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A gallery in Leipzig asked me for a small edition of risograph prints for their holiday market, 50 copies, two colors, A3. I said €250 because I thought riso was cheap to produce and I'd breeze through it. I forgot to account for the test prints, the misregistration on the first 15, the fact that I had to reorder one of the inks mid-run, and the two full days I spent separating the layers because the files the gallery sent were trash. Total cost of materials plus my time: somewhere around €17 an hour. For printmaking. That's less than I paid for the paper. I keep doing this thing where I price the work as if the thinking part is free. As if the years of knowing how to troubleshoot a bad registration or choose paper that won't ghost count for nothing. I just factor materials and a small gesture toward labour and call it done. I'm raising the next edition to €600 and I already feel like I'm being greedy. Which is insane, because €600 for 50 prints, two-color, A3, with original art, that's €12 a print. That's nothing. But the feeling is there anyway.

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.

A gallery in Barcelona wants to do a small solo show in October, my work, but also some documentation of process, which is fair, the whole thing is basically tidepool alchemy. They asked for my notes on the seawater development, dilution ratios, exposure times, how I account for different salinity levels. And I sat down to write it and realised I have none. I just know. I've been doing this so long I can feel it, the weight of the paper, the way the light sits, the smell of the water. I never standardised any of it because every print is a different day, different sun, different batch of Atlantic. I told them I'd put something together and now I'm staring at a blank page trying to remember how to explain something I only understand with my hands. I think this is the gap between making work and showing it. The making is private and intuitive and full of failure and small victories nobody sees. The showing asks you to translate all of that into something legible. I don't know how to do that without flattening it.

What's the longest a gallery has dragged their feet paying you after a sale? I'm not talking about the standard "net 30" that turns into net 90. I'm talking about the one where you had to email six times, where they had excuses every time, where you started to feel crazy asking for money they already collected from a collector. My record is 5 months. Small gallery, loved the space, they sold three pieces in the first month. Then silence. Every time I followed up it was "accounting issues" or "the collector hasn't paid yet" (which I later found out was a lie). Finally got paid after I threatened to name them on a Facebook group. Felt disgusting the whole time. Tell me your worst. How long? Did you ever not get paid at all?

ok so this is going to sound so small and obvious but I've been doing the whole "post consistently and engage in comments" thing for months and it's fine but it's also like... waiting for people to find you? and I got sick of it?? So last week I picked 12 accounts, not big influencers, just people with really good eyes who share art they love, some are collectors, some are just normal people with nice feeds. And I sent each of them a genuine message, like "hey I saw you reposted [artist]'s work the other day and I think you'd like what I do too, here's my latest piece" with a photo attached. No templates, no pitchy stuff. Six of them wrote back. SIX. One bought a small study on the spot, two said they'd keep me in mind, and the other three just had really nice conversations that made my whole week. One of them runs a tiny gallery I didn't even know about and invited me to submit for a group show. I think I got scared of DMs because it feels like bothering people? But if you're genuine and you actually looked at their feed and you're not just copy-pasting, it's... not bothering them?? It's just a person saying hi?? Anyway I'm doing it again this week with a different batch. Thought I'd share in case anyone else is staring at the algorithm like it owes them something lol

Had someone message me about a commission back in February. Wanted a small piece, maybe 40x40cm, in mostly smalti. We went back and forth for two weeks, she wanted a discount, wanted free shipping, wanted me to throw in a smaller piece "as a gesture." I held my ground, said the price is the price, and eventually she went quiet. I figured she'd moved on. Three weeks later the full amount shows up in my bank account with a one-line email: "Same dimensions as discussed, please proceed." No apology, no explanation. Just the money. I made the piece, shipped it, never heard from her again. Not even a photo of it on a wall. I still don't know what to make of that interaction. Part of me thinks she tested me and I passed. Part of me thinks she just got tired of negotiating and decided to pay. Either way, the lesson I keep landing on is: if you're confident the work is worth what you're asking, the haggling either resolves itself or it doesn't, and either outcome is fine. You don't have to win every conversation. Just don't be the one who folds first.