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Bit of an odd one. Last month I got tired of the whole posting schedule thing and did something silly instead. I had 200 small prints made of two sketches, the Russell Market facade and one of those tiled-roof houses off Modi Road, and I dropped a stack at the chai stall near my building, the one I sit at every morning. Stall owner said keep them, charge 150 each, he'd keep 30. Sold 11 in three weeks. One of those people tracked me down and now wants a full watercolour of her grandmother's house in Basavanagudi before it goes for redevelopment. I know it doesn't scale, I know it's not a "strategy." But I have been posting faithfully for a year and a half and the algorithm has given me roughly nothing. A paper stack on a tea counter did more in three weeks than 240 posts. Anyway. Curious whether anyone else has gone back to the physical, offline thing or if I'm just lucky with my chai uncle.

Had a meeting last Thursday with a gallery crowd up in Dublin. Nice people, real interest, they want six or seven pieces for an autumn show. Grand, I'm delighted. Then one of them asks about my "reach." Not followers, like, but reach. Offline. And I sat there like a lad asked to spell a word he's never seen. Because what do you say. I sell at the Saturday market in Galway, I've about 400 people on the mailing list I keep on paper in a shoebox with stamps, and my best bit of marketing this year was a woman called Breda telling her sister. That's the reach. Breda's sister. Ended up saying something about footfall and they wrote it down, so now I'm a man with footfall. Genuinely though, does anyone else find that the language changes when you go up a level and you're suddenly meant to have a system for something you've been doing by hand for fifteen years. Half of me wants to go back to them and say look, the numbers are small and the prints sell and I'd rather that than a big number that doesn't.