Are you fed up creating all your amazing artwork or putting together an incredible artwork shop only to get no sales? Nothing, none. Empty. It can be totally disheartening, right? For some of you it might have happened more than once. It might have happened a few times. And so you can be totally forgiven for wanting to just give it all up, right? I totally understand that. In this video I'm going to share with you the three big reasons why your art might not be selling and how you can overcome that and move forwards. Also we'd love to share with you a free training resource that I think you're going to love that is totally going to help you in terms of sales and also building a sustainable, profitable art business. Well, hello, welcome or welcome back to my channel. My name is Sophie and I help artists just like you, they set up and grow a successful art business doing what you love. And if you'd like more tips and tricks on that then you're in the right place. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, hit the button below to get notified every time I post a new video. Well, let's just talk about that free training for artists, the six-step path to successfully sell your art. Learn how to go from waiting for a sale to happen or not to using my simple success path to build a profitable business and make those sales. And if you're a total beginner or you haven't even started to set up your art business just yet. So here's just some of what you're going to discover. Why having a truly compelling vision for your future is so vital and how that will keep you motivated every single day. Why getting 100% clear on what you want to make or create or focus on first is that real key to success. The five things you'll need to be able to tick off your list in order to actually start selling. The vital step in the path that will provide you with consistent sales and put that all important cash in the bank. And how to pay yourself a nice salary from your art sales so you really can live the dream. Picture yourself five years into the future and imagine how life could be. Now you've followed the art but success path to your creative freedom. Alright, so let's talk about those three big reasons why your artwork might not be selling right now. Number one, you're trying to run before you can walk. You're so excited that you've finished some artwork that you completely bypass all the previous steps to building a profitable art business and you just pop it out there. You put your workshop together and you're just like, okay quick, let's get some sales in, let's get some people onto my workshop. Now don't get me wrong, occasionally success can happen, right? You can have those surprise start ups where you sell something unexpectedly, you fill a workshop that I promise you that next time you do it the result is going to be different because you haven't put it in place, the foundations, you haven't made your art business safe. It's like anything really, let's take cake making. You're desperate to make a beautiful three-tiered cake for a friend or relative's wedding or birthday celebration and the bit that really excites you, of course, being an artist are all the decorations. What you really want to do is all the kind of icing and you want to put all the flowers and you want to make it all look beautiful. So you bypass that cake making bit, you grab some ingredients, you kind of mix it up in the bowl, you put it in a tin, you put it in the oven, you're not really sure how long it cooks for, you pull it out, you're like, I just want to get to the exciting bit, I'm sure it's cool enough, I'll just keep going and then you put all the icing on, you make it look amazing. But when it comes to it, is it even cooked properly? What does it taste like? Again, occasionally you could get lucky right and the cake's edible but mostly it's going to taste horrible, it's going to fall apart, it's probably going to cave in because you didn't cook it properly and when it cools it's all going to go like that. So what do you need to do? You need to source the right ingredients, you need to measure it out, you need to cook it properly when it's cool, when it's ready, then you put the ingredients on. It's exactly the same with building an art business, you can't expect to get to the pretty bit of all the fancy bit without doing all the foundations first. The second reason you're liking up making the sales that you want is you're doing too many things at once. Let me tell you a little story about some rowing boats and a couple of islands. Now the people that are in my membership and I want to want clients with me, they know this story inside out and I've only got to say the two islands story and they'll go, oh yeah, oops, forgot about that, oh yes, absolutely. This is how it goes, alright, there are two islands, you have reality islands, this is the island that you're sitting on at the moment and you have dream island over there and on dream island all the things that you want. So for example palm trees, sandy beach, nice lounges, waiting by the water, nice book to read, nice green juice to drink, whatever it is that's on your dream island, right? And so we've got to get over to the island, how are we going to do that? Or we're likely going to get in a boat. So this is what happens is we get in one boat and in one boat for example could be original art. So you're going to sell original art to get over from where you are now to where you want to be. So you've got your original paintings, you start rowing the boats, rowing the boats which means that you have an exhibition, you maybe have a second exhibition and you start making a little bit of progress but guess what, it's not going as well as you wanted it to go, you are not making those sales. So you say oh that's okay, I don't need to sell original art, I can maybe make some prints because I have the paintings, right? I could make prints. So you used to go ahead and you get a second boat, right? And the second boat is all about printmaking. So now you set up with printmaking, probably some financial outlay there, not great at the beginning of a business. And you start rowing this boat over to the dream island as well, right? Because you're desperate to get over where you want to be. So you're rowing the original art boat and you're rowing the print boat. Now you started the prints but your time is a little bit split and so you haven't really got time to do either one of them very well. So the prints are not really going very well, the originals are not going very well. If you say that's okay, somebody once said the easiest way to make money is to run a workshop. I'm good at what I'm doing. Oh, I'll just set up a workshop. This is boat number three. So now we're going to rent a space and we're going to put a workshop together. So now suddenly we're rowing the boat with prints in which is trying to make print sales for us to try and sell originals and now we're trying to mark it and sell places onto a workshop. And you sell the odd workshop place but really it's not happening as much as you like to but that's okay because somebody said you can do something else alongside you get the idea. And suddenly you're splitting yourself between multiple boats and you're trying to row them all over to dream island where you want to get to. How far are you going to get, right? What's going to happen is you're going to jump from one boat to another to another. You row that one a little bit over here but oh, now suddenly this one looks like it's not going anywhere. Now I'm going to put some attention here. Then I'm going to go back over there and instead actually if you just picked one boat and you put all your time energy and resources into that one boat, one thing and you really focused and you continued to row it until you got to dream island and you got a system and you got a process then you know what, you've got that first lounger and green juice and afternoon under the palm trees. All right. So this is a story that I like to tell again and again and again because it's so true and as creatives what do we love to do? We love to create a new idea, a new product, a new service. The fact is you don't have time to market all of those things, all right? You probably don't have the skills either but particularly you don't have the time or the funds so you need to focus on one thing and be doing that really well until you get where you want to go. Then you can come back and start something else you can focus on the second boat. Now I hope that's making sense. I'd love to hear from you. Let me know in the comments below how many boats you're trying to row over to your dream island at the moment. How many different things have you got going on? Let me know in the comments. And number three reason why you're not making sales that you want to be making? You haven't identified your ideal audience and you haven't worked out how to reach them. Now this is one of the biggest mistakes I see artists and creatives make. Unfortunately it's again a little bit similar to the first one. You want to rush and get out there so you're bypassing all of these things. You haven't taken the time to work out well who am I going to actually sell to? Who are the people that I want to buy my work or my art services? If you don't know who the audience are then it's a bit like throwing darts in the dark, right? You're closing your eyes, you're throwing a few darts, some over here, some over here, hoping that one of them is going to stick. The problem here is that you likely haven't got all the time in the world to be doing that. You haven't got endless budget to be throwing money at marketing, hoping that eventually you make an art sale. Well if I put enough ads out there, if I put enough of this, if I put enough of that, then eventually surely I'll make an art sale. Well you likely will but how much money will you spend getting there? When you've probably spent more money getting there then actually the sale you're going to make, right? It's not working for you at all. You'll be wasting hours of your time wondering where your audience are and just making a guess and hoping they're going to show up where you are, right? Let's look at social media. You choose a social media platform that you like to be on but if you haven't worked out who your audience are, maybe they're not even on social media at all let alone on that platform. So there you are investing time, energy and effort, posting content now and wondering why you're not making any sales. When your audience is over here looking, shopping, spending money with somebody else because you didn't take the time, energy and effort to find out who that audience are and where they're hanging out. I'm hoping this is all making some sort of sense and at this point you're thinking, hmm, okay. Now really one or two things could be happening at this point. One is a massive heart and you go, this is really exciting Sophie. I'm super excited because is this all fixable? Yes it absolutely is. What do you need to do to fix it? Well I'm going to suggest your next step is to watch my free training for artists that is the six step path to successfully sell your art because in there you have all the answers that you're looking for and a step-by-step clear plan to enable you to do everything I've spoken about today. So grab the link below this video and thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you on another one.