Q4 Prep for Artists: Half Your Buyers Start Before Halloween

I've worked out with my buddy Dom for years. There's normal Dom, and then there's the Dom who has a race coming up. Normal Dom shows up when I show up and does the same workout I do. Race Dom shows up thirty minutes early, goes for a run first, and then does our entire normal workout on top of it. Nothing changed about Dom. What changed is there's a race on the calendar.

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Q4 is that race. And it's the one you didn't realize I signed you up for. It starts October 1st, which is about two months out — and here's what most artists get wrong: mid-October isn't your launch. It's your deadline.

Nearly half of holiday shoppers say they start before Halloween. By the middle of October, 40% already know exactly what they're buying. The big retailers figured this out years ago — Best Buy's own press release last year announced they were "putting the creep in holiday creep" and kicking the season off on Halloween. This episode is the broad game plan for getting ready. The tactics come next, week by week, between now and October.

In this episode:

Normal Dom vs. Race Dom — and the small detail in that story that's really the whole instruction manual Why the "Rule of 7" is marketing folklore with no study behind it, and the 1959 experiment that makes the point far better Effective frequency explained as reps and sets: the same 13 ads crammed into 13 weeks spike and then collapse; spread across a year, they hold The number that should worry you — by mid-October, 40% of shoppers already know exactly what they're buying Attention arrives in October. Money arrives in December. Why that's better news for artists than it first sounds Tell your story first, show your art second — and how that one reordering kills the "I don't have enough to post" problem for good Three questions to answer before you get out of the car: can you transact, are you open for commissions, are you actually marketing The Gallery Test pointed straight at December — what a real gallery does differently for the holidays, and the digital twin of every one of those moves The Bathroom Art Sale — how naming the destination removes the friction that quietly kills art sales, and why "under the tree" works even better Why commissions carry a hard deadline, and what that means for your October This week's homework: answer three questions honestly. Is your website set up so a total strang