The changes I will make the next weeks and why
Ciao, and welcome this is the transcription of my latest podcast episode. This because I want to be clear about what I will do in the next weeks to most people who visit my content network.
Selfie, beacuse some times it helps security; ph: Francesco Coppola
In these September days, I come here to drop here a stone. Strange, isn’t it? The “stone” I am referring to is the delusion I have gathered over these months of 2025—about how I have conducted my art business and the unexpected limitations I’ve encountered.
By combining data from Squarespace analytics and Google Search Console, I have become aware of something: it is really hard to start an art career in nude photography when you are beginning from Italy.
Nemo Profeta in patria comes to mind (trad: no prophet in his homeland). But this is not just a superficial truth — we need to go deeper.
The first difficulty is that communicating in English, through articles, SEO, and tags, is not enough. Social media localize and promote you based on your starting IP address. At least, this remains true if you rely on the “old internet rules” like SEO, Google, and META advertising.
A possible workaround could be YouTube, which is a powerful attention grabber — if you work on it with time, consistency, and authenticity. But here we arrive at the second limit I was not aware of before starting this journey: censorship. For artistic nude images, it is absurdly strong. Instagram is no different. In all their algorithmic “glory,” social media platforms are unable to distinguish an artist from a pornographer, and they end up banning everyone. This means the most effective tools to speed up an artistic career are blocked by the incapacity of social media management.
Restricted to Italian internet attention, the audience I gathered was largely the wrong type and that is the third obstacle. The cultural backwardness of my country cannot be underestimated. Old novelists are dying, but there is no evident generational renewal. In Italy, around 30% of the population reads books regularly, while in the rest of Western and Central Europe the numbers surpass 50%. The same can be said for other forms of cultural expression, all the way down to the scarce ability to read and understand photography. This leads to a sad fact: no experienced artist in Italy truly believes in promoting their art here.
And for us in art nude photography, when you cut out cultural appreciation of creativity and artistry, what remains is a large number of porn-addicted people — people simply looking for cheap material to “release steam.”
And that is exactly what I encountered. More than 3,700 visits, of which 85% came from Italy, in March and April, when I launched my first print sale campaign. Result: zero sales.
Plus, as a bonus difficulty I had to endure: my accountant decided to treat my fiscal profile as a seller instead of the other possible identification as a freelancer, causing me a loss of approximately 2000 euros spent in bureaucratic expenses and retirement funds that – in absence of sells – I rather avoided paying and caused me to stall my photographic practice during this summer, so that now I have very little material to use for the international magazine selections.
Now, I must also admit my own mistakes. As you know, failure is never one-sided.
For someone working in a scarcity-model business, my website in those spring months was a strange thing. I had duplicates of the very images I was trying to sell, displayed on a “Portfolio” page—a leftover from my long years in fashion photography, where such a page made sense. On top of that, I had a long-running blog that told the story of my career in fashion and my transition to nude art. It showed images that were too large, too easy to steal — including some of my earliest experiments. No wonder that later I found many of my photos on gray-zone web forums dedicated to masturbation.
So, all that leads to one inevitable conclusion: I am done. I am beyond angry. I am beyond sick of this situation. But
There is a solution. And that solution is simple: I must stress the art part of my art nude business.
I will close my “Atelier” page. More than that, I will completely redesign my website — this includes the blog, and the way I share content both there and on social media.
I will continue submitting to international publications and possible exhibitions.
I will also open a new shop window in at least one online gallery—possibly Saatchi Art—to reach the customers I truly intend to reach.
And of course, I will continue working on my Patreon account. Sooner or later, people will understand the value I am offering there.
This transformation will take some time — about a month, I suppose. I still need to edit some modelsharing images to show on my blog, and reconfiguring my website from the ground up will require effort. Plus, platforms like Saatchi Art don’t accept just anyone; there is a selection and presentation process, a scrutiny that takes time.
So, I give myself until mid-October to:
– Revolutionize my website
– Change my sharing habits
– Open my profile on Saatchi Art
That will be the start. But, as I explained, it will not be the end. Other steps will follow, aimed at improving the quality of my imagery.
From mid-October onward, I will be fully back in the saddle to promote my artwork and my Patreon account.
We shall see, from that moment on, what results I can obtain. My story, I believe, remains an interesting one to share with you.
Hope you appreciate it.
Shine on!