off a cliff. The posts that work are always the ones where I forget I'm supposed to be marketing and just talk about what happened today. Sure I don't know where I'm going with this except that the best marketing advice I ever got was from a woman buying a print of a heron who said "just tell me why you made it" and walked away with two.

So I did a little market in this old garage space in El Cabanyal last weekend. Thought it'd be quiet, maybe sell a few small pieces, cover the table fee. I brought a box of seconds, things with cracks, glaze drips, a little jug that leaned so far it looked drunk. I almost didn't unpack them. Put them at the edge of the table for 10€ each, basically clay cost. They went first. People loved them more than the "good" pieces. One woman said the crack in a little cup looked like a lightning bolt and she wanted to drink her morning coffee from it. I had to stop myself from explaining it was a kiln failure. Meanwhile on Etsy I'm fighting the algorithm, paying for ads, packing things in bubble wrap like a warehouse robot. And I made more in four hours sitting in a chair drinking terrible coffee from a thermos, telling people yes that cup is supposed to look like that. I'm not saying markets are the answer for everyone. But I'm starting to think the friction of selling online is getting ridiculous for small makers. You spend more time managing the store than making the thing. At the market you just... show up. Talk to people. Hand them a wonky cup and they love it. Maybe the real hack is just lowering your standards and letting people see the ugly ones lol

Seven years I did the Christmas markets circuit around Galway, and sure I loved the craic of it, the whole gang of us makers propping each other up over cold tea at half nine. But I started doing the sums on it last year and the amount of hours I was standing on my feet to shift maybe thirty prints at a tenner margin each... you'd get more per hour stacking shelves in Tesco. So I pulled out of the big one this winter. No table, no fairy lights, no man trying to haggle me down to a fiver for something that took me two days to carve. What I did instead was dead boring. I printed a plain little catalogue, four pages, black and white, every piece photographed flat on the kitchen table with the kids' homework shoved out of frame, and I posted the damn thing to about forty people who've bought off me before or who run the small galleries I've dealt with. Old school. Envelopes and stamps, like a man posting letters to his granny. And it worked. Sold twenty-three prints before December even got going. People wrote back, some of them just to say they liked the look of the hare on page two, no purchase, and that's grand too. The gallery in Westport took twelve on the strength of a paper catalogue and a phone call. I'm not saying markets are dead. I'm saying I was so busy performing the selling I forgot the actual selling. Nobody wants to scroll you at a draughty hall in November when they can sit in their own kitchen and pick what they genuinely like off a table of your work. Turns out the thing that worked was the most old-fashioned thing I could have done, and my phone never once told me how many people saw it.

Did the accounts for the last market season over a cup of tea this morning, the way you do, and I nearly spat it out. Sold 240 prints over eight Saturdays, which sounds great till you add up the fine: about €4,600 in, and then the stall fee, the petrol, the framing offcuts, the lino and ink and paper and the new gouges I had to buy because the old ones went blunt halfway through July. Net came out around €900 for the season. That's not a business, that's a very slow hobby with a stronger opinion of itself. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. I met a woman at the October market who bought one print of the heron and then came back the next Saturday with her daughter and bought another one the same, "one for each of them" she said. That's not in the accounts. And I sold one to an American lad who sent me a photo of it framed above his fireplace in Chicago, which is mad when you think the lino block it came from has a coffee ring on it from the Tuesday before. I know the whole thing should be priced better and I know the answer is I'm a coward with my own numbers. But I also know I'd still do the eight Saturdays for less than minimum wage, and I'm not sure whether to be proud of that or embarrassed by it. Maybe both. Anyone else ever run the numbers and then decided not to learn anything from them? 🙂

I do the Saturday market in town maybe twice a month, rest of the time it's online. And every time I come back from the market I look at the Instagram numbers and just laugh. At the stall, I can put out ten different prints, hares, herons, the round tower at Kilmacduagh, a new linocut of the Claddagh at low tide, and watch people pick things up and put them down. And what sells is never what I think will sell. Never. The one I carved in two hours on a whim because I was bored? Gone in the first hour. The one I spent three weeks on, re-carved twice, perfect registration? Sits there like a nun at a wedding. Last month a woman bought the scrappy little print of a jackdaw I nearly didn't bring. She said it looked like the ones that raid her bins at home. And I'm sitting there thinking, I can't algorithmically optimise for "reminds you of a bin-raiding jackdaw." The real numbers I trust are: did someone laugh, did someone say "that's himself exactly," did someone pull out a crumpled twenty from their back pocket. The rest of it feels like astrology for people who make things.

Market yesterday, this woman comes over and starts pressing her thumb into every single vessel. Every. One. I counted the marks on three of them after she left. Not firm clay, they were fired pieces, so it didn't do damage, but the psychic damage was real. She looks at me and says "just making sure they're solid, you know how these things crack." Then buys nothing. Tells me she'll "come back with her friend who actually collects." I don't know why that one got to me so much. I've had people shake my pieces like they're testing avocados. Fingernails on the glaze. One guy licked a bowl once, which was weird but honestly less insulting. But the systematic poking, like I was selling her a suspicious melon, that really stayed with me all afternoon. At least she didn't say her nephew could do it. Silver linings, vale.

okay so I emailed a gallery a few months back with a little portfolio, and they actually got back to me (!) and wanted to meet. I was so excited. Then the owner spent the whole meeting talking about "the market" and what "sells in this area" and finally asked if I could, quote, "brighten up my palette a little" because watercolor in muted tones reads "sad" apparently. I didn't walk. I should've walked. I did a whole sample piece in bright happy colors and she never even replied after that. 😭 honestly kind of glad but also what a waste of a weekend. so what's the red flag you saw on the way in and ignored anyway? or the one that made you turn around immediately? I feel like we all have at least one of these.

A fella came up to me at the Saturday market in Galway, couple of months back. Wanted a heron, A4 size, framed, for his mother's 80th. Lovely fella, genuinely, stood there chatting for twenty minutes while I was trying to pack down. I was feeling generous, the sun was out, I said I'd do it for €180 framed and he near bit my hand off. Anyway. Carving took me the guts of three days. Proofing, a couple of plates I wasn't happy with and started again. The frame was €45 alone because the cheap ones looked like muck. Felt matting, the board, ink, the blades I went through. Add it up and I reckon I made somewhere around €9 an hour on the carve itself, and that's before you count the drive to the framing shop and back twice because I measured wrong the first time. And the man's mother cried when she saw it, apparently. Which is lovely. It genuinely is. But I've been doing this twenty years and I still price from the gut instead of the shop floor and I'm raging at myself about it. €9 an hour for work that's better than that. Where's the line between the joy of a person loving your thing and you just being a cheap date? Asking for a friend. Actually no, asking for me, because I clearly can't be trusted with the arithmetic.

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.

Did the Christmas market circuit again this year, first time since before the lockdowns, and I forgot how much you learn from standing behind a table for eight hours. Two years of posting online, chasing the algorithm, reels and carousels and all of it. And then one Saturday in Galway an aul wan picks up a print, holds it at arm's length, squints, and says "that's nice, is it from a photograph?" and I'm explaining linocut to her and she buys it and tells me her mother had a hare in the kitchen. That's the whole job. That exchange. Can't get it from a screen. The thing I'd forgotten is how much the actual conversation sells. People don't buy prints standing in a cold hall, they buy the story you tell them about the block and the carving and the bad weather that put the heron in it. I sold more from the table in one day than a month of good posts. Not because the posts are wrong, but because there's no substitute for a body in front of the work. Still, the online crowd is what finds you the gallery people and the commissions. So it's not either/or. But sure, there's a reason I keep the stall. It's the only place the work gets a real reaction instead of a like.

was set up at the little sunday market in russafa, selling some of my smaller pieces, little jugs, a couple of those face vessels i've been working on, some bowls with this turquoise glaze i finally got right after like six fails. and this guy walks up, picks up one of the face vessels, turns it over in his hands for a while. and he goes "so, this is 3D printed, right? the texture's very uniform." joder. i wanted to hand him a ball of clay and say "here, try making a face with your bare hands, see if it comes out uniform." but i just laughed and said no, it's hand-built, you can see the fingerprints if you look. and he goes "oh, so you designed the file and printed it and then painted it?" i told him the only file involved is the one i'm gonna use to file down my patience after this conversation. he did not buy anything.

So I decided to actually log everything I did to promote my work in February. Not just guess, actually write it down. 27 hours. Twenty-seven hours of scrolling, posting, hashtag research, replying to comments, writing newsletter drafts I never sent, reading articles about algorithms, changing my bio three times. And you know what came from it? Two commission inquiries that both ghosted after I sent pricing. Meanwhile the one thing I actually sold last month came from someone who saw a piece in a café window where I'd left a business card months ago. Zero effort. Zero hours logged. I'm not saying marketing is useless. I'm saying I spent 27 hours doing stuff that felt productive and most of it clearly wasn't. I don't even know what to cut because it all felt important in the moment. Has anyone actually tracked this and changed what they do based on it? Or are we all just spinning plates and hoping?

I've been selling small etchings for €180 since 2021. Same size, same paper, same amount of work. Three years of the same number while my studio rent in Berlin went up twice and the price of copper plates nearly doubled. Last month I finally raised them to €240. Not a huge jump. Still probably too low for the time that goes in. But I did it. Then a former professor, someone whose opinion I actually respect, saw the new price list and said, in that careful tone, that the pricing was "ambitious." Asked if I was worried about "pricing myself out" of the market. The market being what, exactly? The market of people who think art should cost as much as a nice dinner? I didn't say what I wanted to say, which is that I know etchers in London charging £400 for a similar plate and nobody calls that ambitious. I just said I'd think about it. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should have raised them more, or if I'm actually wrong. The math says €240 is still a bad hourly rate when you add up drawing time, plate prep, printing, editioning. But the voice of that professor is stuck in my head.

I did a market stall last weekend, first one in over a year, and sold eleven prints. Eleven. More than I moved through my whole shop last month. And yet every morning I sit down and put the energy into the Instagram grid, because that's what you're supposed to do. It's not that the online stuff is useless. I met a few real collectors through it, one who bought a big piece. But the work is so physical. It's paper that's been soaked in seawater, it has salt crust on the edges, it smells like the shore. You can't convey that through a screen no matter how good your lighting is. There's a pattern I keep noticing in the work I'm most proud of. It always finds its people by accident. Someone sees it pinned to a wall somewhere, or held in a friend's hands, and that's the whole transaction. The algorithm has nothing to do with it. I keep telling myself I'll spend more time doing markets and studio visits and less time pretending the numbers mean something. Then a month goes by and I've posted every day and done one market. Does anyone else have this split, where the thing that actually works is the thing you avoid because it's more tiring and less measurable?

Y'all, I been selling quilts my whole life, church bazaars, word of mouth, folks stopping by the house. Never needed much more than that. But my granddaughter got me on Instagram a few years back, and I tell you what, the folks I've met through there... mm. People from England, from Japan, from California, wanting a piece of what I do. I sold a quilt last month to a woman in Paris. Paris, France. She saw a picture I took on my kitchen floor and paid more than I used to ask for a whole summer's worth of craft shows. And I'm grateful, don't get me wrong. The Lord's been good. But there's something funny about it, these folks paying top dollar for what my grandmother did out of a flour sack because that's what she had. They call it "art" now, and I guess it is. But it was art then too, wasn't it? Anyway. I'm still figuring out what to make of it. Grateful, but figuring.

Ran the edition of the heron prints down to the last one today and the fella who bought it was the first person all day who didn't try to haggle. Just handed over the cash and said "that's for my mother, she loves the birds." Fair play to him. Nice way to finish the stall, walking home with an empty tube and a bit of a bounce in the step. Some days you sell one, some days you sell nothing and you'd swear the dog was looking at you sideways for it, but today the whole run's gone and that's a good feeling all round. The mother in question better like the print now, that's all I'm saying. 🌟

Had a gallery offer representation but wanted me to front the cost of their promotional materials. Anyone else run into this? Seemed off to me.

Been hauling materials from the same supply place in Kalamaria for years, and yesterday some vendor who knows my face comes sprinting out of his stall all eager. Says he'll help me carry the palette of smalti I just paid for. Sir, that is 40 kilos of glass and you are wearing sandals. I told him no thanks, I've got it, I've done this a thousand times. He does not stop. He grabs one corner anyway. Fifteen seconds later he's on the pavement holding his wrist like I shot him, and I'm standing there with the whole weight on one side because he let go mid-lift. My back is going to remind me of his good intentions for a week. The thing is he meant well. That's the part that gets me. Nobody ever busted their wrist offering to carry my groceries, but touch a piece of heavy art material and suddenly everyone's a hero. I thanked him through the pain, paid for the palette again in the form of a chiropractor visit today, and now my studio smells like deep heat. I know it's not the worst thing that happened in the world today. But my knees are 45 years old and they did not need this.

went to a friend's opening last night and this man I've never met walks up to a piece I have in the show, it's this big mixed-media thing I worked on for months, central image is this dead elm against a gray sky, torn paper and charcoal and some old family photos collaged into the roots, and he goes "love the texture but you're burying the lede, that tree is a downer, crop it to just the bottom third and you've got something people would actually buy" i just stood there holding my wine. didn't say anything useful. just nodded like a malfunctioning toy. and now i'm lying in bed at 7am still replaying it and thinking about all the things i should have said. the tree is the whole point my guy. the tree is doing the work. you want me to make you a nice little abstract of some roots? go buy a print at homegoods.