THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: If you ever thought, I just don’t have enough time to go to my art business, this episode is going to challenge that hard. Because the truth is, you don’t need more time, but you do need a better strategy. So today I’m going to show you how to sell your art working just ten hours a week. Not theoretically. This is how I built my own art business when I had very limited time. And it’s what I teach my clients now. And I’m going to be very honest with you, you’re probably spending time on things that feel productive but are draining your energy and not helping your sales.
Speaker 2: It’s The Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast, an art World Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey there, I’m Miriam Schulman. I’ve been a professional artist for over 25 years. I’m author of the book Artpreneur The Step by Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living From Your Creativity, which is now entering its third reprint. I’m also founder of the Artist Incubator program, where I’ve coached hundreds of artists and many of them over the six figure mark. But when I was building my art business, I didn’t have full days to work. I started building my art business when my son was in nursery school, and my daughter was in kindergarten and I didn’t have childcare. So when my son was in nursery school, I actually used the time that he was in nursery school to work out and run errands, and I had to wait until both of my kids were put to bed before I could paint. Then after Seth went to kindergarten, I had about 90 minutes in the early afternoon before I had to pick my kids up from school. That was it. I could paint in the evenings and I could work on the business in the afternoon. Maybe an hour in the morning. And for marketing, maybe. Maybe four hours a week, sometimes less. Especially if I already had commissions, then I maybe wouldn’t mark it as much. So when I tell you that this can be done in ten hours, I’m not bsing you. I’m not guessing. This is how I did it. I didn’t have more time than you, but I couldn’t afford to waste a minute.
Miriam Schulman: Energy drains. Most artists think I don’t have enough time. Actually, a lot of people think that they don’t have enough time. But here’s the truth. If I were to wave a magic wand and give you more time, that doesn’t necessarily mean you would have more energy. So the trick is not even so much managing your time, but also managing your energy so you don’t burn out, and also not focusing on the right things. So if you’re putting your energy into things that don’t lead to sales. If that just made you rethink how you’re spending your time. Hit subscribe because I’m here to help you stop wasting starting with the biggest trap that I see, something I call procrastinating. Now, I’ve heard other business coaches shame and blame their clients for making excuses, and I never use the words excuses because the fears behind your reasons. They don’t feel like excuses. They feel real to you. And the smarter you are and the more creative you are, the better you’re going to be at coming up with those reasons why you shouldn’t do that scary hard thing. So let’s call these doubts instead. They’re unhelpful thoughts which, left unchecked, will hold you back. These doubts often make us feel confused about the correct actions that we need to take. Sometimes people get so confused that they doubt the viability of acting at all, and others go into what I call procrastinating mode.
Miriam Schulman: And they bury themselves in the research stage. So procrastinating stems really just from wanting to get everything right, everything perfect. But what happens is all that extra information ends up overwhelming you with more fear and more doubt. Especially as you research, you’ll find conflicting information. Should you do this? Should you sell your art online or should you get gallery representation? Who knows, maybe you have another latte. So whether you don’t know how to move forward or you spent endless hours researching the right way. The result is pretty much the same. It usually ends up with you not taking any action. Researching might make you feel like you’re doing something, but learning without acting doesn’t help you, especially when you’re confused and overwhelmed. Sometimes I have clients who, in order to avoid taking action, they’ll ask me for plans. So they’re doing procrastinate planning because it’s always easier for them to escape the present by going into the future mode. Future planning instead of taking the actions they need to take right now. But any kind of procrastination, even procrastinating, is not really helpful. It feels productive, but it isn’t. If you’re watching tutorials, if you’re listening to podcasts, if you’re taking notes, even watching me right now, but you’re not actually doing the things that lead to a sale, here’s the hard truth you don’t learn faster by researching, you learn faster by failing.
Miriam Schulman: So think about how babies learn to walk. They don’t study it. They pull themselves up. They fall down. They pull themselves up again. And every time they pull themselves up, it’s like doing a squat and they’re building strength. And that’s how you build your business, too. Not by consuming content, but by doing. Be honest. Have you been in procrastinating mode lately? If that’s you, put guilty in the comments, so I know. Click pause here. If you’re listening to this and thinking, oops, I see myself, I’ve been stuck in research mode, then you need a system, not more information, a system. And that’s exactly why I wrote my book Artpreneur. It walks you step by step through how to build a sustainable art business without relying on social media and without wasting time and things that don’t actually lead to sales. And clearly, a lot of artists need this right now because we just went into our third reprinting. So if you don’t already have it, go grab yourself a copy. But we also have it available in Kindle and the audiobook. So if that’s easier for you, you can get it on Amazon, go to Artpreneurbook.com. But because it is a traditionally published book with Harpercollins, which is a major publisher, you can also request this book from your local library or from your local bookstore. All right, now let’s get back to the show. The other analogy I love is that I live in New York City, and when I go someplace for the first time on the subway and sometimes not even for the first time when you emerge from the subway, sometimes it’s a little disorienting.
Miriam Schulman: You don’t know which corner necessarily you’re popping out on if you’re facing north, south, east or west, or which way you really need to go. And sometimes there are a bunch of unsavory characters lurking around, so you don’t even want to ask somebody. So the best way to figure out which way to go, if you should walk this way or that way or this way, is to just start walking. And if you got off at the subway at 18th Street, and now you find yourself on 17th Street, but really you wanted to go uptown to 19th Street, you turn around and now you’ve figured it out. But you’re going to waste a lot less time than if you’re just standing there scratching your head. And don’t tell me you can pull your phone out. And New York City. Sometimes if there’s unsavory characters around, you don’t want to be pulling out your cell phone on a New York City sidewalk. Maybe you don’t get reception. My point is, you want to keep moving and moving. You’ll learn something a lot faster than just staying still. All right. So let’s talk about the time wasters. Let’s assume you only have ten hours a week. And you cannot afford to waste time on things that don’t generate sales.
Miriam Schulman: Before I get going with this plan, I want you to know I do have some clients. I actually spoke to a client in my Artist Incubator today and she was saying, uh, she’s a doctor. So says this is a very serious job. And she said when she works on marketing, she doesn’t have time to do art. I said, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can spend one week working on your marketing and the next week working on your art. So you do ten hours on, ten hours off. Because if you’re an art marketing mode, sometimes it’s hard to get back into art making mode. So you don’t have to split your time, your ten hours up into marketing and art making during the week. You can do ten on ten off like that. Alternate weeks. I had lots of clients who do it that way, But if I only had ten hours a week. Here’s what I want you to stop doing. Starting with posting on social media every day. Especially if you’re not getting sales that way. If that’s true, you’re performing. You’re not building a business. If you’re writing blog posts hoping people will find you, by the way, that is really outdated advice. Tell me in the chat below if anyone is still giving that kind of advice, that artists should be writing blog posts because that advice is at least ten years out of date.
Miriam Schulman: Oh, here’s another really big time suck. Applying to jury shows where maybe you get 1 or 2 paintings in the show or artworks in the show. Not only do you have the fees, but the type of show where they’re not even during it online. So you have a date where you have to drop off your artwork, and then at the end of the weekend, you have to pick it up. What doesn’t work? And even if your art does get in the show, you have to like, come back at the end of the month and pick up your art, and you’re doing all this back and forth and spending all this money. So maybe one artwork gets into a group show. That’s a waste of time. It’s also kind of a waste of money. I remember those types of jury shows could cost me like $100 to maybe get 1 or 2 pieces in, and sometimes they even required me to sit around and babysit the show. And it wasn’t really good odds because there’d be 100 pieces in this group show, and maybe, maybe 5 to 10% of the show sells not 5 to 10% of your works, 5% of the show. So I stopped doing those shows because I would go to pick up my artwork at the end of the month and find out only four pieces out of 100 sold. No, no. And all that time driving back and forth, I know you know what I’m talking about.
Miriam Schulman: If you’ve ever participated in one of those shows, it’s not a growth strategy. If something is for exposure but doesn’t lead to a sale, it’s a distraction. Remember a few weeks ago when we talked about exposure artist Barbie? Visibility without a sales mechanism is a hobby. So tell me, which one of these time wasters are you still doing? Social media blog posts, jury shows. And I’ll add one more to this list pinning on Pinterest. Tell me in the comments which of these outdated advice are you still holding on to? So I have a client, Megan Mayberry. She is totally crushing it, by the way, and she’s very creative with how she gets herself out there and getting visibility. But when we first started working together, she told me how she was participating in a gay pride parade because she knew that was her ideal collectors and she was letting people try it on and all that is good. But I asked her, is there any way they can buy it from you? And she says, no, no, no, it’s just for exposure. So I said to her, if it doesn’t lead to a sale, you’re wasting your time. And yes, it stunk. She did not like hearing it, however, that shifted everything for her. She stopped doing things just for visibility and started focusing only on opportunities that had a path to a sale, or if she was doing it for visibility, making sure it included a sales mechanism.
Miriam Schulman: So within six months, she made over $45,000. This is not about working harder. It’s about working on the right things. Now, here is my philosophy. I want you to market like it’s 1999. I mean, technically like 1995, but I like that 1999 goes with that song. Back then, we didn’t have Instagram, we didn’t have smartphones, we had phones. But the only thing we could use them for was to call people. We built relationships. We followed up, we reached out directly, and here’s what’s wild. Those strategies are even more powerful today because no one is doing them. If you want to stand out, send a handwritten note, send a postcard, send something in the mail. There is no spam filter on somebody’s mailbox. If you only had ten hours a week, these are the only things that matter. Number one follow up. This is how sales happen. Sales do not happen always in the first conversation. They often happen in the follow up. When I was doing portraits, if someone even casually mentioned that they might want one, I followed up. Not once, not just twice, multiple times multiple until they said either, okay, yeah, I’m ready to do it or oh, Miriam, I’m so sorry, but I changed my mind. Yeah, those were uncomfortable conversations. But here’s what I learned. It’s not about convincing.
Miriam Schulman: It’s about making it easy for them to decide you want to get them out of maybe. So either they’re going to say yes or no and you’re fine, whichever way they go. Now, for me, that meant getting the photo or scheduling the photo shoot. And here’s something I learned the hard way in terms of those photo shoots. I used to book it on the calendar without a deposit. And then I learned if I didn’t collect a nonrefundable deposit when booking the shoot, they would call me up to reschedule and maybe disappear. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t have any skin in the game. So I removed the friction. I made the step clear. And that’s what luxury does. By the way, luxury is not about pressure. Luxury is about making the decisions easy because a confused mind doesn’t buy. So what I would do is when they book the shoot, I scheduled it with a deposit and I said, it’s not refundable, but once you put the deposit down, you won’t lose the deposit if you reschedule. So it forced them to follow through on what they wanted. That’s the strategy. If your buyer has to think too much, they don’t make any decision at all. Now, before I move on, I want to say this. If what I just shared with you, if that’s new to you and you want more strategies like that, exactly how I implemented them.
Miriam Schulman: That’s where a lot of artists get stuck because they understand the concepts, but they don’t really understand how to apply them. And that’s why I tell so many of my own personal stories. And I really break it down for you inside my book. Artpreneur. Because this isn’t theory. This is the step by step process that I used, and I’ve now taught to hundreds of artists. So if you’re serious about building an art business with the limited time that you have, don’t learn from your mistakes. Learn from mine. Start there. Go get the book. And by the way, if you’d rather listen while you’re creating your art or on your commute, don’t worry, there’s an audiobook version of it too. So all you have to do is go to Artpreneurbook.com. Okay, let’s keep going. Number two, partnerships and real world opportunities. So the second driver of sales are partnerships. Now partnerships can be partnering with a charity. I’ve done a whole episode on that. In-person opportunities. It could be built in trust. It could be. Reaching out to interior decorators or stagers, but in person and real world belly to belly live is how your business will thrive. I had a client, Lynn Sams, who was really struggling the year before she started working with me. She had only made $13,000 in sales from her galleries, and the following year she made over $90,000 in a year. But let me tell you, her best month was August of 2024, and she made over $19,000 in art in one month.
Miriam Schulman: And the kicker was that was the month that her Instagram was hacked. So how did she make those sales? Well, she hosted an in-person studio show. So Instagram didn’t grow her business. Her strategy did. Now, if that surprised you even a little. Hit the like button so I know Number three media and visibility. The third driver is getting in front of other people’s audience. So that’s media features podcasts. You don’t need to build a huge following. You just need to get in front of other people’s big followings. Okay, your ten hour week, let’s break this down. If you only have ten hours a week, you can spend six hours making your art and four hours marketing, or you can spend all ten hours of that making art. And the following week, all ten hours marketing. It’s up to you. But here’s the key. You don’t have to market every day. You can batch it. Instead of trying to do everything every week, you might want to do three hours of email, one week, three hours of outreach, another week, your marketing shifts, but your focus stays the same. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about hiring people. So some people know that I have a full time employee. Her name is Anna, and she hired I hired her actually over ten years ago when she was in college.
Miriam Schulman: And when she first started working for me, I paid her only $10 an hour. I didn’t even know it in the beginning. What to have her do. So I had her working on Pinterest, which I’m kind of embarrassed about because when I look back, those are some of the exact activities. I tell you not to waste your time doing pinning things on Pinterest, pinning my blog posts, pinning other people’s blog posts so that they’ll pin mine. Yeah. For real, that’s what she was doing. And you know what? It didn’t move the needle at all. But something interesting happened because I was paying for those ten hours. I started taking them more seriously. I stopped assigning those time wasters to her. So what fell away? Well. Blog posts pinning anything that wasn’t helping me sell more art. So here’s the lesson. When you pay for time, you respect it. And most artists, they don’t respect their own time. They treat it like it’s unlimited. And your energy is not unlimited because you can’t hire and burn yourself out on activities that don’t help your business grow or your art grow. So here is my final advice to you. If you only have ten hours a week, you do not have time to second guess what’s working. You do not have time to hide it in research mode. You do not have time to do things that don’t lead to a sale, and you definitely don’t have time to make all these mistakes yourself.
Miriam Schulman: And you don’t need more time, but you do need a better strategy. So what’s one thing you’re going to stop doing after listening to this episode? And what’s one thing you’re going to focus on instead? Tell me in the comments. You know what? I read every single one. And if this episode hits you and you’re realizing you’ve been busy but not actually building a business, this is your moment to shift. Start simple. Pick one strategy. Apply it this week. Because clarity doesn’t come from thinking, and results don’t come from just planning. They come from doing so. Before you go, I want to tell you what’s coming next week because if I had to restart my business in 2026 from scratch, with zero audience, no connections and no reputation, what would I actually do? Not theory. Oh, by the way, definitely not post on Instagram. No post in hope strategy. The real moves I would make in the order that I would make them, and what I would ignore completely. Because the truth is, what worked even a few years ago doesn’t work the same way anymore. So next week I am breaking it all down. If I had to start from zero, this is exactly how I’d rebuild. So make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it and I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on facebook, at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt, and of course on SchulmanArt.com
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