Artists and Photographers have a marketing problem. Let's fix that. Whether you're an emerging artist, a seasoned professional, or an art marketer, this podcast provides the insights you need to sell your art online and off. Join Patrick from Art Storefronts as he explores the latest trends in art marketing; featuring expert interviews, success stories, current events and trends, and deep-dive tactical marketing advice to help you thrive in the art world.
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I don't know, like, and trust you. Only you can fix that. Here is how.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 • Duration 46:58
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.
When a Buyer Asks for a Discount: How to Negotiate an Art Sale
Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 37:37
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.
How to Price Your Art for Q4
Friday, August 14, 2026 • Duration 51:22
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?
Q4 Prep for Artists: Half Your Buyers Start Before Halloween
Friday, July 24, 2026 • Duration 33:50
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
How to Sell Art Online Without Reinventing Anything
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 • Duration 26:56
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
Why Every Artist Should Take Commissions
Monday, June 22, 2026 • Duration 20:12
The most influential poster in the history of art was an ad for a play. It was designed by a broke, unknown illustrator who only got the job because he was the one stuck working over the holidays. His name was Alphonse Mucha, and that single commission — a rush job nobody else wanted — turned him into the father of Art Nouveau. He didn't sit in a studio and find his direction. A customer handed it to him.
Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar
That's the heart of this episode: a commission isn't a compromise. It's an idea-generation machine. A client drags you somewhere you'd never have chosen on your own — and every so often, that detour becomes your entire career. It happened to Mucha. It happened to a portrait painter named George Stubbs who took a few horse commissions and ended up the greatest equine painter who ever lived. It happened to a studio photographer named Dorothea Lange the day a government assignment sent her into the migrant camps.
But before we get to the good news, we have to clear out the lies. The longer you spend in this business, the more you realize the "sacred truths" of the art world are mostly nonsense — and most of them are really just hobbyist rules wearing a business suit. (If you've heard me draw the hobbyist-vs-business line before, this is where it earns its keep — same line that runs under The Long Game.)
In this episode:
The Christmas shift that invented Art Nouveau — how Mucha got the job nobody wanted and never looked back
Six "sacred truths" of the art business that are complete nonsense — and the one thing wrong with every single one of them
"You need a niche before you can start" — why you don't pick your niche; the work reveals it
"Good art sells itself" — the $128 of thrift-store junk that resold for $3,612 on stories alone, a $3.5M violin that earned $32 in a subway, and the painter who went from unsold to $2.5 million without changing a brushstroke
"Never discount your work" — why that rule is real, why it isn't yours, and what the galleries who preach it actually do behind closed doors
20 Ways to Grow Your Email List as an Artist (Online and Off)
Friday, May 29, 2026 • Duration 42:36
You don't own your followers. You own your list. Every platform you're on is rented — the landlord can change the rules or close the door anytime. Your email list is the one audience nobody can take from you.
Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar
The good news: it doesn't have to be huge. Three hundred of the right people is enough to run a real art business — which is exactly why you want three thousand, then thirty thousand, then three hundred thousand.
This is the foundational one: why email matters, the creative ways to capture it, and the latest tradecraft. Almost no artists do this well. (We covered why the basics outlast everything in The Long Game — this is the basics, weaponized.)
The unlock isn't new places. It's the places you're already standing — the booth, the bio link, the DM, the box you're shipping, the car in your driveway. Every one is a capture opportunity you're wasting.
In this episode:
The trifecta — phone, email, snail mail — and why email is the cheapest and easiest one to own
Hobbyist or business? The honest cut, and why every opportunity is an email-capture opportunity
The four online venues: your website (footer to popup to content upgrades), bio links, DMs, and comments
The 11–15 second popup rule — the delay that converts at 6.45%, and why a zero-second popup kills it
The Birthday Club, the new favorite opt-in: some people are birthday people, and if they are, they love it (3–4x)
Just ask, then shut up — the DM play most artists never run
The three offline venues: in-person events, the QR-code layer, and direct mail
The clipboard and the fishbowl — $0 plays that are 150 years old and still work
QR car magnets — the hero play nobody in art is running yet (about $35 a pair)
Direct mail at $0.40 a piece — your art in 1,000 mailboxes around your gallery for less than a Meta ad
Should Artists List Prices on Their Website? The Gallery Test
Tuesday, May 19, 2026 • Duration 35:18
There's one number that should end the price-on-request debate forever: artworks with visible prices sell 2-6 times more often than the same works with hidden prices. The data is in. The artists are still hiding the prices.
Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar
This episode runs the gallery test on your website. A real gallery prices the work, frames it, lights it, and puts a checkout at the desk. Christie's, Sotheby's, Gagosian, 1stDibs — every serious art business does this online too. Almost no working artist does. Today we close that gap.
In this episode:
The gallery test — the one rule every digital decision should pass
The 5 things almost every artist website gets wrong
"Oooooh so mysterious" — why "contact for pricing" is the gallery with the lights off
The shop is the signal: how a real storefront tells visitors they're welcome to buy
Why the biggest art sellers on earth all do this — and the artists somehow don't
The generational gut-punch: collectors under 40 don't tolerate hidden prices
Mix the feed the way you'd mix an opening — killing the "art-only Instagram" sacred cow
Why a gallery with the lights off on Wednesday loses every Wednesday walk-in
The data referenced (with sources):
Artsy, Dec 2019 — works with visible prices are 2-6x more likely to sell than identical hidden-price works
1 Image. 45 Mediums. 10% More Every Year. This Is What Print On Demand Can Do To An Art Business
Thursday, May 7, 2026 • Duration 38:14
There's a town in Texas called Round Top. Population eighty-seven. One square mile. And in that town, an artist named John Lowry sold a single painting for $141,500. (We toured his gallery on YouTube — link's right there in his name. Watch it before or after this episode.)
Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar
That's the headline. Here's the part nobody tells you: he then sold roughly $60,000 more in reproductions of that same image. Same painting. Different mediums, different sizes, different price points. One image, two hundred grand.
That is not luck. That is not a once-in-a-lifetime fluke. That is a system. And the same system is what Gray Malin uses to run a 4,156-SKU catalog with 221 variants of certain images. The same system is what Wyland — yes, that Wyland — uses to sell 972 products across 45 different mediums, raising prices roughly 10% a year for the last sixteen years.
This episode deconstructs the engine that makes all of that possible. Print on Demand and the sample ladder aren't two ideas. They're one engine. The artists at the top of this business have figured that out. Most artists haven't. We're going to fix that today.
But first — a quick rant about what gets in the way.
In this episode:
The $141,500 painting in a town of 87 people — and why the second sale is the lesson
The knife salesman pivot: why Print on Demand is a sample tool first, a profit tool second
Hobbyist or business? The honest question every artist has to answer
The Drain — four ideas clogging up most art businesses (you can't run a business / you can't run sales or marketing campaigns / you can't be perceived a certain way / never discount your work) — and why every pro you admire threw all four of them out
Why we study the masters: you studied Van Gogh and Ansel Adams in art school. Time to study the people doing it best in the business of art.
Why Your Website Will Still Be Working in 2055
Friday, May 1, 2026 • Duration 48:07
There's an artist I talk to every Wednesday. Could be 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s. Brilliant. 50 years of work. Galleries gone. No website, no email list, no story they can tell in their sleep — just the same panicked question every week: what do I do on social media?
Want to join Patrick for a live webinar? He hosts one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Register here: asf.today/webinar
I want to tell you about them before you become one of them. There's still time. That's the whole point of this episode.
The macro is brutal — Iran, gas, frozen real estate, no photography demand, AI panic. That panic is real. But on a 30-year horizon? It's noise. The basics in 2013 are the basics in 2026 are the basics in 2055. Build on the part that doesn't move.
In this episode:
The 78-year-old artist still asking the question — and the version of you that's still mid-vine
Why the macro doesn't matter on a 30-year horizon (the real estate parallel)
The trinity of what's not changing: attention, business ownership, the basics
The Six Basics — the list nobody wants to hear
#1: A website you own — storefront, not brochure. Plus the SEO foundation: own your name before the next paradigm decides who's allowed in.
#2: Print on Demand — sell what you don't have in stock. Unlocks the full pricing range.
#3: Capture email every which way. The trifecta: email + phone + address.
#4: Run marketing and sales campaigns. You are a business. The muscles compound — 1st campaign awkward, 50th a real machine.
#5: A story you can tell in your sleep. Know, like, trust — and things in common.
#6: Show up consistently. Do your measure best. Drop a tier when life happens. Just don't go dark.
The wine vintage frame: some years fire on all cylinders, some go sideways. The vine doesn't care.
The runway ladder: 45 → 40+ years still to come, 55 → 30, 65 → 20+. You are not at the end of anything. You are mid-vine.
The tragedy of delay — not the tragedy of talent
Why we built Copilot: a gallerist that keeps you consistent when life happens
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
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.
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.
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.
The line in the sand: hobby or business? Drucker said a business has exactly one purpose — to create a customer — and in that equation, you don't get the last word. The market does.
"Nobody bought it, so I'm a failure" — the lie that makes good artists quit, and why Picasso died holding roughly 45,000 of his own unsold works
Why constraints beat the blank canvas — Stravinsky, and the bet that produced Green Eggs and Ham in 50 words
The honest catch: when a commission becomes a cage instead of a doorway, and how to tell the difference
This week's homework: take the one commission you'd normally turn down — the weird request, the subject you'd never choose, the client who wants something slightly off from your usual. Say yes to it. Then watch where it drags you. Reply or DM me what you learned — I read every single one.
20 Ways to Grow Your Email List as an Artist — hobbyist or business, the honest cut
So here's the takeaway. If you're a hobbyist, make whatever you want, forever, and be happy — there's no shame in it. But if you want a business, stop waiting for the market to reward your purity, because it never will. Go meet it. Say yes to the commission, the weird job, the thing you'd never have chosen — because that yes creates a customer, which is the only thing that makes you a business, and it just might drag you, like it dragged Mucha off that holiday shift, straight into the work you were put here to make.
The compounding math — how the basics become $800K–$1M over ten years
Wyland and Gray Malin run this at the highest level — get on their lists and watch (see POD and Samples)
This week's homework: pick three tactics. One online, one offline, and one you'd never have considered. Set them up by Friday. Then reply or DM me your three — I read every single one.
So pick your three. A clipboard on the table, a real opt-in in your bio, a magnet on the car. You don't have to run every play — just start capturing in the places you're already standing. Followers are rented. The list is yours. All roads lead to email.
Artsy Art Market Trends 2025 — 69% of collectors hesitate to buy because of lack of transparency; 43% name "lack of visible price" as a top barrier; only 5% call the art market completely transparent
Art Storefronts — the website and storefront engine built for working artists
Walk into a real gallery this weekend. Then load your website. Stand them side by side. If your site doesn't make a stranger feel welcome to buy, you have work to do. The basics in this episode are the same basics in 2055.
Gray Malin, deconstructed: 4,156 SKUs, 16-year escalator, 221 variants of single images. What an artist with a real engine looks like under the hood.
Wyland, deconstructed: 972 products across 45 mediums. The 10%-a-year price escalator that compounds for decades. The catalog as a museum gift shop.
The Range Unlock: your catalog isn't N images. It's N images × M mediums × P price points. Most artists are sitting on 100x more inventory than they think.
Same image. Every price point. Why this is the single most important sentence in your art business.
The bottom rung IS the sample: a $20 mug isn't a giveaway, it's a customer-acquisition machine wearing a price tag
The Buc-ee's flex: how the cheap stuff at the front door funds the expensive stuff at the back wall
John Lowry, the customer mirror: an Art Storefronts customer in a one-square-mile Texas town doing exactly what Malin and Wyland do — at his scale. Proof this isn't a billionaire-only game. (Watch the full studio tour on YouTube.)
"You don't sell JPEGs" — the Brooks rant about why a digital file is not a product, and what the pros actually sell
How the Six Basics from The Long Game show up — receipt by receipt — in all three of these businesses
The artichoke storage room (you'll know what this means by the end)
This week's homework: audit your own catalog the way we just audited Malin and Wyland. Take your top 5 best-selling images. Count how many mediums you currently offer them in. Count how many price points. Now ask: could I responsibly add three more variants of each, this week, with Print on Demand? If the answer is yes — and it almost always is — you just found revenue you already earned but haven't collected yet.
Art Storefronts — the website + storefront engine built for working artists
Related episodes:
Why Your Website Will Still Be Working in 2055 — The Long Game (the parent episode this one builds on)
Humble Donkey Studio — the original John Lowry interview, July 2024
All Oars In — The Anatomy of a Sale
Nothing New Under the Sun — The Rules That Actually Sell Art
So: which 78-year-old version of yourself wins? The one still asking what to post on social media, or the one running a real engine — same image, every price point, compounding every year? You don't have to be in a billionaire's neighborhood to do this. You can be in Round Top, Texas. Population 87. The engine doesn't care where you live. It cares whether you build it.
This week's homework: audit yourself across the six basics. Score 1 to 5 on each — website + SEO, POD and pricing range, email list, campaign rhythm, story, consistency. Pick the lowest score. That's your priority. Start today — not next quarter, not when rates drop. Today. Don't be the 78-year-old still asking the question.
Nothing New Under the Sun — The Rules That Actually Sell Art (
The Algorithm Doesn't Care About Your Art
The Coffee Shop Test — Why Your Social Media Is Failing
You are not too late. You are exactly on time — if you start the basics today. Pick which 78-year-old you're going to be, and how many of the next 20, 30, 40 vintages you're actually going to fill. Pick. Then build.
