Two trains, two tracks, no brakes

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick explores a novel way to rethink your art and photography career with the metaphor of 'Two Trains, Two Tracks, No Brakes.' Fresh from a reflective family trip, we delve into redefining success, focusing on key strategies for artists and photographers to achieve $100,000 in gross sales annually. We break down three primary paths: galleries, shows and fairs, and direct marketing. Through a relatable analogy inspired by an iPad game observed on the trip, the episode emphasizes the importance of continuously working on both your craft and marketing. Expect realistic insights into the challenges, dedication, and expectations necessary to build a thriving art business.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: [Music] Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, we're talking about two trains, two tracks, no brakes. Specifically, a new way to contemplate your art, your photography career, what you should be working on, and resetting your expectations for the greatest chance of [Music] success. Just got back from a trip with my family. For the record, I have a wife and two small boys. The trip was much needed as it gave some time to unwind and reflect and, as it turns out, to closely observe some interesting kiddo behavior. The travel days in this one were long and brutal. With a five and a seven-year-old, I did what any modern parent would do: I made sure the iPads were fully charged, had backup batteries, and paid for on-plane Wi-Fi. Older parents, how you did this without technological devices, I have no idea, but respect, respect to you guys.

My kids, both of them, were playing this particular iPad game in which things dropped from the sky, and in the left-hand corner of the screen and the right-hand corner of the screen were cats. You essentially moved, with either your right hand or your left hand, these cats side to side so that they ate these things that were falling from the sky. As I watched my kids playing this game, I watched a significant chunk of time being invested. I watched the repetitions and practice increase, and my kids were getting ever more dexterous and good at operating these two cats at once. It would start out with just operating the cat on the right-hand side, moving back and forth, then it would switch to the cat on the left-hand side, and then to both of them at the same time. You're driving the one on the left, you're driving the one on the right, and then the speed would increase and increase.

After observing this for a while, it gave me a chuckle because it's essentially the task before you as artists and photographers if you want to have a successful business. Hence, the two trains, two tracks, two cats. So let me start by defining what success is, and then we can get into these two trains, these two cats. To be clear, everyone has a different definition of success, different ambitions for the size of their business. But just to give this thing some teeth, let's start with some real numbers. Let's say a successful art business, for the perspective of today's podcast, is an art business or a photography business that is doing $100,000 per year in gross sales. Gross sales are before expenses, taxes, insurance, all of that. It's not what you take home at the end of the day, just your total gross sales.

For further simplicity, let's say the art business, the photography business in question, is directly selling fine art in the form of originals, limited editions, prints, and merch, not including other revenue sources like teaching classes or service side of a photography business. How are artists and photographers broadly speaking going to achieve, in 2023 and beyond, that $100,000 gross sales a year goal? In my experience, after talking to hundreds and thousands of you, having 10,000 plus customers for 5 to 7 years now, looking at all that data, everything I've read, it essentially boils down to three ways if you want to achieve a six-figure-a-year business in gross sales as an artist or photographer.

Number one, everyone's big dream: being in a gallery where they handle everything, and all you have to do is create. They handle all the marketing and the selling; you get paid. This sounds like a wonderful world, right? So let's say you did $100,000 in gross sales in a gallery. Great job, by the way. Well done. Then we subtract the 50% haircut that the gallery takes, and you're left with $50,000 in actual gross revenue. Then you subtract the money it takes to rent your studio, your materials, your camera gear, your travel, etc., and now we're down somewhere around $40,000 or $35,000 a year. Then we get to the painful part. Making $35,000 a year is not exactly a living wage and not exactly what everyone aspires their art career to be. The percentage of artists and photographers who are even in this situation, making $35,000 to the bottom line per year, is extremely small. I would say it's less than 5%, and that is being generous. Meaning, if I took 100 artists, all trying to sell their art or photography, five are doing $100,000 a year in a gallery. Again, that's being generous.

If we wanted to double those numbers to paint a rosier picture, or triple them, so artists or photographers doing $300,000 a year in gross sales in a gallery, taking home essentially $150,000 per year less expenses, over six figures a year, that percentage is less than one-tenth of 1% of artists and photographers attempting to sell. I get that data from a combination of sources: talking to artists, industry reports, the $20 million Sue Shark book (look that thing up on Amazon), and the Freakonomics podcast on the art industry. Wherever those numbers truly fall, the odds are just not good of making it in that modality. I compare it to the number of people you know who play a sport versus the number of people you know who are professional athletes in that sport. Those are sort of the odds. I'm not going all the way like lottery odds, but it's kind of like becoming a professional athlete. They're not good. So it's just not a viable path for most.

What is the second way? The second way is the Road Warriors, the show and fairs crowd, doing anywhere from 25 to 45 shows a year. Yes, you're dealing with the booth fees, the setup, the teardown, the weather, the long days on your feet, the travel, the crappy hotels, and the food. And yes, you have to deal with some shows being hits and some being duds. But on balance, if you do that number of shows, it's an extremely viable path toward getting to the $100K gross a year, and often beyond that. If you go down that path, you stand a way higher possibility percentage of getting to the $100K threshold. The reason most artists don't do it is because of life reasons. It's not just the booth fees and travel expenses, but you're away from your family, friends, and job. It's a difficult life, but it's also very beneficial. Difficult stuff always yields the highest results because you keep 100% of what you make. You end up acquiring emails if you're doing it correctly all year long, tons of them. You're acquiring new buyers, some of whom will turn into collectors, and those collectors are with you for life. If you're a young artist or photographer without kids, it's a great thing to do and knock out when young. It's a great thing to do even now if you can only do a couple of shows a year.

Some of my most successful customers at Art Storefronts did this in their younger years, grinding hard. Now, they're in their 50s and 60s with a great-sized art business, continuing to sell year after year to all the buyers and leads they captured over those years. Bottom line, it's a great way of doing it but not without a high level of difficulty and disruption to your life.

What is the third way? The third way is marketing and selling art directly to consumers yourself via your website and marketing. I believe this is by far the best choice of the three. The reasons for that are you are in total control, you keep all of your revenue, you know who purchases your work, and you can do it without leaving your house for the most part. I would even go as far as to say that out of the three, it's actually pretty simple to do. When I say simple, it is simple. It's simple but not easy. Not easy in that it takes years and years of marketing to get there, often selling almost nothing or very little for the first few years. That is a painful reality that nobody ever wants to talk about. Yet, if you stay at it and remain diligent, you can get there, stay there, and continue growing year after year. Bottom line, I believe it's the best option of the three, with the rub being that it takes years and years of getting good at marketing.

Those are the three ways to grow an art business today. I love seeing a blend of those three in any combination. The third option is just the most viable for most folks out there. Also, there are no other options I'm aware of that occur in anything resembling a trend or statistical significance that get you there. I've talked to tens of thousands of artists year in, year out, been doing that for years. Perhaps one out of that bunch claims they are doing even $50,000 plus gross on the marketplaces like Saatchi Art, Redbubble, or any of the rest of them. There's some fringe stories you hear here or there about weird additional revenue sources, but the big three are the big three. Those are the ones most people fit into. 

When you sit down and have a personal come to Jesus and say to yourself, "I am going to do this. I am going to make this happen. I want to have a thriving art business. I want to support my family with this. I want to build it into something amazing," and you come to terms with that, you're going to build something viable and long-term, a real business. The path becomes clear. It's either option number two or option number three. The odds of anything else happening to get you there are so low they're not even worth considering. If you are working on anything aside from number two or number three, you are likely laboring under false premises or working on utter, total, and complete nonsense. If

 you're not doing two or three, you're wasting your time, energy, talent, and life on hope, which just doesn't mathematically pencil. Once that time is gone, it's gone for good. We don't get that back. You're inflating left balloons. I could even say you're Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill only for it to come rolling right back down. Two roads diverged in a wood: one is the hobby path, and one is having a business.

I'm not lecturing from some high hill saying this is the only way to make it. By all means, do you. But these are the facts on the ground as I see them in 2023 that apply to most artists. Knowing that, accepting that, coming to terms with the fact that no one is going to market your art for you, it just doesn't happen in any measurable numbers. It's unicorn status if it does. You have to be the one to do it. This is where I arrived at my two trains, two tracks, no brakes. This is where I started in with, "Oh my gosh, my kids driving the cats." There's no difference in what artists and photographers need to do. It's the exact same thing. Your art business and all that it can become is essentially these two trains on two tracks.

The first track is your craft, your talent, your vocation, what you're creating, how good you are at it, how good you will become, what subject matter and materials you're creating with, the hours in the field with your cameras, or the hours in the studio with your brush or your pencil, your palette knife. All of that is just a train on a track. Sometimes it's going to feel like it's really going fast with the wind at your back, and sometimes it will feel like the train got derailed and is off the tracks, and you don't know what's going on. All of that is totally good and totally normal. Your job is just to keep that train moving on that track as quickly as possible and don't ever let it stop. No brakes on that train. We all know that. We all have that passion, that vocation.

There's another train, the second train, the second cat if you like, which is your other craft, your other talent, your other vocation. Realize that there is no one out there that is going to market your art for you in any effective manner to actually help you build a business. Realize that this train, on this track, this cat, is just as important as the first. No one's going to do it for you. It takes just as much practice as the first. It needs just as much dedication as the first. It is a train that sometimes will be going fast, other times it will crawl, and other times it will feel like it's derailed. But again, all of that is good and totally normal. Your job is just to keep that train on that track and keep it moving. Drive both of those cats, sometimes one at a time, sometimes simultaneously, and know that it's your job to get better and better and better. It's okay if the level resets and you have to start all over again. Totally normal.

My position is that all of this is actually quite simple but not easy. It's kind of been buzzing on Twitter recently, and I kind of like it. Simple but not easy. It's simple in the fact that it really simplifies your life. Again, if you're not working on moving either the first train or the second train down the track and you're working on something else, you're likely working on the wrong thing. The business is likely not growing. You can tell yourself you're busy, but unless you're working on train A or train B, you're likely working on the wrong thing. You can work on one and be busy with that, have a lot of focus on that, then you can go and work on the other one. You can get frustrated with one, then go and work on the other one. The whole point is to keep both of those trains moving down the track. That is the path. That is the way. Two trains, two tracks, and your job is to make sure there's no brakes on either train. I think it's actually really simple when you realize this.

Now, of course, it's simple and not easy. Not easy though is the fact that most artists' and photographers' expectations about what is possible, how fast this is going to happen, and how much money they're going to be making, and how quick that's supposed to happen, I believe is utterly, totally, and completely out of whack. This just seems to be the general consensus out there. It's something I continue to see across the board. I think there is a huge gulf between expectations versus reality. When you have the wrong expectations, it is utterly, totally, and completely a cancer that is going to derail you, demotivate you, depress you, put you in the depths, have you questioning yourself, thinking your mother was right, this should have been a hobby. It's a killer, and I'm tired of seeing it, and I want it to stop.

This all comes at a really interesting time in the creator economy writ large. It doesn't matter if you're an artist, a photographer, a financial advisor building your business on Twitter, a podcaster about a sports team, or a talking head news reporter releasing your shows directly on the internet, a writer, a comedian, a musician, anyone really. The internet has and continues to completely disintermediate the entire media and creator business landscape. The power of the gatekeeper is gone. The bureaucracies and hoops we had to jump through have been utterly, totally, and completely obliterated. The entire landscape and all these various niches are now controlled by individual creators with nothing more than their creativity and an internet connection, building massive businesses. That is such an exciting time. Just pause for a second. The fact that there are no roadblocks in front of you, artist or photographer, in building a monster business aside from understanding the landscape and your own output, that's amazing. It's a truly remarkable time to be alive as a content creator. This was simply impossible or nearly impossible to do a few years or decades before. Every single solitary industry is getting completely disrupted by individual content creators, sometimes with little teams.

For every crazy big story like the Kardashians and what they've been able to do, or Mr. Beast making YouTube videos about Squid Game to get more views than the actual show Squid Game, or Tucker Carlson leaving Fox, with whatever his audience was, 3.5 million viewers, and now he's doing 7 to 10 million, 45 million downloads on some shows. For all those crazy success stories about going through existing channels versus doing it on their own, there are tons of small ones too. Individual sports team podcasters that started as a hobby and are now making six figures a year, supporting their favorite team, or some of these crazy niche content providers I see, like people doing quilting shows and quitting their day jobs or music teachers selling courses directly and providing for their families. What I love about all of it, whether it's someone as massive as Mr. Beast or the quilter show, is they all have one thing in common: they grinded for years and years and years before anything really substantial started happening in their businesses. They spent thousands of hours working on the two trains on the separate tracks. They created their craft, then spent the time marketing it.

This brings me back to the expectations. This brings me back to the simple, not easy, and this notion of expectations. I've created my art, I've created my photography, I'm so awesome, I'm going to throw it up on the internet, not do any marketing, and boom, I'm going to have a huge business. Fish are going to jump into my boat. My audience is going to be like flicking a light switch. This is totally out of whack in this community. I don't think anyone takes into account just how hard it is to get there. "Patrick, I've been doing this for two years and haven't sold anything. I did everything that you said in that playbook. I made 10 reels and nothing happened. I didn't get any sales." I don't understand where this expectation comes from or where it started. Maybe as a society, all we do is celebrate the winners and the big success stories. If there's 10 hours of coverage, there's nine hours and 55 minutes on all the success and five minutes on the fact that this person worked 10 hours a day for four years until they even started making any progress, which is what I heard about Mr. Beast recently and his crazy work ethic.

You don't need Mr. Beast levels of success or Kardashian levels of success. You can have the level of success you design for your business. The takeaway is the opportunity is greater than ever. It's amazing, but you're going to have to do some grinding on train number two to get there. It's going to take some time for you to cement yourself, get good at marketing, start enjoying it, and realize it's your second job. I think when you come to terms with these facts, the fact that it takes three to five years to build anything of value in today's day and age (Steve Jobs said that), that you might sell nothing or very little for your first few years as an artist or photographer starting out, that it's painful, hard, frustrating, deflating, and exhausting at first, but this is the path. This is the way that everybody has to go through. They have to fight through those periods of adversity, especially early on, until you get to a point where things start happening in your business. I believe that when you come to terms with this, everything in your business will start to change. You will give yourself the freedom and time to get the business going, to stay plugging away on both trains—your vocation, the art, but also your new vocation, which is getting good at marketing and promoting yourself, learning how to sell it, and learning

 how to social media market.

You realize that the marketing train, like your art, can and will be a beautiful thing if you just apply your creativity to it and stay at it. You're not supposed to like it at first, but in time, it really does become fun to figure out how you can leverage these incredible social media platforms to get the word out about your art, your photography. I really do believe there's never been a better time. There's never been a better time as an artist, photographer, or individual content creator. The fact that we can press some buttons on a phone and create content, whether it's about you, your art, your process, what makes you tick, your brand, if you're into dogs or cats, do you do CrossFit, live in Hawaii or Vermont, are you a foodie—all those things that get potential buyers bonded with you. The fact that we can tell those stories just using our phone and potentially reach thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people—there's never been a time in history like that. It's amazing. It's simple to do. Simple, not easy. Not easy, right? We come to terms with the fact that none of us are entitled to anything aside from the sweat of our brow and our marketing. There's no one that's going to sell your art for you, your photography for you. There's no one that's going to market Art Storefronts as a business for us. We have to do it, and consistency at the end of the day is undefeated. It is the winner 100% of the time that it is tried. Setting these expectations upfront is one of the most beneficial things we can do for customers, and I'm hoping it's the same for you, my loyal podcast listeners.

Over the years, no company's perfect, certainly not us. When the expectations are set incorrectly—someone at Art Storefronts is trying to sign someone up, promising them this, promising them that, promising them the world, and saying they're going to take care of the marketing for you—even if that person has great art and is decent at marketing with a serious aptitude to want to learn and good technical acumen, when the expectations are set incorrectly, i.e., it's going to happen, it's going to be easy, it's going to be quick, you don't have to do anything, you almost never rescue that person as a customer. It is such a powerful thing, this notion of setting your expectations correctly. Show me someone you define as successful, that's doing well, whether in a gallery, doing shows, written up in a magazine, selling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In every one of those cases, there is a backstory about how long and hard they worked to get where they were. That's okay. It's awesome. It's reality. When you realize that, when you set your expectations accordingly, when you give yourself the freedom to struggle and suffer for those early years to get this business going, it is just such a massive advantage. You have the wind at your back, your expectations in the right place, you're going to work harder and for longer when everyone else quits.

When everyone else treats their marketing, the second train, the cat, like a New Year's resolution—I'm going to the gym, this is going to be my year, but the expectations are not set correctly. You're going to the gym four days a week in January. Times get tough by March. You haven't been once all month. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. You wake up, you're 80 years old, your life is over, and you never gave your art business a shot. It's all about expectations. It's all about having those correct expectations set. When they are set correctly, where everyone else quits, you're going to go blowing by—Road Runner status. Boom. You're going right past that trap every single solitary time because your expectations are set correctly. I continue to find that properly set expectations are one of the greatest assets you as an artist or photographer can have. It's going to be tough at first. It's going to be some painful years. You're going to have to learn some technology that you don't probably like. You're going to have to get good at doing something. You're going to have to come out of your shell. You might have to start getting comfortable being on video for the first time, which none of us like. It's all good because it's all part of the process, and it's all focusing on that second train.

You get those two trains humming on those two tracks, you get those two cats eating everything, you are going to be on the path to having a successful business that you will have for the rest of your art-selling life. There's never been a better time for it. That is exciting. That is really exciting. Now that that's off my chest, I can get back to the tactical, for which this podcast is so heavily known. I'm really hot on Instagram right now, getting incredible results on Instagram, marketing myself like a lunatic on Instagram. I've got a ton of stuff to teach on there, and it's going to start off with this next episode on what I believe should be the OMTM—the only metric that matters in your art or photography business right now. I'm going to explain that metric, break down Instagram as a social media platform, and then we are going to get into the tactical—show and tell, how to do it, what you need to be doing, and how you can get that second train rolling on that track. As always, thanks for listening. Have a great day. [Music]