Evan Carmichael coaches artist Debbie on reaching $10,000 monthly revenue by selling her mission, not just her work. Buyers need to understand the story and emotion behind each piece. Pick one word that defines your theme, then show how your art inspires people to live by it.
Chapters
How can we help Debbie get to $10,000 a month in sales for her art so we can— so she can continue to help people? What do you think? Debbie, some more value for reward the, uh, the love.
Reward it. Yeah, I think that that's, that's an awesome, awesome thing. So what she's trying to do online is she said $10,000 of art per month. Well, I would want to just find out more about maybe what her market is. I don't know, Evan, you're going to have to answer that one because I know you've got so much more knowledge in the art, how to profit from your visual art.
All right, cool. I'll go on it. Okay, in talking about the art world, I think the concept of core selling is super important, almost more important than a lot of other industries. And the idea of course selling is, you know, what are you— you're selling what you stand for as opposed to just selling your products or services or the benefits associated with it. A lot of people can't understand art. You need to explain what your art means, right? If I look at a painting, it might be hard for me just to say, oh, that's a really good painting, I'm gonna go buy that thing. But if I know that you— so, you know, you left your job and started to go all in on yourself after 9/11. So I don't know what the theme is to you, like what your one word is, what you're all about. If it's overcome, if it's challenge, if it's, you know, something around betting on yourself, if it's confidence, if it's passion, you know, whatever it is, you know, if you're capturing that spirit of doing your thing and being in the moment now and not waiting for the future. Like, if that's what your theme is all about, since that's what you did with your business, if that's expressed in your paintings, whatever is expressed— like, a good painting, a good piece of music, you know, any piece of art is only great if there's emotion in it, right? Like, a good painter expresses emotion through their art. The challenge is you can't always see that emotion. If I'm emotional, I get all excited and I'm yelling and ranting, you'll see it very clearly. You'll see it clearly. If there's a singer who's singing their song and you could tell they're almost on the verge of breaking down because it's so sad, because it's a love song or it's— they lost somebody. You feel that emotion with them. Painting is harder because you're pouring your guts out onto this canvas and you're having an emotional connection and emotional reaction, or you should. If you're just going to paint the bird today, great. That's, you know, that's not— you could do better. But the person seeing it can't understand that connection. And so it's on you to explain it. Tell me what I'm looking at. Tell me why you're here to do what you do. And I get that you're on a mission and you want to help people, and it comes across in your message, and you're loving and considerate. And so letting people know that— what is the mission that you're on? How do you express it through the art so that I can own a piece of that, right? So that If I am the person who hasn't bet on himself yet, or I want to continue to remind myself to bet on myself and take those risks or take that chance or whatever it is that you stand for, then by having your thing on the wall, that's a constant inspiration to me.
Mm-hmm.
But if I don't know what I'm looking at and it's just a nice piece of art, then it's a lot harder to get that sale. And the impact that you want, like you can impact people through a lot more than just making $10,000 a month, right? You can impact people through the work, through every time they look at— like I walk in here, the people behind me, those canvases that JRice helped me actually make, those mean something to me. And they're just faces on the wall. But the faces represent something. They represent something powerful to me when I walk in the room. Your art needs to represent something, and it does to you, but you have to express that to others so that I want to sign up and I want to buy your thing because I know what you stand for. So core selling, decide to apply it. It's powerful.
