What should I do if I've been trying to sell my art for a year or more but it's not selling?

If your art isn’t selling after genuine, sustained effort—not phoning it in—you need to accept that you haven’t validated your art. This doesn’t mean you or your art sucks, or that the market is broken. It simply means you haven’t created something the market wants to buy. The solution is to pivot: try different subject material, explore new styles, and test again. Keep creating variations and taking them to market until you find what resonates. The goal is figuring out how many arrows you need to fire to hit the target, not beating yourself up for missing on the first try. Once you realize it’s a validation problem, you have the freedom to try something new.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2022-01-22