Asking a few questions of your customers can really help you find future buyers.

For an artist there is nothing like the feeling of making a sale. Especially for the emerging artist that does not have many sales under their belt. It is such a special  and exciting thing when someone decides to give you money in exchange for something you created. With that cash in hand you’re probably already starting to focus on the next sale. But before you get ahead of yourself it can be very valuable to ask your recent buyer a few questions.

Now I don’t recommend hitting them up with these questions the moment after you have the check in hand, but I do expect you to get their contact information so you can do a follow up in a few days. Basically what you hope to find out is why they decided to by your art specifically and also how was their experience in buying you art. Surveying of customers is very common in business but very rare in the business of art.

Keep the questions simple and keep them to a minimum, 3 to 5 is a good number. And the specific questions will be different for every artist but the information your seeking will be the same. Why did they buy the piece? Was it a decor choice, a collectors choice, was it a gift, or did they just like it? Also ask if they feel it was a good value. This can help you discover if your charging too much or too little. I’ve often bought art that I would have paid more for. But I can also understand how you might not feel comfortable asking questions about the price, that is okay, ask what your comfortable asking, all information is valuable.

An artist who is making sales through a website and shipping work to buyers can really value from a follow up survey. Find out if it was easy for them to buy, if what they received is what they expected, and if it was packed well. This also shows that you care about them beyond the sale. Answers to these questions could indentify a blind spot in your practices.

There is not a lot of sound data on the specifics of why people buy art. It would be hard to collect due to varied range of art and artists that are selling art these days. What you’re looking for is why people buy your art. This information can help you have an idea of who your ideal customer is. Not so you can cater to them with your art but so you can reach that ideal, most likely to buy, customer with your marketing.

You can do this follow up with a simple email that contains a few questions or you could use an internet survey service like Survey Monkey. Many email services such as Constant Contact, iContact, and Bronto also offer survey options.

Trent wraps up his forum post with this paragraph:

“Have your MySpace page, but get a site outside MySpace – it’s dying and reads as cheap / generic. Remove all Flash from your website. Remove all stupid intros and load-times. MAKE IT SIMPLE TO NAVIGATE AND EASY TO FIND AND HEAR MUSIC (but don’t autoplay). Constantly update your site with content – pictures, blogs, whatever. Give people a reason to return to your site all the time. Put up a bulletin board and start a community. Engage your fans (with caution!) Make cheap videos. Film yourself talking. Play shows. Make interesting things. Get a Twitter account. Be interesting. Be real. Submit your music to blogs that may be interested. NEVER CHASE TRENDS. Utilize the multitude of tools available to you for very little cost of any – Flickr / YouTube / Vimeo / SoundCloud / Twitter etc.

If you don’t know anything about new media or how people communicate these days, none of this will work. The role of an independent musician these days requires a mastery of first hand use of these tools. If you don’t get it – find someone who does to do this for you. If you are waiting around for the phone to ring or that A & R guy to show up at your gig – good luck, you’re going to be waiting a while.”

Well let’s start with MySpace. It does seem that MySpace is dying thanks to the rise of Facebook. But for an artist and musician MySpace still has use and value. For one MySpace allows you to really control the look of your page, which is a great way to show off your artistic style. For musicians it is still the place to showcase your music on the web easily and for free. MySpace does have a cheap feel to it though thanks to all the ads and the type of ads that tend to be found on MySpace. Use it for some of its functions but don’t use it for your online headquarters.

Mr. Reznor’s next bit advice is solid advice for any creative people. “Remove all Flash from your website.” I know many artists will not like or agree with that bit of advice because many artists use Flash for their whole website. This is so it looks fancy and can have all sorts of animation, sounds, and fancy menus. A website heavy in Flash can be very slow to load and very hard for search engines to find. If search engines have trouble finding you then so will your fans. And if your fans do find you and your site loads painfully slow or automatically plays music they may just leave to avoid the hassle. If you must have a fancy Flash site then think about having your landing page (the page people first land on when they visit your site) offer the option of Flash or HTML. Find a great example here.

“Constantly update your site with content…” Probably the single best piece of advice in all of Trent’s post. As an artist if your patient and you continue to perserver with your online efforts by constantly updating your site people will find you and you will gain fans. It is almost guaranteed. It is for this reason that I am a big believer in artists using a blog as their online headquarters. Blogs are easy to update and easy to make search engine friendly.

And if you don’t know anything about this “new media” don’t worry. I am moving Art Palaver in the direction to focus on helping you learn and effectively use all the tools that are out there for the independent artist. Because like he says your role these days is to be a master of these tools, your art career depends on it.

Use this link to read the complete forum post along with all the replies. There is a good palaver happening there and any artist in any medium can learn from it.

Thank you Mr. Trent Reznor for sharing you thoughts and ideas with the us.

Trent’s next bit of advice is this:

“The Beastie Boys’ site offers everything you could possibly want in the formats you would want it in – available right from them, right now. The prices they are charging are more than you should be charging – they are established and you are not. Think this through.”

There are a few things any artist can take from that statement. Options are something I see a lot of creative folks overlooking, especially visual artists such as painters and photographers. Give your fans many ways and many price points to collect what your creating. Offer very small prints, artist trading cards, sketches, and anything else you can think of that gets your art in more people’s homes. And offer all these through your website or blog as well as art shows and galleries. This does not devalue your art in any way. If anything it creates more value for your original work. And if someone can walk away from your showing with a $5 postcard of your art they are going to remember you and your work more than the artist in the booth next to yours who had no such offerings.

His next point about pricing is a tough one for many artists especially those just beginning to sell to the public. “Think it through,” is very good advice. Pricing is tricky for sure and there is no one piece of advice that can be offered on this subject. So much depends on your medium, your experience, how much you have sold, the current market, and even the part of the globe you live in. A good strategy that has worked for me is to start lower than I would like but raise prices with each sale. This works to build interest while getting your work in people’s hands.

What are your thoughts on pricing art? Please leave a comment and share what works for you. Especially tell us about what methods you used when you were just starting out.

Nine Inch Nails is pretty much the musical project of one man, Trent Reznor. Back then he had the image of an angry at the world skinny guy who at every show trashed most of the bands instruments. Even though I liked the music I never cared for Trent. In 1994 he released the album The Downward Spiral and then seemed to disappear. NIN resurfaced a bit in 1999 with the release of The Fragile but that album did not seem to have much traction and Reznor again faded off the pop culture landscape.

It was 2005 when Trent seemed to comeback onto the scene a new man, bigger, cleaner, and most of all smarter. It is when he started to change the music industry through leading by example. A video for the new album was premiered on the band’s website, not on MTV. Reznor released source files of songs so that fans could do their own remixing. Trent saw the new world that technology and the internet was bringing and was early to adapt to it.

Why am I giving you a Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor history lesson? Because I feel we have a lot to learn from those who are forging a path. Recently via the NIN Forums Trent offered some advice to musicians who are new or unknown. It is good advice and I wanted to share it with you as well as have a palaver on how it can be applied to other artistic mediums besides music.

It all started with this Tweet (via Twitter), “Beastie Boys / TopSpin get it right once again. This is how you sell music today. http://bit.ly/Aj9yw” And what he is referring to is the fact that the Beastie Boys offer up a bunch of options for fans to get their hands on Beastie music and Beastie merchandise directly from them through a service like TopSpin. Many people read that Tweet and replied with comments saying that only works for musicians who are already established. It is because of those replies Trent offered advice to those musicians still struggling to get known.

His first piece of advise is, “Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish?” (Where have I heard that before?) Thinking about what you want your art career to look like will help you in knowing what path it takes to reach your goals. If you don’t know your destination how can you know what roads to take? Some artists simple desire the ability and the resources to keep creating. Others dream of being rich and famous in their respective field. These two different paths could be the difference in seeking representation or taking care of your own business. If you have not already planned and written down your goals as an artist that should be first on the list. This advice holds true for any hat you want to wear in life.

Mr. Reznor’s next bullet point may sound a little discouraging at first but I believe he is onto something:

“Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.”

Remember this is for little or unknown artists. The idea here is to give away something in exchange for information. Most likely a name and an email address. Any artist working in any medium can apply this idea. Photographers can give away hi-res jpgs, writers can offer chapter samples or whole books, painters can offer simple contests for a print, a sculptor could have a similar drawing for a smaller piece, it can work with anything. Heck you can even get people to offer up their friend’s email addresses in exchange for your art, like I write about in this post. Nine Inch Nails gave away a whole album, The Slip, which you can download for free here.

The idea is to build a list. Your list will be the foundation to your creative career. And as you grow your list, nurture your list, and take good care of it, it will become the most valuable asset to making money with your art. Managing and taking care of your list are a topic for another post though. Take his advice and think outside the box a bit on how you can effectively offer something of your art in exchange for a little bit of information. Trust me you will see a return on this investment.

This palaver is continued in this post.

And a music lesson in any instrument! I read that and it makes me want to find the most obscure instrument known to man. In reality though a kazoo would be a stretch for my musical abilities. Though I do like the idea of being a part of a world record.

This event is being put on by Swallow Hill Music, who is also offering guitar lessons all year to celebrate their 30th Anniversary. The catch is you must attend Film on the Rocks at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater. Though a music lesson and a movie at Red Rocks is not a bad deal.

Use this link for all the details.

“Magical Elves (Peabody Award-winning Project Runway, Emmy Award-winning Top Chef) and Sarah Jessica Parker (Golden Globe- and Emmy Award-winner) and her production company, Pretty Matches, are teaming up for an hour-long creative competition series among aspiring contemporary artists who will create and compete to conquer the art world!”

I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Reality television continues to capture viewers which means producers are going to continue looking for new angles to bring to reality tv. And I must admit I am intrigued by the concept of an art competition on mainstream television. It has the potential to bring art and artists into living rooms that otherwise don’t think about art.

But…

I fear the drama. Or should I say the melodrama, which seems to be a must have when it comes to reality programs. The casting call for the show which is titled “Untitled Art Project” does not offer many details about the show. Images of coed housing, roommate fights, and whiny confessionals come to mind though. Time will tell.

If you’re interested in the show you must attend one of the four casting calls taking place around the United States in Chicago, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. (Big surprise on those four choices for artist casting calls.) But before you show up you must fill out a 23 page application. For giggles let’s look at some of the questions you must answer:

• Have a boyfriend?
• Have a girlfriend?
• Have you ever worked or do you work for a gallery or museum?
• Do you have any rules you live by?
• Who are among your least favorite artists; or who do you this is overrated; and why?
• What is the most scandalous in your life as an artist? For your art?
• How would you describe yourself in one word?

They go on and on. If you’ve been in the military they want a copy of your DD214 which is your official record of all you did in the military. I would venture a guess that the friction and drama between cast members is found in an applicant’s answers and that is a big part in casting a reality show.

I’ll keep an eye and an ear out for when this show begins to air and be sure to let you know. You all can come over for a viewing party.

Click here to see Bravo’s casting page for Untitled Art Project. (If you go to a casting be sure to tell them ArtPalaver.com sent you.)

Click here to see the 23 page application for yourself.

You’ve heard of Etsy but have you heard of ArtFire?

ArtFire is a website that states it is “your home to buy and sell handmade items designed by artisans from around the globe.” It is based out of Tucson Arizona. I  bring up Etsy because the two sites have a very similar look and feel. But one big word stands out on ArtFire’s homepage… free.

When you visit ArtFire.com your greeted with “No listing fees, no final fees, no hidden fees, no kidding.” There must be a catch right? If there is I couldn’t find it.

There are two options, a free BASIC account and a $12 a month VERIFIED account. The question is does the free basic account have any real value? Or is it just a tool to get you to sign up for the site? Looking at the list of what an artist receives with the basic account I would say it has a lot of value.

You can list 12 items, have a personal domain, site statistics, global shipping profiles, a “RapidCart” that allows you to sell directly on your blog, and a feedback system, just to rattle off a few features that cost you zip. Sounds great if selling online is just a small part of your art business or if your just now dipping your toes into online sales. It is a good way to test it out without costing you a dime. And you can keep using ArtFire at that level if it works for you, it is not a trial version.

The $12 a month verified account looks pretty amazing as well. First it comes with about twice as many features including more pictures per listing, up to 99 categories, search engine optimization, artisan guilds and councils, the list goes on and on. A full service online marketplace to sell your art for only $12 a month. Period. Meaning you can sell as many items as you want and still only pay $12 a month. Not a bad deal.

With these two options ArtFire is worth using just for their shopping cart. Promote your work in your own community and sell it through ArtFire. There is one asterisk with this post. I have not used ArtFire personally. This is just information I gained off their website. I can not speak into their customer support, up time, or overall functionality. Though it does look like a very well done site with a strong community of artists built up around it. But I do plan on checking it out myself in the next week or so. That means in a month or so I will have a little more insight for you.

ArtFire is currently holding two contests, one on Twitter, and one on Facebook. The prizes being ArtFire shopping sprees. That alone is reason to head over and check them out. (They sell art supplies and materials too.)

This is a good place to start your ArtFire adventure.

But if your readers are not plugging in your URL and visiting your blog directly how do you know you have readers? Tracking subscribers is just one great use for Feedburner. After you “burn your feed” Feedburner keep track of how many people are subscribed to your blog and also how they are subscribed. This information is very useful in helping you build your fan base. But subscriber stats is just one tiny reason you should be using Feedburner.

Email subscription is another reason. Many of your fans are not using RSS readers so that little orange square means nothing to them. But I would bet all the cash in my wallet that they do use email. Feedburner has an option that allows you to plug in an email subscription form into your blog. Your fans simply enter their  email and each time you blog your post is delivered right to their inbox. Using this one simple tool will increase your readership.

Feedburner has a ton more tools for the artist blogger to take advantage of. It allows you to add custom options to your feeds such as links to social bookmarking sites or Facebook. You can limit the amount of text that is delivered to a feed, forcing readers to click a link to your site to read the whole post. The “SmartFeed” option makes sure your feed is able to be read by everyone’s reader, no matter the format they prefer. You can create animated widgets that show show your blog’s headlines in your website or places like MySpace. PingShot is a Feedburner service that notifies many other sites whenever you post. You can also add Google AdSense to your blog via Feedburner. I could keep listing all the options that are waiting for you at Feedburner, these are just some of the highlights.

If your an artist blogger you should head over to www.feedburner.com right now and burn your feed.

Want to learn a bit more about feeds? Click here. (Contains a good list of feed readers.)

Still trying to wrap your head around Feedburner? Click here.

For this Episode of the Art Palaver Podcast I get out of the studio and start my mission of having palavers with artists and those who are in the art business. Leap of Faith Fine Art Gallery opened in May here in Fort Collins Colorado. It is co-owned by Melanie Valentine and Nick Roberts. I took my recorder and my microphone and headed down there to hear their take on opening an art gallery in 2009.

The gallery does not have a web site yet but you can email Leap of Faith at leapoffaith [at] q.com

Let me start off this post with a few statistics:

- The number of professionally trained artists and art historians in the U.S. – Males 52%, Females 48%
- Percentage of artists at major institutions:
- National Gallery of Art — 98% male, 99.9% white
- National Portrait Gallery — 93% male, 99% white
- Hirshhorn Museum – modern and contemporary art — 95% male, 94% white
- Exhibition opportunities: Juried (artists unknown to juror) – Males 52%, Females 48%
- Exhibitions opportunities: Invited (artists known to juror) – Males 80%, Females 20%
- Gender distribution of visual artists in art texts – Males 90%, Females 10%
- Of the over 100 Tonys awarded since 1947 for theater direction, only 2-5% have

And we like to think of the art world as being progressive. Thankfully we have filmakers like Pamela Tanner Boll and Nancy Kennedy to help shed some light on this through their film "Who Does She Think She Is?"

"From the producing team, that won an Academy Award for Born Into Brothels, comes WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?, a film that examines some of the most pressing issues of our time: parenting and work, partnering and independence, economics and art.

The film follows five women artists as they navigate the economic, psychological, and spiritual challenges of making work outside the elite art world. From Hawaii’s Big Island to the suburbs of Ohio, from New York City to the deserts of New Mexico, we watch as
these women—ranging in age from 27 to 65—fight to honor their vision and their families every day.

“(This film) is not about being a woman or being a woman artist but rather how
to be a human, how to find your true place in life.”
Jean M Murphy
Wellesley Centers for Women

Interviews with experts like Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade), Maura Reilly (Sackler Center for Feminist Art-Brooklyn Museum) and the Guerrilla Girls add a cultural context for these women’s uplifting journeys. It is not accolades they seek; it’s simply the radical opportunity to live whole."

I have not seen the film but I wanted to share with you the trailer and the information. I do know that I don’t like the idea of anyone’s creativity being held back. That is the foundation of all that I do, the belief that every human being is creative. And that we would all be a lot better off if we all explored and worked on our individual creativity.

The website for the movie is www.whodoesshethinksheis.net. Check it out for yourself.