Your Work Is No Good...and Other Lies They Tell
Finding your people and helping them buy is harder than it sounds, but it's possible. First, you have to do pre-work and research to get ready to sell something.
If you haven’t tried to sell your work yet or need a refresher, read up on how to test the market and see if they're ready for your creative product.
Two voices that make you feel like a failure
If you did start, or tried to, you may have come up against the two Horsemen of the Apocalypse (in our world we don’t need four—two is plenty).
One of them is the voice that keeps you from trying to sell anything and says, “Your work is no good.”
The other voice, especially if you tried and didn’t “succeed” at selling is: “No one wants your work.” Then it might whisper, “You’re worthless.”
I put “succeed” in quotes because there are a large number of reasons why work doesn’t sell, if indeed it didn’t. (If you did sell stuff, Hooray! Now go try selling two products at once.) These reasons often cluster under two headings: wrong people/not enough of the right ones; and making it hard for the client to buy.
Notice in BOTH cases, the reasons have nothing to do with your work or your worth. They involve the mechanics of the selling process.
Two ways you might be sabotaging your art sales
You may be making it hard to buy. As much as possible, the purchasing process has to be fast and easy. This means you can’t default to the “Send me a DM (direct message) and we’ll talk.”
That’s an insurmountable barrier to most people. It is to me. I don’t want to find out the photograph I selected costs $1,000.00. That much money isn’t in my spending plan right now, and I don’t want to have to explain that to someone. I want to know the prices of things, so I don’t have to discuss my money situation with anyone.
If you don’t have a website that lets you add a shopping cart, Squarespace has templates with easy shopping carts, so does Big Cartel and Shopify. Big Cartel lets you sell from your Facebook page; I think Facebook does too. So you can sell from your free social media site and not even have a website yet.
You may not have targeted the right audience yet, or enough of them
The second problem—finding enough of the right people. Solve that problem by talking to the ones you have already. Interact with them. Read and comment on their posts. Look up more people to follow that you’re genuinely interested in and make friends. Do this for a month, then make sure it’s easy for people to buy, and try selling again.
If we weren’t all artists and creatives and had our self-worth so intertwined with our work, we would call this process I outlined above “Market Research.” It has nothing to do with self-worth, and everything to do with finding your people and helping them buy. The process itself is neutral.
Have you ever heard either Horsemen of the Apocalypse speaking to you? And more importantly, what steps will you be taking in order to move past their comments and sell your creative work? Let me know in the comments below.