Where do art fairs, galleries, and online marketplaces fit into my business strategy?

All of these—art fairs, retail galleries, online marketplaces like Etsy or print-on-demand sites—belong at the top of the pyramid as ‘everything else.’ They come after you’ve established the foundation: building attention daily and deploying the three ways of selling. If you can make any of these channels pay with positive ROI, they’re fantastic additional revenue sources. However, they have significant limitations: fairs require booth fees, travel, and long hours with no guaranteed return; galleries take 50% and you don’t keep customer data; online marketplaces are highly competitive and rarely produce significant revenue for most artists. They can work as supplementary income streams, but you cannot depend on them as your primary business model because you don’t control them and can’t build your collector list through them.

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Asked by an artist evaluating different sales channels · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2021-04-03