The Art Marketing Podcast

You've nodded along to the story lesson all year and kept firing the art gatling gun. So I'm done teaching it. This episode, I become it. Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar I've never recorded an episode like this one. Three proofs that the art doesn't change, the story does. Then I run the experiment on myself, on you: the mini life story I've avoided telling for nine years. At the end, one question. How much more do you have in common with me now than you did forty minutes ago? In this episode: The two failure modes after every "yeah yeah, I get it": nod and revert, or one post and revert The art gatling gun. Art, art, art, one shot fired forever. What I see when I open your profile My hedge: the artist who did the exact opposite of everything I teach, to the tune of $347K, and the softball story about copying a fence-clearing home run What happens on a webinar when one artist opens with their story instead of their awards: the whole room asks for their Instagram Mona Lisa: respected, not famous, until a Louvre handyman walked out with it in 1911. Story added, value explodes Banksy: signed originals at $60 from an unmarked Central Park stall. Eight buyers all day. Story removed, value collapses Joshua Bell: a $3.5M Stradivarius in a DC Metro station, 1,097 people walked past. Context removed, excellence disappears How Elon Musk interviews: "Tell me the story of your life." Your art is the résumé. The story is the interview. Every collector is Musk I asked AI what my listeners actually know about me after nine years. It's embarrassingly thin Then the story: Hawaii, Pearl Harbor from a front yard, Boston Latin and MIT, Janis Joplin as the backyard band, an IBM under the Christmas tree, a john boat off La Jolla Scott and the nametag, the dog you end up walking, and the claw machine: every facet you surface opens another lane to your art "But I'm not interesting." Rare lanes are small, common lanes are enormous. Painting at 5am in half the garage is a bin with millions of people in it This week's homework: make the list. Every facet of your life someone could glom onto, the mundane ones included. Pick one and put it in front of your art this week. You don't know what's going to work. You do know art, art, art isn't. Resources mentioned: Hello, My Name is Scott by Scott Ginsberg — the nametag guy Banksy's Central Park stall, October 2013 — go look at the picture Related episodes: The Artwork Didn't Change. The Story Did. — where this year started 4 Prompts That Pull Your Story Out — if you need help making the list The Coffee Shop Test The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Art — memes are the fuel, this is the sorting machine When a Buyer Asks for ode

A buyer asks, "Can you do any better on the price?" Most artists feel their stomach drop — like they just lost something. I don't accept that premise. Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar It's my strongly held belief that more art gets sold at a discount than at full price — especially at higher price points, especially in person. Once you know that, everything changes. You can prepare for negotiation, and you can negotiate on your terms. Last episode we covered the maths of pricing your art for Q4. This one is what happens after the price is on the wall: the rules, the tradecraft, and why the buyer who negotiates is the best thing that ever happened to you. In this episode: The premise I refuse to accept: that entering a negotiation means you're the one losing How I learned to reject a premise — the story of why I haven't been offended in decades A car dealer, a real estate agent, and Thomas Crown — why negotiating an art sale is different from every negotiation you've seen The one metric (new customers acquired per year) and the long game: you're not playing a one-shot game, and that changes everything Sun Tzu was right — the battle is won before it starts Your three rules: know your floor, have a range of pricing, and never give something up without getting something in return Why negotiation is the greatest thing that's ever happened: it signals intent My Craigslist career — over a million dollars of cars, boats, and gear, and what the "$7,500 cash, I'll pick it up today" guy taught me The serious buyer drives over to look at the car — for an artist, that's the phone call or the Zoom Get out of the DMs: every step from message to email to call to in-person gets more real The asks list: what to trade for instead of dropping your price Q4 is coming — which means sales are coming, which means negotiations are coming This week's homework: write your asks list before Q4. Know your floor on every piece and be comfortable with it. And decide right now what you'll ask for the next time someone asks you to come down. Related episodes: How to Price Your Art for Q4 — the maths this episode builds on Advanced Pricing Strategies for Artists and Photographers — the pricing opus, including the original negotiation rule Discounting Your Art or Photography. Should You? Why Your Website Will Still Be Working in 2055 — the long game

Getting ready for this episode, I re-read everything I've ever taught about pricing art. Four years on, the rules haven't moved an inch. That's not a confession — that's the point. Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar Pricing your art comes down to one metric: new customers acquired per year. Everything else — the range, the non-wall-art, the bell curve — works backward from that number. This is the full pricing refresher pointed straight at Q4, plus four pricing plays I've never taught on this show before, each backed by real research. In this episode: Why "nothing new under the sun" is the best news your art business ever got The one metric — new customers acquired per year — and the Slack channel of $10,000 sales that proves it "But Patrick, I only sell to high-net-worth individuals" — the pushback, and the street-cred riff The socioeconomic bell curve: price points from under $100 to prestige. It's all just maths Gift buyers price the occasion, not the art — roughly $628 of gift budget across 8 gifts. Call it a $75–80 slot The catalog test where the $39 dress outsold the identical $34 dress — nines are the costume of cheap Originals end in zeros, mugs end in nines — but get precise inside a negotiation Stepped editions: the documented ladder that opens at $4,000 and hits $17,500 at 95% sold The January price increase — real December urgency, zero discounts Gift cards as taste-risk insurance for the buyer scared to choose for someone else This week's homework: walk your store like a gift buyer. Is there something at $25, $50, $100? Is anything merchandised as a gift? Does every slot on the curve have a price? Resources mentioned: Art Storefronts NRF Holiday Survey — the $628 gift budget Deloitte Holiday Survey — budgets flex, the gift list doesn't Stanford: It's the Thought That Counts — price doesn't buy appreciation The $9 Price Endings Experiments — the $39 dress study Magnum: Understanding the Fine-Art Market — stepped pricing Related episodes: Advanced Pricing Strategies for Artists and Photographers — the magnum opus this episode re-hits The Gallery Test — should artists list prices on their website? Q4 Prep for Artists — the race this episode trains you for The rules are the rules and the maths never lie. Set the range, cover every slot, put non-wall-art in the lineup, publish the ladder — and let Q4's gift buyers do what they came to do. Acquire as many new customers as you can this season, then market to them for the rest of your art-creating life. Your art will thank you. Stay Up To Date With The Latest

I've worked out with my buddy Dom for years. There's normal Dom, and then there's the Dom who has a race coming up. Normal Dom shows up when I show up and does the same workout I do. Race Dom shows up thirty minutes early, goes for a run first, and then does our entire normal workout on top of it. Nothing changed about Dom. What changed is there's a race on the calendar. Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar Q4 is that race. And it's the one you didn't realize I signed you up for. It starts October 1st, which is about two months out — and here's what most artists get wrong: mid-October isn't your launch. It's your deadline. Nearly half of holiday shoppers say they start before Halloween. By the middle of October, 40% already know exactly what they're buying. The big retailers figured this out years ago — Best Buy's own press release last year announced they were "putting the creep in holiday creep" and kicking the season off on Halloween. This episode is the broad game plan for getting ready. The tactics come next, week by week, between now and October. In this episode: Normal Dom vs. Race Dom — and the small detail in that story that's really the whole instruction manual Why the "Rule of 7" is marketing folklore with no study behind it, and the 1959 experiment that makes the point far better Effective frequency explained as reps and sets: the same 13 ads crammed into 13 weeks spike and then collapse; spread across a year, they hold The number that should worry you — by mid-October, 40% of shoppers already know exactly what they're buying Attention arrives in October. Money arrives in December. Why that's better news for artists than it first sounds Tell your story first, show your art second — and how that one reordering kills the "I don't have enough to post" problem for good Three questions to answer before you get out of the car: can you transact, are you open for commissions, are you actually marketing The Gallery Test pointed straight at December — what a real gallery does differently for the holidays, and the digital twin of every one of those moves The Bathroom Art Sale — how naming the destination removes the friction that quietly kills art sales, and why "under the tree" works even better Why commissions carry a hard deadline, and what that means for your October This week's homework: answer three questions honestly. Is your website set up so a total stranger can buy without having to ask you a single question? Are you open for commissions? And are you actively marketing right now — not in October, right now? Whichever one you answered no to is where the next two months go. Resources mentioned: Art Storefronts — the storefront engine for working artists Bankrate Holiday Spending Report — nearly half of shoppers start before Halloween NRF Holiday Survey — when shoppers really start browsing and buying Zielske, The Remembering and Forgetting of Advertising (1959) — the study behind the whole episode Related episodes: A Greek Warship, a Horse Named Sally — the full anatomy of a sale. Swap Mother's Day for Black Friday and run it Art-Selling Holidays You're Sitting Out — the calendar as a forcing function The Coffee Shop Test — why your social media is failing The Gallery Test — should artists list prices on their website? The Artist's Guide to Instagram Live — even if you hate being on camera Here's the takeaway. You've been creating for a long time. Not enough people have seen your art. You want to sell it — and Q4 is the single best window all year long to do exactly that. So enjoy your summer, genuinely, by all means. Just keep it in the back of your head that Q4 is coming, and start putting the reps in now. Your art will thank you. Stay Up To Date With The Latest https://linktr.ee/artmarketingpodcast

Few on earth has a website problem. Everybody has a marketing problem — and the fix is hiding in plain sight inside every art gallery in the world. Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar In 12 years and 15,000+ artists, Patrick has watched one truth play out over and over: selling art online isn't about reinventing anything. It's about copying the paradigm that already works offline — the art gallery — and refusing to play the short game. This is the "customary rant" that opens every Art Business Webinar, start to finish. The art gallery is the same in every country and culture on earth: minimalist walls, the art front and center, nothing else. That single paradigm tells you how to build your website, how to behave on social media, and why consistency beats talent every time. In this episode: Why artists in their 80s, 90s, and 100s still show up asking "how do I get my art seen?" — and what that proves about your real time horizon The "graveyard of hobbyists": whancer for an art business The one paradigm that sells art everywhere on earth — and how to copy it three ways Your website is not a canvas: whworst enemy online "Your art are the commercials" — the Art Gatling Gun that kills your social media, and the programming the algorithm actually r The open sign: why consistency beats talent, and the New Year's-resolution trap that gets every artist Art sells 50% story, 50% craft — and the REAL Vincent van Gogh story nobody tells you (hint: it's not "you have to die first") This week's challenge: walk your own website, your last 10 social posts, and your posting calendar, and ask of each, "Would this work inbout where you're running the Gatlinggun. Resources mentioned: Art Storefronts — the gallery-style storefront engine for working artists Join a live webinar — Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays with Patrick Related episodes: The Gallery Test — Should Website? The Coffee Shop Test — Why Your Social Media Is Failing Why Your Website Will Still Be Working in 2055 So here's the takeaway. You wouldn the real world — minimalist walls,art front and center, doors open six days a week. Stop reinventing it online. Copy the paradigm on your website, bring a human to your sociait — and give the work the story itdeserves. That's the whole game. Stay Up To Date With The Latest https://linktr.ee/artmarketingpodcast