NEW YORK—During the depths of a recession — when keeping tabs on the number of art galleries that have closed has become something of a hobby among certain journalists, and one notorious blog even features a death watch — would seem an unlikely time to publish a how-to guide for opening an art gallery. And yet the intrepid and astute Ed Winkleman, who runs his eponymous gallery in New York's Chelsea art district when he's not posting on his popular blog, has done precisely that. His new book, How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, comes out today from Allworth Press. ARTINFO cornered Ed in his gallery last week and pestered him about how much money we would need to borrow from our parents in order to open a gallery, why we would need to grit our teeth and write a business plan, and why being an art dealer is the best job in the world. He also told us the top five things not to do when opening a gallery (see podcast at left).

Ed, before we discuss how I should go about starting a gallery, tell me, how did you get this gig?

Only a handful of people know this, but at one point I was an enthusiastic amateur painter. Arriving in New York from Washington, D.C., in 1994, I began doing studio visits with other painters and realized I just didn't have their talent. I was like Salieri, who could recognize Mozart's genius but couldn't duplicate it.

That's rather sad.

But I realized I enjoyed having a dialogue with artists. That doesn't always naturally lead to opening a gallery, but in my case it did. It all started with a series of guerrilla-type exhibitions I organized called "Hit and Run." There were five in New York and one in London. Each would happen over the course of a weekend. It was almost like an art rave.

Jumping ahead, in May 2001 you opened Plus Ultra gallery in Williamsburg, with the artist Joshua Stern, and five years later you struck out on your own, with Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea.

Yes, I changed the name. I talk about that in the book. I ran into someone on the subway who had been very encouraging of Plus Ultra but admitted that he'd forgotten its name. And everyone else I talked to said, don't underestimate how much value you can get out of the name.

How did you get the idea for the book?

Two years ago I was approached by the publisher. They'd asked an author they'd worked with, Daniel Grant, to write this book. But not having owned a gallery himself, he recommended me.

But then everything changed. The global economy tanked, the art market started to slide, and there you were writing a book about how to open a gallery. What did you do?

I talked with the publisher four months before I turned in the final manuscript because the landscape was changing dramatically. Two sections in particular have been affected by how the economy changed: the art fair section, which will become the most dated, and the cash flow section. When I began writing that, there was every reason to believe that sales would continue along steadily. But by the time I was getting ready to hand in the manuscript, people were already seeing the spigots being turned off and were having to quickly reevaluate how they managed their money. So I added a section about how to raise cash quickly.

How do you feel about your book coming out during a recession?

It sets it up for easy potshots; two artists I know are already working on a parody of it. But I really believe that if you start with an emerging art program on the primary market, a recession is actually a good time to open your gallery, because you have to go through an incubation period anyway.

This sounds like very encouraging news for my new enterprise! What do you mean exactly?

With an emerging program of wholly unknown artists it takes three to five years for that business to become profitable. If you are more or less going to be struggling during that time regardless of what the economy is doing, and you have an eye toward the economy improving in a few years, you can imagine that your name recognition is going to start rising when people are going to start buying again. Whereas if you wait, you will be starting at ground zero on the name-recognition end of it and playing catch-up when a whole bunch of other people are trying to get into the game.