Update Summer 2025
I changed my mind. I would like to encourage you to think positively about selling your art, but I fear it’s quite possible, depending on your art form, you will not sell enough art to quit your day job.
You can try, though. I hope you will, and then come back and tell me my mother was right all along, that the secret to selling art is to make what people want to buy (in her case, flowers and butterflies), instead of making what you want to make (which in my case was edgy weird paintings and offensive caricatures of my family).
Still, here’s my pitch. Take what seems useful and toss the rest.
A book! For you!
Make money selling your art is my shameless attempt to leverage my years of knowledge, experience, education, and frustrations so you can do what I say, not what I do, and MAYBE sell more art.
You may not know this, but I have a PhD in marketing, which means I can confidently claim this book is based on time-tested marketing principles. The four main chapters focus on the four Ps, interpreted by yours truly: product, price, people, and promotion, in that order.
The final chapter of the book is about the business-y stuff artists would rather avoid. I won’t tell you what it entails because then you would run screaming into the night. Hint: Consider registering as an LLC if you meet with people in person.
The bonus chapter is my attempt to convince you that you should consider launching a website. Don’t laugh. It’s easier than you think. And probably more disappointing than you hope. I have a solution for that.
Available now on Amazon
I hope you will buy it and read it. Well, some of it. The parts that don’t make your eyeballs roll back in your head. I know marketing our art can be traumatizing, especially since a lot of us make art to deal with the trauma we’ve already lived through.
Making art is probably a compulsion to you—an enjoyable one, I hope. But marketing your art is likely another story altogether. I know it can be fraught. This book addresses all that delicious fraughtness and tries to convert it into actions that will help you earn money selling your art.
Need help now?
Check out Art Dialog with Christy and Carol
My friend Christy Strauch and I have launched an occasional podcast on YouTube. We discuss how artists can sell more art. Topics include basics like pricing and promotion. However, we’ve learned that having knowledge about marketing basics is not enough. Most artists are coping with the fallout of a lifetime of trauma, which affects how they feel about selling their work. Christy and I have fun digging into fizzy topics like why artists resist pricing and promotion.
Update Summer 2025. Art Dialog with Christy and Carol has been on hiatus. Life got in the way, but that’s not a good excuse to stop creating. Beyond the usual trials of living, Christy and I came to the realization that giving marketing advice to artists so they could fail at selling their art wasn’t all that satisfying.
We retreated and mused and realized that there are many reasons why artists balk at taking the actions to turn their art into a real business.
We think it might have something to do with past trauma.
We plan to resume our videos in the near future. Remember, we aren’t psychologists, but we are creatives, and we have some ideas about how we could be more useful to artists who want to sell their art.
Once we get over our past trauma, of course. Stay tuned.
Visit our website and our YouTube channel for some help to sell more art.