Arts Market Dip
It’s no exaggeration to say that the last two Artsmix markets have been my all time worst
in terms of sales with only 3 pictures sold. Even those ever dependable East Coast shots of Staithes and Whitby have stalled, and a desperate attempt at supermarket style BOGOF offers failed to generate any interest whatsoever. What’s more, as my sales have fallen off a cliff, Anthony’s sales have soared helped by some wonderful shots of Lake district sun rises (see link below).
Add to that, the records clearly show that all my attempts to improve the product -mounting, backing, packaging, signing – have made absolutely no difference to sales or profit. Mmmm…
Why? Well who knows. There’s no discernible pattern and every hypothesis is immediately disproven. Right now it just seems like sheer luck; the pure randomness of the right person rocking up and connecting with the right image. If this magic happens then bingo, and every other factor, including price, pales into insignificance.
So only one thing to do then, find some ways to improve my luck!
And the lack of sales did give me time to play with my iPhone camera panorama mode!
New Images
While I work on this luck thing I guess it can do no harm to bring a couple of new pictures to the Market, variety is, after all, the spice of life, and so I’ve printed and framed up a couple of images from our recent trip to the Isle of Harris. Let’s hope that a shopper’s coach outing from the Outer Hebrides, armed with pockets full of hard cash, happens to be in Leeds on Saturday!
What Difference Does a Design Make?
If you’re reading this post now, and you’ve visited the site before, you may have noticed a few changes. Though the content is largely the same the site is based on different theme; the blog and collections, which before were separate sites, have been brought together into one; and the categories and tags have been rationalised. Perhaps the biggest difference is that instead of presenting the last blog post in full, the home page presents a list of posts with a snippet and featured image.
Has all this effort been worthwhile? Well the numbers tell the story with the average visitor to view ratio leaping up from 2.5 to 6.5 over the last four days! And the variety of images clicked on has widened significantly, so people are taking more time to look at more stuff. Whether this will be sustained it’s too early to say, but so far the re-design is looking good.
Richard