Selling Prints: Observations and Advice

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Art in the Professions Week

Introduction


A lot of people think this is how print sales happen:

1. Join DeviantArt
2. Upload your first piece to DA with prints enabled
3. Log out
4. Come back an hour later
5. ????
6. PROFIT


But, sadly, it's not that easy - like most social media platforms, DA is a site where you tend to get back a return (in this case, CASH MONEY!) proportionate to effort you put into getting your content seen. In this article I'll be focusing on marketing your prints, which is easier than you'd expect but requires you to think about four major questions: What are you going to sell? Who are you selling it to? Where will you sell it? And how will you get it seen? If you can think up good answers to these questions you can be as glittery as Big Ang in the above gif, or at least make a few extra bucks on the side.


What Am I Going To Sell?


Look at your work - and then go to shop and check out the artists across the bottom of the page, in the sidescrolling box titled "Shop By Artists", and if there's one who has a similar medium or style to yours take a walk through their gallery. Check out the other thumbs on the shop page, too, that are close to what you do. Then go out to a store that carries framed art prints and do the same there. The pieces you've seen are fairly well-executed, right? First tip about selling prints: People buy good work. This isn't to say that you're never going to sell anything unless you're Salvador Dali, it just means you may have to put in more sales effort if your work's average. If it's bad - like this bad--

Untitled Drawing by isthisthingstillon

--well, then you might be better served using your time to refine your art for a bit, versus marketing it as wall art. But I can't give you a list of what specific levels of quality are going to sell or not sell, because even that kind of off-looking panda might strike one viewer and make them go, "Yes, I need this as a mousepad". The decision of whether your work is ready for sale as wall art is ultimately yours. Just remember, though, that the market already has a lot of available art at very high levels of execution and very low prices. All those pieces in shop and the framed works at galleries and boutiques are your competition for sales. If you make your work available and put in the effort to sell it and it just doesn't sell, the market might be saying it's not ready for sale.

Or they might be saying it's good, but not what they'd put on a wall. The example I think of in this situation is if you're on DA as a fetish photographer, and have really awesome pictures of let's say, sexy nuns with ball gags and no shirt. Yes, some people would put that on their wall - but a very large portion wouldn't, for various reasons. Corporations buy art for their offices and boardrooms and if they hang that nun they'll end up with a sexual harassment suit from the Catholic lady in accounting. Parents probably won't want that hanging in their house for fear a nine-year-old might get some weird notions about what goes on in church when mass lets out.


Same reason parents usually don't keep Big Ang in their house.

This doesn't mean you need to only do "safe" art if you want to sell prints. Go nuts. But the more "approachable" themes are more easily marketable. As the poll results below show, people who follow printscommunity on DA are more likely to buy things like landscapes, abstracts and animals. There's still 5% who want controversial stuff - nudes, political work - but that 5% can be harder to reach than the nearly 40% who want pretty little trees. We'll touch more on how to reach buyers in the next section.

Prints Mktg Poll 1 by isthisthingstillon



Think about formats and sizes of prints you'll sell. This might seem common-sense - if you're taking a square photograph, sell a square print - but one thing I've seen people do more times than I can count is taking one image and making it available as a print in every possible aspect ratio. The issue you're going to run into here is that each ratio is going to have a different crop or matte, so you're not selling one image so much as several variants on one image. Odds are there's one crop that you think is the best. Sell that one. If someone asks for a different aspect ratio and puts cash money on the table in front of you, take the cash money and sell the ratio they want - but it's your work, and you should have enough faith in your composition to want it sold as-intended. Size is another consideration, since bigger sizes mean more profit per sale. Don't take that to mean that you should only sell gigantic prints, though, because some people just can't afford the big ones or don't have enough wall space for them. On DA and other sites that print on demand the variety of size is more important than variety of aspect ratiosEven just a couple different medium and large sizes (like 8x12 and 24x36 respectively) give people a range of prices and areas to pick from. If you're selling a limited run of a print or if you're getting a batch done to sell in physical space then pick the size(s) you think people will buy or that you want them to buy - like 1:1 reproduction for paintings.


Yes, you can have my dress as a tablecloth. For about ten grand in unmarked bills. And a puppy.

One last note - if you're selling readymade prints in the physical world, it can be a good idea to have both framed and unframed prints, or unframed photo prints and stretched canvases, or some option at least to pander to both people who want to customize the piece to fit their decor or just buy it ready to hang without any further effort. Frames also increase your profit margins if you're selling in the real world, because the price of a framed print can be a good amount higher than an unframed one without people taking to the vapors when they see the price tag. Simple frames are usually pretty inexpensive from artist supply stores or framing shops and you can mark up the price over what you paid for it. Capitalism! Printed giftware can be a good revenue stream too, if you can get low enough production costs for things like mugs to keep them affordable to buyers while maintaining a profit for yourself. 

You can always add a personal touch to prints - signing them is one obvious choice. But you can also offer custom mounting, or even mats. And postcards are the best - they're small, can easily be handed out to galleries, are beautiful and low-cost. Small things sell. And the more immediately useable they are the better! Like calendars - they're not small, but they're art that's ready to be hung. Small stretched canvases, too. Not prints that have to be flattened and framed and all that nonsense. And think about how your art will look on different surfaces like gloss or matte finishes or canvas - some images will look exactly how you envision them on one surface only and it's fine for you to say that.
snowunmasked giving her input on the sizes and the formats and such

These poll results from printscommunity show what people do with the prints they buy:

Prints Mktg Poll 3 by isthisthingstillon
Prints Mktg Poll 4 by isthisthingstillon


Who Do I Sell To?


The good thing with a site like DA having an onsite prints service is that, especially if you've been around for a while and are pretty community-active, you've probably established a loyal watcherbase. That means when you submit work for sale here, they'll see it - so you've reached some potential clients already!


Big Ang has nineteen million watchers.

However: Just because they watch you doesn't mean they're going to buy your work. I used to manage an account that did very high volume print sales here, and strictly did print sales - no real community involvement, and the only art flowing through it was for prints purposes. We had thousands of watchers and thousands of sales, and if poll sampling is to be believed only 26% of our watchers actually bought anything. This was an account with very diverse work across various media and no incentive to watch it apart from to see art and then buy that art, so we had a very specific niche of watchers, and still only had a 26% conversion rate. If you're on DA using it like I do you have people who watch you for a million possible reasons, and not all of them are art-related - people watch me for articles, tutorials, my body (let's be real), my poetry, and my visual art. Let's say 40% watch me for visual art; of that set, maybe another 20% buy prints occasionally, so that's 8% of my total watcher base who are potential buyers. If 26% of that 8% actually buy a print, that's only about 2% of my watchers - about 80 people of 4000. That's a pretty low number if I want to buy Prada shoes.


Your response to me wanting Prada shoes, right?

Fortunately you've also got other networks aside from your DA watchers to sell to. Family who need wall art and who you can leverage familial guilt against? Check. Facebook friends who have twitter friends who have pinterest friends who know that one person who presses the "make this viral" button at Internet HQ? Check. Coworkers, employers, neighbours, local art afficionados? Why not! Start spreading the word to them. If you have a hard copy portfolio or a link to your sales site, be it a DA shop page or something on your own site or another platform, pass that around. Tell them to pass it around. Don't be annoying and harass them about it nonstop, but rumor has it that if you look a bit emaciated and have crazy hair you might drum up sympathy and sympathy sells. Allegedly.

Think about who might buy your work. If you're shooting architectural photography in India, people who are into Indian architecture are your obvious market - or people who want to visit India, or people who come from India, or people who've been there and want to remember it, or students of architecture who want inspiration, or people who just really like the colour of that building you're photographing. If you're painting anthro squirrels with shotguns you might want to target people who like anthro art - or people who enjoy hunting squirrels, or people from areas with a lot of squirrels who've moved to areas that are squirrel-free, or people who have a shotgun similar to the one said squirrel is holding, or people who generally like cute rodents with attitude problems. There are a lot of groups of people who might be drawn to any one piece. Then think about which groups are big and have money they're willing to part with, because if you can only market to one group that's the one you want to strike. Let's say you're doing the anthro squirrel thing. If you go to an anthro art convention to sell those prints you're hitting a huge group of people who enjoy that general theme and who are already mentally prepared to spend money.


Probably don't say this to the people you're not targeting on any specific day, though, unless you want to get a bad reputation like Nene sometimes has.

So that covers the what and the who - now onto the:


Where and How?


In the last section I mentioned that using other social media and real-life networks can be a great way to generate sales, because you're leveraging your connections to people who already know you and they might know other people who will like your work too. Even a little teaser, like a business card with some of your work on the back that can be passed from person to person and hung up on bulletin boards, can lead to sales (but don't do like I did once and forget to put any contact information on it, because then you will not get sales, derp). I also mentioned conventions, where artist cards and limited prints usually go over really well. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for where to sell work. Keeping in the same vein of groups of artistic people under one roof, places like galleries and framing shops that sell small greeting card or postcard prints will often let you showcase your work there for a small commission, and some high-volume shops might even buy work from you outright at wholesale prices to resell to their customers. But businesses that aren't catering specifically to artists and art buyers can be great venues too, if you can appeal to their existing customers.


"Existing". "Customers".

I used to sell pretty large matte prints of flowers in a flowershop, and prints of coffee-related things in a café; odds were that people in a flowershop liked flowers and people in a café liked coffee. But you don't even have to think that narrow, like AshleyxBrooke demonstrates by selling postcard prints of her local New England area in local New England businesses for tourists - and she also has some input on merchandising for optimal sales:

I'd recomend checking out local shops, coffeeshops, locally owned restaurants and seeing or asking them if they do anything like an "Artist of the Month" type deal. It's pretty big around here but not sure how it is in other towns. The [prints] I sell the most of are of course local shots. They sell not only to locals but to tourists. The postcards especially. No one else in town does postcards, so I think that's also why they sell a lot better than I thought they would. I started with just selling my postcards at one shop and now I'm selling them at three. I honestly didn't even think they'd sell because they aren't your typical $0.50 postcards, they are a bit pricey but this little art town seems to eat them up. If you can get them close to your viewer - THAT is key. For example, postcards: They need to be up front at the register where they will catch the eye of the customers. Location is KEY. We once even had them off to the side (still AT the counter but not where the customer was looking) and dont get me wrong, they still sold but once I moved it back by the register? People were like "ohhh are these new?" They weren't. They were just moved to right in the eye of the customer.... I have one guy that has bought three prints from me just by seeing them as a postcard form, and he'd rather have a larger print. And I also have a few other people that are always buying my postcards when I let them know new stuff is out.
See? There's hope if you can think outside the box.


Conclusion: Brand, Brand, Brand


I hate the word "brand" but it's one of those inevitable ones that is everywhere these days and if you ever mention "art" or "business" or "market" on twitter you'll get followed by ten thousand bots named things like BrandingAdvice4Artists. I'm using the term here not to refer to your corporate logo and letterhead design, though. As you create a business around your prints and especially when you get repeat buyers, you create an expectation that you're going to keep creating similar work for sale. That's your brand - you're #1 anthro-squirrel-with-a-shotgun painter in Missourri and so help you God you're going to work it.


Big Ang knows how that goes.

And frankly, if people prove that they'll buy your new work if it's similar to your older work? Run with it. That's money, and that's a sliver of success. That doesn't mean that you can't go on to create an anthro chinchilla with a revolver somewhere down the road, but it might not resonate as well with your existing customers as the squirrels do. If you completely 180 from painting squirrels to photographing babies, well, you might get some existing customers buying out of loyalty at first but you're pretty much going to have to start from the ground up - reexamine who you'll sell to, what you'll sell, and how to reach your buyers. Hopefully it's easier the second time around, with the experiences you've accumulated already.


What she said.

Questions for Discussion

  1. Do you sell prints? If so, what one piece of advice would you give to someone else who was looking to sell prints for the first time?
  2. Do you notice the art on the walls in places you visit? Especially if it's for sale?
  3. If you were going to buy a print right now, what would it be of? What medium would it be?


© 2015 - 2024 isthisthingstillon
Comments17
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CeaSanddorn's avatar
interesting article, but the video snippets are a bit disturbing...
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