Artist Lindy Severns
In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick sits down with talented artist Lindy Severns, who shares her inspiring journey of thriving as a professional artist in remote West Texas. Despite the challenges of limited resources and a fluctuating economy, Lindy achieved remarkable success, selling over six figures of her art last year. Discover how she navigates the art world, balances gallery representation with direct sales, and leverages digital marketing strategies to connect with her audience. Tune in for valuable insights on building a sustainable art business and the importance of consistency in marketing.
Podcast Transcribe
Lindy Severns: I want to sell at museums. I want galleries to sell my pieces, but mainly I want to sell them myself online. You can break all the damn rules and do whatever the hell you want because you have the demand, and that's really the only thing that matters in this entire business. Like one of the things that I rant about all the time is that pricing rant, right? And how important that is. And I do believe in that firmly. And one of the things I make fun of all the time is this stupid formula for how to price your art: hours of time spent times the material times the medium, which just... that only works if you have demand.
They've been following my work for something like 15 years, as it turned out. I'd never met them, never heard of them. 15 years—that's how long it sometimes takes to make a sale in this business, right? Market consistently, yeah. And then the trust was there. It's like, "Okay, we're gonna give you a whole lot of money for this big piece." What do you feel like the biggest gains you've made digitally from a marketing standpoint, certainly since starting with us, but especially like in the last year? What do you feel like really moved the needle in terms of outbound marketing in the digital context?
Patrick Shanahan: I've been tons more consistent. I've always painted consistently, but I've been equally consistent this last year with my marketing.
Lindy Severns: All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Art Marketing Podcast. The last couple of episodes were of the hardcore tactical nature, and now I'm really excited to get to go back into a customer interview. And not just a customer interview, but for Lindy, a big year last year, which we will get into, and a very exciting headline. And Lindy has an African gray, which, for those that do not know, is the most loquacious of parrots on the planet. Really excited for this interview. It gives me great pleasure to introduce artist Lindy Severns. Lindy, how you doing?
Lindy Severns: I'm great, Patrick. Glad to be here.
Patrick Shanahan: Very excited to have you. Why don't you give us the quick highlight introduction—who you are, what you do—then we can start drilling into things from there.
Lindy Severns: I'm a crazy artist with a parrot, to start. But yes, behind that, I've been a professional artist almost all my adult life in one form or fashion. We live—I like to explain it that we live three hours from the nearest shoe store. Women relate to that. We live on a mountainside on a friend's ranch in Far West Texas, and we're equidistant between El Paso and Midland, so we're just really remote. So I've had to, since we moved here, learn to do everything myself. I don't have resources that I can go to. I don't have a framer locally. I can't buy supplies locally. I certainly don't have marketing resources, and hence, Art Storefronts is huge.
I've been a full-time professional artist since 2005. Before that, I did commissions. I did whatever, and I did the usual—the festivals and the shows and all. But my husband, when we married, was flying corporate jets, and so this has been my life, which means on-call, no schedule. It wasn't fun to go to shows alone. It just wasn't fun to set up a booth. You do that just a little. Well, he did that for half our marriage, and then one day he needed a co-pilot, and we had met at the airport, so I was a pilot, but I was nothing like he was. So he said, "Would you consider just flying right seat for me for this trip? I just need a warm body over there." And one thing led to another. Anyway, he trained me in the jet, and we flew together for 17 years.
Patrick Shanahan: No way!
Lindy Severns: Way. And we're still... we just celebrated our 50th anniversary last week.
Patrick Shanahan: Congratulations. That's amazing. There's so much to unpack in there. It's crazy. I was going to ask you because I love camping, and where I live in Southern California, we go out all the time. I own several trailers. My kids are all into motorcycles. So I saw the clear, mistakenly sliding glass window behind you of an RV. So how are you keeping internet out there? Do you have Starlink?
Lindy Severns: No, we just have Wi-Fi, and it's undependable, and it's sometimes slow, but we have Wi-Fi from out of Alpine, and it's just a rural Wi-Fi thing. When we first moved here, we didn't... we were out of luck. And we literally one day walked in, quit our jobs—and of course, we worked for the same guy—quit our jobs, sold our house overnight, and bought a big RV. And we're in our second RV. We love the lifestyle.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, windows. We love it. After flying and having no schedule and not being able to plan anything, boarding the animals—we have two, we always have rescue dogs—we have two dogs, two small dogs. Must be wonderful. We don't fly anymore. If the animals can't go, we don't. We don't do cruises. We just... if the animals can't go, we don't. And we're not quite that crazy, but we literally have been there, done that. We had that kind of lifestyle, and it's been so comforting just to be cozy and at home and everything, which... yeah, we've done this for 20 years now, and it's good for art and bad for art. I thought when we quit working, I was going to paint more. I was going to do sidewalk shows, maybe travel around and in New England do like a little festival on the beach or whatever. Never did that. Never. Just accidentally landed in a place that responded strongly to my art.
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing. And I want to show off some of your art. I've got your website here, so I can bring in the screen share, and then while I'm showing off some of it, you were going to frustrate some people because you're living the 20-year-old's life of the digital nomad, right? You're like off the grid, like anywhere, spotty internet, and yet you manage to sell over six figures of your art last year, which is a very difficult thing to accomplish. And in addition to that, you don't have a huge social media following. So how are you getting it all done is question number one. I think anyone that looks at your art probably it's very easy to understand how you've done that because obviously you've been doing this a long time, and you're very talented at it. But what type of artist would you say you are? And showing your work on... as far as if I had to do the short thing, I say I'm a landscape painter, but I also do... I actually did portrait commissions back in my love book days. I love to do figures. I love to do animals, and I do all my own photographs. So it's critters—it's the coyotes and the foxes and javelina that we have out here. And I love to do wildflowers. I have a biology background. My degree from Tech was in English and biology, not art. I love to do like little 5x7 wildlife studies or 5x7 real close-ups of wildflowers—not Georgia O'Keeffe, but also not so technical that they're not arty. So I combine all of those things.
I had never done anything as far as skies until we moved here, and we live on the south plains. Beautiful skies up there, but it just never occurred to me to incorporate skies into my paintings. I would do intimate forest scenes or a river with rocks, whatever. It just... how you think of these things at three in the morning. I woke up, and I thought, "I need to just like do this sky with all these colors that we see out here at sunrise, sunset." Everything's bigger in Texas too, right? Including those sunsets, those West Texas sunsets. And what I love about this area is we're in the mountains. We live at 6,000 feet, which surprises people. They don't even realize Texas has that. Wow, yeah. But out here, the sky is so vast, it dwarfs the mountains. And I did a sky, and I... that's what I'm known for. I use that term very loosely. I'm a really big fat fish in a tiny pond, but it works. I don't have to be everything to everybody. And so I also call myself a sky painter. And most of the claim that I've gotten or the interest that's pulled me into other opportunities has been because of my skies. Jim says—my husband says—I'm channeling all those years at 35,000 feet in the jet, and that may be true. You look at a thunderstorm very differently if you think that if you skirt it too close, you're going to die. Pretty clouds have rocks in them. You're probably uniquely qualified to paint those guys based on how many different angles you studied them your entire lives.
Patrick Shanahan: They're very real to me. That's amazing. Okay, Instagram's telling me we don't have sound. Sound? I don't know. Rich says they've got it. Oh, whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm recording it. Absolutely amazing that you've been able to accomplish that. I would love to unpack because the reason I say absolutely amazing that you were able to accomplish it is not based on how I see your work that I'm amazed at how you accomplished it. Absolutely amazing that you did it, and what traditionally most people are saying was a very down year. It was a recession year with inflation rising out of control, and it's impossible to talk about how crappy the economy was without going down political rabbit holes, which I have no desire to do. But people were hurting last year. I looked at more than enough data. Like, it was not a banner year for most folks, and yet you hit a record in your personal business. So I'd be very curious to unpack that.
Lindy Severns: I belong to Art Storefronts. We'll take that. We'll take that endorsement. The reason I joined—I joined in 2020, and I actually forfeited... I'm getting off track, but it's... I actually had a website with another company, and I forfeited a year of that because I'd looked at Art Storefronts for about a year and a half or two years seriously in terms of signing on. And it was working. It was fine, but 2020 hits, and we're in lockdown, and I thought, "If I'm going to jump off this deep end here, this is the time to do it. I have all the time in the world right now." And I also thought it was going to be critical to have more control of how my art sold and to have the website selling my art. And my first website was built... I built my first website from "Building Websites for Dummies." That's how I learned these things.
Patrick Shanahan: Oh, I love it. Yeah, books.
Lindy Severns: But I built it in 2007, so you can imagine. Yes. And of course, it wasn't just for artists. Anyway, I have literally sold off that. I was on Etsy. I've sold online before, so it wasn't new, but primarily my sales were galleries. And there's a museum in Alpine, which is in the Big Bend area, that I've been really lucky to be associated with an invitational show each year, and so I had some sales there too. But you know, again, that's not year-round. I wanted to have control of my own business. I wanted to sell as much as I could myself. So also, I had not been doing open edition prints. I'd not been doing print on demand. I did small prints. I called them mini prints—5x7s that I'd throw in a mat, print myself, sell at little coffee shops or wherever. The galleries loved them because it gave them something, and I was selling them for... and this is four years ago, okay? I was selling them for $18 matted, 5x7. Amazing. Amazing price. Sold, of course. I sold millions. You're not going to ever get rich selling $18 prints.
Patrick Shanahan: Were you... were you in a scene with that? Were you getting the contact information when you were doing that? Or no?
Lindy Severns: Yes, yes. I was selling prints and cards and notecards, and I still print my own notecards because I've done this for so long, and I put my contact information on the back of every notecard. Okay. And also, any gallery representation goes on the back of that card. And so that was how I was contacting people and staying in touch. But again, working full-time, painting, doing this, dealing with galleries, I was talking about wearing thin. And so Art Storefronts will at least give me a direction, and instead of trying a little of this and a little of that, I'll at least have somebody going, "Just do that." Yes. So I joined, and within... within the first... I joined in April, so I got in. My website was up in 24-48 hours because I had built websites before, and this website... amazing. Makes me so happy. There's people that drag it out for months. We build it for them, and they still drag it out for months.
Patrick Shanahan: Yes. Well, you can't get it perfect. You know, it's never perfect. Just do it, and then you correct things as you go along. Just do it.
Lindy Severns: I'm very impulsive but also methodical about that. So within... my website was up within 48 hours. End of April, first of May. By the end of June, I had paid my entrance fee, my sign-up, whatever. Now, I hadn't netted that, but I had grossed that. Yes. Because I had never printed open editions before, and all of a sudden, I had all these people out there who couldn't afford originals who had $18 prints or a notecard, and all of a sudden, I'm offering the same painting to them as a large print. Yes. And I was also... I was selling at probably the 250%, maybe 300% markup. I wasn't trying to get a lot of money for it. I was just trying to sell these things. Yes. And so it was a wonderful flurry, and then I, of course, started raising my prices, and it just... so I had opened up a whole new market for myself.
Patrick Shanahan: And I don't know if you've heard how many rants about this, but like the range of pricing is so critical, and it's so critical for one reason more than anything else. And I could make the argument that in the short term, you opening up the middle of the range, right? Because your originals started at several thousand, and then you had these $18 things. You had nothing in between.
Okay, you had the prints, and now you've got the in-between. It's just as important to have those $18 ones long-term as it is to have your middle-range ones because what no one understands is that in any business, the easiest customer to get is the one that you already have. Mathematically, it's much easier to get a customer to come back and buy again than it is to acquire a new customer for the first time.
No one ever says anything like that. And then the force multiplier in art is that people get laser-focused on artists and become collectors, and they have this collector desire in that bond that forms with artists. That's not going to happen at a laundromat or some place selling shoes—not to the same extent and certainly not over the course of the rest of your life where you're going to be selling and creating art every single solitary year because you guys never turn it off. And I look at so many businesses like yours where it's like pre-having the range where at the end of the year, they're like, "I had a great year." I'm like, "Okay, how did you do?" "I sold seven pieces." And I'm like, "That's amazing. You sold seven pieces."
Even if you sold them for $10,000 a piece, at the end of the year, you only have seven people to market to.
But when you have all the people buying the $18 things, the ones in the middle, and the ones at the high end, at the end of the year, when you send an email that you're having a sale to 300 people, the math says you're going to get way more revenue that way.
And then guess what happens in year two, year three, year four, year five, year six? It’s the artists who have gone their entire lives without that range that break my heart. Every year, the number of new customers you acquire is the ballgame. It’s the whole ballgame.
So I love that you figured that out—albeit late in the operation—but you’ve got it now.
What do your originals start at now? I see $425 on prints, right?
Lindy Severns:So for originals, if I'm doing little things—and I love to do large and small and everything in between—the smallest I'll do is 3x5 or 4x6 inches. Because I can sit in my rocking chair and do these, or sit out at the table, those will go framed for about $550now. My normal small piece would be a 5x7 frame, and that’s $625now. And those sell. And I also... I do watercolors, oils, and pastels, and I'm a pastelist. That's my passion, but I love the other two mediums, and I sell them for the same price. And I fought my galleries for years about this because anything under glass supposedly you don't get as much for. And oils are... the mystique of an oil painting, and that's true. It's there. But then watercolors... poor watercolorists just sell for so much less, and some of them are fantastic painters, and they... I think they're devaluing their work because perhaps like local shows or exhibits, it's just... it's become a tradition that's not as valuable. Mine are, and they sell. The only difference in my pricing will be slight accommodations for framing because the pastels can be very expensive to frame. You know, the oils I may have to buy a big panel, and everything that's more costly. And so I may... with that, there's a difference. There's some variation, but I really fought that.
Patrick Shanahan: Well, and then the... I did my largest... maybe not the largest piece I've ever done, but the most I've ever gotten for a piece, and I sold it for $18,500 last year, and that was 36x48, I think. This is big dog. Was that a first-time buyer? Was that a repeat buyer?
Lindy Severns: First-time buyer.
Patrick Shanahan: And that was an unframed price?
Lindy Severns: I got so into it. I ended up... and it was gallery-wrap, so it was meant to be unframed, but I got so into it and working with the people that I ended up putting a frame on it. It cost me $200 wholesale frame, and made friends for life by doing that.
Patrick Shanahan: Always do. How did you find the buyer?
Lindy Severns: The buyer was referred to me by... I'm currently in two galleries—one real gallery, one sizable gallery, and then one over in Marathon at a boutique gallery there. And the Old Spanish Trail Gallery owner had visited with these people, and they had seen my work over... shown at shows and shown in galleries and exhibits. They've been following my work for something like 15 years, as it turned out. I'd never met them, never heard of them. 15 years—that's how long it sometimes takes to make a sale in this business, right? Market consistently, yeah. And then the trust was there. It's like, "Okay, we're going to give you like a whole lot of money for this big piece." And so anyway, so it was a referral. And I try to treat the galleries really fair. I gave them the full... yeah, no, I don't do 50% galleries anymore either.
Patrick Shanahan: I don't have to because you have demand. And I'm dying to hear that. So let's drill into that because it's like such a rare conversation. Number one, everybody would want to ask is how are you navigating the relationship of being in the galleries that you are and yet also selling direct on your website?
Lindy Severns: Really upfront and really fair. If I have to err on the side of... did the gallery bring me this sale, or did I generate it myself? I always give it to the gallery. It's not worth cheating a gallery, and they do... the way I try to explain it, I'm the liaison between this gallery, which is... it's like a... it's a large gallery. Anyway, it's out remote, but it makes good sales. The way I explain it to artists who are considering coming into this weird remote, by-appointment-only gallery is even if you come out and it turns out this is not your market and you don't make good sales, the gallery adds prestige. You put this on your resume or on your... you're paying... if you're part of a gallery, you're indirectly paying for that prestige, and you owe it to them to give them the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I didn't know these people. Yes, he'd been looking at my work. Perhaps the museum was the original connection that referred him, but I wasn't there. I was at this gallery, and it was clearly there. So they got their full commission.
On my website, I tell them this. I list everything on my site, and if it's listed at one of the galleries, it's as if the gallery owns that painting. Yeah. And you know, they have custody, at least. They're the foster parent. And so I'll list it, and I'll do everything I usually do, and then I put a little line at the bottom and say, "Currently hanging at Old Spanish Trail Gallery and Museum." I usually will add a link. I've found that it's easier if I put, "Contact me for help buying this." Yes. And then I'll call the gallery owner and say, "Hey, I've got a sale for you." I put the price there, and then on my Art Storefronts side, I put zero down at the bottom so that they can't check it out, which is, of course, nightmares. You sell the painting twice somewhere.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, that would be good.
Lindy Severns: But so they contact me. I pick up the phone immediately and call the gallery owner and say, "We got this." And if necessary, I'll even run the credit card. I'll run it through my stuff and then pay the gallery a commission back. I had a 95-year-old man buy himself a painting for his birthday. I think this is year before last, but... and he was up in Maine or somewhere. He was way, way far away, and he really didn't... he just... he was not going to click online or call somebody. He just wanted this painting. And so I did the whole thing for him, and the paperwork can be a little more difficult than just... but he got the painting. The gallery got their commission. I got my commission. Everybody... the guy was happy. So I do whatever works for the client, and I don't go into a gallery that won't do this. And I know some won't, and it's not fair to try to impose your own will on a gallery. They have their own way of doing things, but I won't do that if the gallery won't give me the respect of trusting me to handle these people because you won't work with them. And you know, it stays kind, and so it all works. But I put everything on my site, and that's one of the biggest benefits of having a great website is that it's flexible enough.
Patrick Shanahan: Yes. And it's funny because I'm sitting here listening to you, and it's... I've been doing this for a long time, right? Teaching artists and the marketing side, the nuts and bolts side of the business, and how to get into it, and whether it's education material that comes from us or it's the prevailing wisdom out there that's online or the traditional wisdom or whatever it is, what I see time and again is one, everyone's struggling to try and make their first sales and get going, and they bang on to all the wrong things. "If I just know what the right size is, if I just know what the right media type is, if I just know what the best niche is..." All those things. And then there's the rules that you should all be following, but like the things that have stuck out to me on this call, and I've had calls just like this with other artists that are successful like you, it's like you can break all the damn rules and do whatever the hell you want because you have the demand, and it's really the only thing that matters in this entire business. Like one of the things that I rant about all the time is like that pricing rant, right? And how important that is, and I do believe in that firmly. And one of the things I make fun of all the time is this stupid formula for how to price your art: hours of time spent times the material times the medium, which just... that only works if you have demand. Otherwise, it's just nonsense, right? Someone's either going to buy it or not. In your case, you don't care, to your earlier point, whether it's an oil or whether it's a watercolor when there's behind glass. You have demand. These galleries will work with you because you have demand. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. And it's like with it, you can do anything, and without it, you're stuck spinning your wheels trying to get to that level. And I'm sure there's a lesson in there. I'm not technically sure it is there, but maybe it is there. It's just the meritocracy of the whole thing.
Lindy Severns: You know, I think I've learned... again, I've done the gamut, but not full tilt because we were on call. I'd sign up for a show, and then I couldn't be there, and different things. But I've done galleries, and I've been lucky with that. I've been in some good galleries. I've done the festivals. I've done coffee shops and boutique gift shops and everything, and you learn from each thing, and you take what that's giving you and then apply it somewhere else. And so that helps. But so much of it is you got to be there working all the time, and when that break comes, you're ready for it. I've never had to say, "Oh no, I can't do a solo show. It'll take me two years to get enough stuff together without taking it out of my galleries or something," which I... I work whether the economy is good, whether the economy is bad. I work whether I'm depressed or whether I'm elated about sales. I work when I'm sick. I work.
Patrick Shanahan: Why am I... why am I surprised? Hashtag, I'm not surprised that you're extremely successful based on the fact that you've been grinding that hard for as long as you have and just a... the pain of finding a picture before. You've been doing that for however many years that you were also a pilot in which your life consists of when someone with a lot of money wants to get on a plane and go somewhere, you need to be there within a couple of hours to get that thing gassed up and go sometimes, which is not an easy life to live. You're on call to some extent.
Lindy Severns: Um, yeah.
Patrick Shanahan: Which is just amazing. So I got so many rabbit holes I want to go down. Last year's sales—the six figures. Then what percentage was through the gallery? What percentage was direct on your website?
Lindy Severns: Oh, I should have done this for you. Vastly, the biggest percentage was on my website. Like, best I... I would say 80%, maybe 85%.
Patrick Shanahan: Are the galleries in high-traffic towns? Are they small-town galleries?
Lindy Severns: Oh, this gallery is on a mountainside. The other gallery I'm at... a place called The V6 at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, and the Gage gets the... best little... best luxury hotel, little luxury hotel in Texas award. They're just... it's who I'm targeting. But I only take them... I don't take them large work. I only take them not miniatures, maybe 8x10 or something. So I do that. The gallery out here is by appointment only, but it's very close. It's on the ranch that I live on, and the rancher owns it. But see, there's sometimes a month where you don't have any traffic, and then you'll have $20,000 in sales in a two-day period. Just boom. So it's very erratic, but it's been very successful. It's been open for 10 years now.
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing.
Lindy Severns: And it targets people who want to... our target is... as I say, I'm not... it's not a C, I'm not an employee, but that's the way you should feel about a gallery. It's ours. It's a cooperation, a partnership. Our goal is targeting tourists who want to take a piece of this very unique, beautiful country home with them, and they come in primed to buy art. So it's very low traffic, very high sales.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, high intent. Yeah, qualified leads, qualified buyers come in.
Lindy Severns: Yeah. And it gives... usually, my husband will go with me because we're on a mountainside, and you really don't know. Maybe it's the ax killer coming in to see art. I joke. We get nice people, but if we have an appointment, if at all possible, he'll go down with me because we found if there are two people, one's maybe a lot more interested in the art than the other, Jim and I work together for a long time, so we divide and conquer. And we'll just intuitively latch on to one of the people and, "Oh, you want some coffee? Can I get you a glass of wine? Or you know, come and say, 'There's deer at the feeder. You want to come watch these deer?'" And so while the other one sells art, and we switch off according to who got the personality type or whatever. Yeah. And so if possible, we take the gallery visits. I actually carry the gallery phone because it doesn't work at ranch headquarters, which is how remote we are. That's... and so I make the appointment and... don't get... I'm not paid to do this, but it's very much to our benefit to do this. And so we learn about the other artists, and we can talk about other artists. And so Jim said it's one of those bizarre hobbies you come up with. "Oh, let's be gregarious."
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. Well, to me, it also sounds like you're seriously greasing the skids for a potential gallery venture of your own.
Lindy Severns: I've never wanted... I've never wanted that. I've never wanted an open studio, and we used to do that a little bit, but this is... this is enough contact. I'm... I enjoyed the... the thing that Ginger did, the webinar that she did recently, and she was talking about what is your goal as an artist? Do you want to sell in public? Do you want to do shows and festivals? I'm way over there. I want to sell at museums. I want galleries to sell my pieces, but mainly I want to sell them myself online. And I love my clients dearly, but I'm not that social. I... I got it. You know, I used to go to... I used to go to show openings, and I've been privileged to do some pretty cool things, and literally, I would... I have a really tall husband. I would put my hand in the back of his belt and say, "Don't leave me." Just follow him through the room, hanging on to his belt. "These are scary people here." I've done enough shows. I don't... I'm better than that now, but that's not my natural element. I do a lot of communications online with people. I'm religious about answering emails and comments, and I've... you know, I have a lot of people out there that I've never even met that we have a good friendship going. So I'm not an isolationist, but doing things in person and painting and being interrupted would really bother me.
Patrick Shanahan: Where you think ideally you sit in the gallery, and I tried this at this gallery. I'll... I'll just set up, and I... I worked. I did a couple of oils where it was time-consuming and all, and I just leave it set up and work when people would come in. Nah, it's just not me. It's not... I love to paint on location. I love to do plein air if the weather's nice and if there's nobody around. So I'm not one of these people that will go to what do they call it—a quick draw where you have to do... just not me.
Patrick Shanahan: You know exactly what you want. Business, yeah.
Lindy Severns: You know what I would love to hear is what do you feel like the biggest gains you've made digitally from a marketing standpoint, certainly since starting with us, but especially like in the last year? What do you feel like really moved the needle in terms of outbound marketing in the digital context?
Patrick Shanahan: I've been tons more consistent, and I can say I've always painted consistently, but I've been equally consistent this last year with my marketing. And I actually swore this last year that I would follow the Art Storefronts game plan as best I could to the letter. And you know, I've skipped some things. I don't do all the sales because of my market. I'm still primarily making money off pricey originals. Yes. But I really don't want to neglect those people that are sitting there just spring-loaded, waiting on me to put prints on sale for 20% or a coffee cup. I love those people just as dearly. So I've followed... I followed the game plan, the art marketing calendar. I do... I joined Co-Pilot reluctantly because I thought I wanted to do it myself and have control.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, that's not true. You have control. You still have control.
Lindy Severns: Yeah. I love Co-Pilot because it gets me through those times where I think, "I cannot stand to see my name in print one more time this week." And somebody put something on there for me. I usually tweak it almost always so it's a little more of my voice because I have a very distinctive... I've done it long enough. I have a distinctive writing style and online voice, but it's there for me. So I've... those two things—the art marketing calendar and Co-Pilot—have helped tremendously. I also started going through all my photos, and I've been pretty religious about getting decent photographs of my work, but I'm not a photographer, and I can't hire somebody out here. I have to be able to take and process my own photos. And so I started going back on old photos, including them as best I could from the original files. And I also started... as programs for... I do their... what do they call it—Gigapixel? To enlarge... some of these old 2005 photos into print. And so that has helped because it's expanded the prints that I felt comfortable marketing for sale. Yeah. And oh, my emails. Okay, so emails too. Yeah, emails. You have no idea how happy that made me because the number one thing that I say all the time... everyone, "What is the tactic? What's the super hacky thing? What's the special trick that no one knows?" And then you have to be the one that just says, "I wish I had something sexier for you. It's just... it's just consistency. That's it." And Co-Pilot gets a ton of flak for a number of different reasons, but when we look at the data of the folks that are on it versus the folks that are not, and it's not to say that the revenue is... quit your job because everyone's got a different product. It doesn't work that way. But what we find is that the people that are on Co-Pilot are selling more than the ones that aren't. And you know what that is? It's just a proxy for the consistency because, look, I've run a marketing department for 15 years. Everybody burns out. Everybody gets tired. Life happens. You're so sick of doing that thing. It's not even speaking to you. In fact, it's not even in your mind. The fact that Co-Pilot forces it to get done one way or another—either you edit it, or it's going, but it's going. You know what I mean? Like, the consistency is the whole ball game. And I talk about it ad nauseam, and I love that you just said it. That's it. It's consistency. It's so easy for an artist to be consistent in creating, or it's easy for me to be consistent, but marketing is a whole another right brain, left brain thing.
Lindy Severns: Oh yes. Oh yes. Things that Co-Pilot has helped me with, even though I was reluctant to relinquish that... it's not... not control because I again I tweak it, but I thought, "Oh no, I can do this myself." I can't. I stay swamped. I live in a state of fun overwhelm. But one of the things Co-Pilot has made me look at it as a creative endeavor instead of a task because the Co-Pilot program comes up with just different eyes on different ways of expressing things, different goals. You're doing this to hit people who are only going to buy a coffee cup. Yeah. And it's made me think of it more creatively. So instead of looking at a... "I have to do a post today," I think, "Oh, okay, this is cool. Let me post today about this. Let me expand on that." And so that has helped tremendously. But so to get back to the emails, then I was already sending an email a month before I joined Art Storefronts, and I had been doing that for about three years very successfully. I introduce a new painting with... I was doing it once a month. That's just never good enough for you guys.
Patrick Shanahan: No, not.
Lindy Severns: And I finally listened to enough talk. It's like, "Okay, if you do it once a month and you hit this many people, you have X chance of selling. Yes. If you do it four times a month, you're getting a chance of every one of those. Some different people are going to open it. You have... yeah, greatly increased your chances." And so my... I won't say that I have to do the math on this one too, but a good majority of my original sales come off those emails. And I try to send them every time I have a new painting because I paint consistently. I do 30 to 50 pieces a year compared... all I heard was... all I heard was an email every week. That's all I heard. An email every week. Yeah. And so the email also prods me to paint. So it's like, "Oh, okay, right now I'm thinking... got a little flywheel going on there." And I haven't got anything new to introduce. Maybe this is time to sit in my little easy chair and do a little pencil sketch or something. Something I'm working on a commission right now, so I'm not doing a lot of outside painting, but maybe it's the time just to do that or a little flower portrait, something just so I have something on Saturday or Sunday to send out and say, "Hey, this is new." So I'll send... I'd say my average is probably every three weeks out of four, and sometimes I'll do more than that, and I'll introduce sales with emails and stuff, but I really do the new work that way. And my list has grown with Art Storefronts from... I had a weak 300-person list when I started, and that had only grown... that had doubled that same year because I'd hired my brilliant young niece to do my postcarding, which is a really great idea for people who have brilliant young... yes. And then after a while, she was too brilliant, and she didn't have the time to do it anymore. She had her own business, but it got me to that point. Now, my list is pretty strong—right at 900. And of that, my open rate is... if it's down in the 40s, I get, "Oh gee, what did I do wrong?" It's usually in the low 50s percent.
Patrick Shanahan: Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Yeah, way higher than the average.
Lindy Severns: You know, I give them quality. I give them a story of the painting, and I... to make the stories different. Sometimes it's technique. It's like, "I did this, and you look how these colors do this and that," and I get all artsy. Sometimes it's, "This was the most mystical place to walk through in the fog, and this is what we felt." And then I tend to wax philosophical in some of these. Sometimes it's just what was going on in my life. It's like, "This has been chaotic, and I just felt the need to paint, and this just appeared." And so it's different. So I hopefully hit different people in each of those, which brings me to Lightroom advertising, but Art Helper. Yeah. Okay. I'm a writer, and I enjoy writing, and it's relatively easy for me. Even for a writer, it's hard to come up sometimes with a nugget of thought that you can expand on with the blank page problem. Yes. Yeah. It's like, "Wow, or what if I'm really trying to sell this? Not talk about it to my brilliant niece. What words should I use?" Art Helper is fantastic for... yeah, jump-starting you, for cleaning up your act, for giving you a different way to look at your own work. A recent painting I did was... it's like a Julian Onderdonk takeoff. It's just Texas bluebonnets. Everybody does it if you're a Texas artist—not everybody, but Texas artists—you need to do bluebonnets. And I've done them before. This is just an old fence, old oak trees, bluebonnets—like a 12x16 painting, something like that. And although I loved painting it, and again, my photograph—I've been there—and it turned out quite nice, I thought I was just at a loss. It's like, "I don't even have a title for this." And a lot of times, I'll have a title before I ever start painting. I know that. But on this one, even though I connected with the painting, I didn't have a theme that I could express to anybody else. So I plugged it into Art Helper, and it came up with... I don't know, it comes up with eight or ten titles even for the title. And that's the first time I'd ever done that, and I didn't like any of them, but one of them talked about quiet, and one of them talked about magic, and I took words out of those two, and it was like, "Oh my God, this is 'Quiet Magic.'" You just... it's boom. Frenzy in time. So Art Helper and I are getting along pretty good at that point. So I plugged in, "Write a blog post about this," because I found that I... for what I do, I can do that easier than the product descriptions. If I'm going to do an email, and anyway, you pick and choose the parts you like anyway. So it comes up with this product description, and it was more flowery, and I... this is the first version. I didn't tweak it or anything. It was more flowery than me. It was more... it was more artsy than I tend to be with my people on an email, but it said, "With all these wildflowers down there, the painting is really..." it said this in its own words, "The painting is really about the trees. The old oak trees have seen people walk that fence. They've seen seasons after season of blooms. They've seen storms come and go, drought, bad years, good years. Those old oak trees are sentinels of the land." And whenever I was painting, I did it a little differently, and again, I hadn't read that when I painted, but I did it differently. I focused on the trees because I'd just been doing a lot of trees this year, and I thought, "I want these trees to be so alive. I want you to feel the leaves." Yes. And I just... I want the trees to be what I'm painting, and then the bluebonnets are below. So that was my thought process. Sorry, but I just wrote this really good for me story from those, and it wasn't art words. They were my words, but I wouldn't have gotten there without those prompts, and it probably saved days of not sending anything out because I couldn't figure out what to write.
Patrick Shanahan: That's the line. It saved you days. It saved you days. I've been... I'm a huge nerd just to begin with, so I love technology. So as much as you geek out on the painting, I love to geek out. I relax just by playing around with the latest and greatest. I've been so far down the AI rabbit hole a million different ways, one day every single solitary use case you could imagine. Okay. And I still am. I'm trying like six or seven hours a week. It's become such a buzzword, and it's still a buzzword, but it's just your personal golf bag with a bunch of clubs in it. Yes. And you can take whatever club out you want and hit it any which way you want, however your creativity sees fit. And I'm sitting here listening to you, and the way that you're saying it, it's like, "I will create a piece of content on video. I will go plug it into the AI. I will hate what it's come up with, but I'll grab two or three bits and go, 'That was really good.' Boom. I'll throw it into a new title. Boom. I'll truncate the title." And I'm like, "You just saved me I don't even know how much time." Yes. And then what does my life look like? The whole argument for AI, and I'm so getting so passionate about this, is like GDP is the measurement to measure the total of goods and services produced in a country. It's a way to rank the productivity of a country. Guess what? An artist has a GDP. Me as a marketer has a GDP. It's the sum total of goods and services that I'm capable of producing in a year. Right? And I look and see what's possible with AI, and I use your use case. As hard as you're working and as consistent as you are, what does your output look like as a result of that thing? It's going to first 2X, and then 3X, and then you're going to blink, and you're going to be six months down the line, and you're going to be like, "I am doing 10 times as much in a day as I was back there." And that's the future. That is literally the future. It's why I am a glass half full on this. I'm not a glass half empty. The robots are not coming to kill us. This is just an amazing thing. And it's argued that it's the perfect storm for artists, and the reason that I do that is if I... let's just say the last 10 years, I've talked to a million artists. Out of that million artists—photographers, every stripe, every industry, every geographic region, every age group—what percentage would you say of them have even just one employee? You've been at this a long time too. You already know the answer to the question. It's 1 to 2%. Okay. And if we take it from one employee to two, it's less than one-tenth of 1%. So what does that mean? All of you guys are solopreneurs out there on your own, or maybe in your case, you have the help of the husband or wife or a significant other. AI, for the first time, is going to give a group of people that never had employees that will work day and night and that will never need to get paid. That's insane. That's insane when you stretch it out, and it's through all the little opportunities that you're going through and the use cases you're going through now. If you keep fighting through the... "This result was okay, but I'll just do it faster if I do it myself." If you just keep fighting through that... "This result was okay. How can I use it?" Watch what happens. The consistency, the quality of your posts, the creativity in your posts, the emails that you're sending, the feedback that you're getting, the gallery going, "Who the heck wrote this?" Like, all of that is coming, and then in more and more in space, it's just... it's staggering to contemplate. I'm more excited for this industry than I have been in like the 15 years I've been doing this. It's crazy.
Lindy Severns: One thing I want... one thing, Lindy, and then we'll wrap it up. I ask this one thing: if there's one thing that we could improve with our Art Storefronts—not ten things, not five things—one thing, Lindy, one thing only, what would it be for you?
Lindy Severns: I don't know. I'm pretty happy with you guys.
Patrick Shanahan: There's got to be something that bothers you.
Lindy Severns: I don't know. I don't like as many sales. That's... yeah, but they're there, and I can pick and choose. Yes. And there's that. I hate to be a pooh-pooher, but I love the website. I love the functionality of it. My people love it. I don't know. I love the... I didn't think when I signed up I was going to have this whole team at my back the way I did, and so I love that. Keep talking to everybody. Keep... yes. And the interaction, whether it's podcast or having somebody like Hava talk or webinars, I do almost everything that is presented out there. Holy... keep doing. I'm... you know, I'm sorry. I can't come up with a bad thing.
Patrick Shanahan: No, I will take that. I will take that. You know how to find me. You guys, if you want to find Lindy, and I based on what she just said, I imagine all of you guys probably want to get on her email list. Can only get on her email list if you're going to open and click her emails. Okay. Because otherwise, you're going to drag her open rate down. But her website—the easiest way to everyone finds everyone just via Instagram, so it's @bigbendartist on Instagram. @bigbendartist. You can see that here in the video too. And then that links to her website, and you can find out more information about her. If you really liked this episode, send her a message because she knows. She's delightful. And then I have one more special request. You know what I'm going to ask for because I can't... I got to see the bird.
Lindy Severns: Oh, Grace Stoke. Let me see. Let me see. Okay, hang on. All right, Grace Stoke, you've been summoned here. Come here. I'm so excited about this. You guys, I grew up with parents... I was telling... oh, Bea. Okay, he wants to show you his tail first because he's just... he likes his tail. And he plucks his... he plucks his feathers. A lot of birds do. A lot of birds do. He's happy. We had him all tested years ago, and Jim said... and he turned out very healthy. Jim says he just wanted to know if we'd spend $400 on him, is all. But so they're fine. They just... for some reason, birds do this. They... I think they want to look more like us. Are his... are his wings clipped?
Patrick Shanahan: He does... no, they're not.
Lindy Severns: And we take him outside. We take him everywhere. He was so abused. He doesn't fly. He doesn't realize he can fly and just never developed the muscles. And so when we got him, he would barely even climb. We had to coax him into higher perches, and he's extremely well-adjusted now. He's... he flew in the jet some... some trips, and he goes camping with us. He slept in tents, and... oh, amazing. He loves to hike. He loves to be in the studio with me. Oh, he's growling. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. And I was watching... I think I put it on one of my Instagram posts. I was watching an art video the other day, and he likes to sit with me like this, and I'll scratch his head, and the guy picked up... he was mixing color, and he picked up a brush, and Gray lunged for the screen and tried to get the brush out of the guy's hand.
Patrick Shanahan: No way.
Lindy Severns: That's so good. It was so cute, and he kept repeating doing it. So now he thinks anytime I'm doing this, there might be art involved. But he loves to watch me paint, and he'll talk to me as I paint, and every once in a while, he'll make the fart sound, and I think, "Okay, I'm really on the wrong track here with this art."
Patrick Shanahan: Amazing. You can't beat this. We all now have to wonder: is it the mystical African gray that is responsible for many success, the consistency, or just her general jovial attitude? Either way, fantastic interview. That was amazing. I've got to have you back on. I've got to show you some hacky stuff with Art Helper too, but we'll have to... we'll have to schedule that. But thank you so much. You guys, go and follow Lindy on Instagram. Get on her email list, and thanks everybody for watching and for the comments, and have a great rest of your day. Bye.
Lindy Severns: Thanks. Bye-bye.
