5 Reasons Your Art isn't selling

Art Biz

Mar 10

Written By

I know that art can sell, and makers can profit.

It can be a wonderful side hustle or an amazing full-time job. It works for me and hundreds of other artists that I talk to.

I also know it can be incredibly hard to figure out how to do it. It can be hard to know who your audience is, where to find them, what to offer and how to price it. And on top of that, art is SO PERSONAL. You made this thing. You might have cried. You might have bled. Then you're like, hey it's $299.99, who wants this??? SO VULNERABLE.

So let's say you manage to make art, and you manage to show it to the world either in real life or digitally, these are two huge milestones by the way. Just getting this far is more than a lot of dreamers do! And then you manage to offer it for sale and….no one wants to buy? It’s a heartbreaker.

In this blog, I’m going to break down five things I commonly see when someone is struggling to sell their art.

1) Your art isn’t ready to sell

My 8 year old daughter painted pinecones with gold craft paint and sat at the end of the driveway on our dead end cul-de-sac trying to sell them to the passing cars. The work wasn't ready. The marketing needed work. But I had to love the entrepreneurism! So many artists try some version of my 8 year old’s sales technique. They whip something together and they throw it up for sale, and never mind that the passing cars are never going to stop. Maturity, unique voice, and technical mastery just takes a while to develop, and if you are very new to art it’s better to focus on just art for a while. Adding the element of selling adds an unnecessary stress and possible confidence destroyer. When will I be ready, you ask? See reason number 2 for some insight here.

2) Your Art isn’t consistent or cohesive

The second reason people struggle to sell their art is their body of work isn’t cohesive. This is a HUGE challenge for artists who want to try everything and do everything. Which is amazing and I love that energy so much! I think everyone should experience the joy of art making…. but, if you aren’t ready to niche down and discipline yourself to create a series with one style and one recognizable expression, you are probably not ready to sell in a reliable and consistent fashion. To the collector, the “try everything” artist just appears scattered and fragmented, and collectors feel more confident when it’s clear the artist knows who they are and what they’re doing. It’s like wandering into a shop and finding some high-end jewelry next to some screwdrivers next to some snowboards next to some bananas. And no, I’m not talking about an estate sale. If you are a new artist and you want to accelerate the maturing process, to get yourself to a place where you can sell sooner, I would strongly advise you to radically niche down to one expression and make a lot of smaller works to define yourself and your voice. Niche is not jail. You can always change up your expression as time goes by, but niching down is 100% a requirement for an artist who wishes to develop their voice and to have consistent sales.

3) You are making it too hard or confusing to buy your art

The third reason you might be struggling to o sell art is that there is too much friction in the buying experience. This happens online, but can happen in real life as well. In the psychology of the buyer, when they finally cross the threshold of deciding they want to give up their hard earned money for something, the seller needs to make it EASY, because the merest hiccup in the check out process will so easily result in an abandoned cart. This is especially the case when Lauren is selling her clay sculpture via Instagram DMs to Martine, a stranger. Martine is going to Venmo money to a complete stranger and HOPE she will mail her the thing and that it will be awesome. Lauren needs to do EVERYTHING in the world to make Martine feel that her purchase is secure and professional. A lot of times buying art from an artist online can feel like some kind of sketchy Facebook marketplace transaction and that doesn’t make a collector feel confident. A sales website, listing on Esty, or having a streamlined Paypal invoicing system can help solve this.

4) Your Art Photography needs works

The fourth reason you might not be selling your art is it’s not photographed well. If you are selling in real life then this isn’t as relevant, but even then pretty much no artist anywhere can get away with skimping on the photography. Ever. If the work isn’t represented will, no one will look twice. Good photography can be done with a reasonably updated smart phone or an inexpensive digital camera, so the equipment doesn’t have to be fancy. You’ll want the art to be photographed in good light, usually indirect natural light. Hot tip: You’ll want to make sure your lens (especially on your phone) is clean. The image should be in focus and no filters should be used that distort the color. You will probably need a bit of photo editing to tweak the color and exposure. Detail shots and wide shot are helpful for context. You want the photograph to be clear and look just like the actual art.

5) Your art is priced wrong

The fifth reason your art isn’t selling might be because it’s not priced right. And I don’t mean it should be cheaper. In a lot of cases, it should be more expensive. We don't want to get into a race to the bottom. With pricing, you need to put on your small business hat. You should download my guide Pricing Your Art Made Easy, for a full list of considerations when pricing. The highlights from that download are that you need to know your costs and your time, and add a margin on top of that. When you’re starting out, I recommend that you create a series of smaller works that are individually priced modestly, somewhere around the cost of a nice dinner out for 2. I imagine that would be something that takes you 1-4 hours to make and has modest material cost. I hesitate to offer hard and fast numbers, as every market is different, but the point here is you want your prices to be consistent and fair, and definitely differentiate you from competing with mass produced art from Home Goods.

To sum up, the 5 reasons your art might not be selling are,