Selling at craft markets - hard lessons learned.

[Rob Champagne]

here's what you do. You hire a local venue such as town hall or community gallery space for your own personal show for one or two weeks. You do it in peak season if you can. You steward the show yourself so that visitors can meet the photographer. You use a simple theme to the show such as landscapes of xyz.

If you sell nothing then you are going to have to face facts. People just don't like what they see enough to want to buy it. People telling you that they like your work may just be taking pity on you. The best and only worthwhile compliment on your work is a financial one. i.e. it means it is a genuine compliment regardless of whether it is misguided or not.

I live in a town of 5000 people in a major tourist center. One local amateur photographer here has four personal shows a year in our market hall. He sells very well. He uses a digital slr and makes ultra wide panoramics by stitching images together in PS and prints on an epson 4000. Some prints are over 6ft wide. He prices low from £20 to £150 for a long framed print. Get up close to any print and there is no fine detail and they are very soft. Stand back at normal viewing distance and they look very good.
People just aren't interested in all this resolution and sharpness crap, especially not at a craft market.

What people want is something they can relate to and is meaningful to them. Why do you suppose AA's prints sold well? Because he set up shop at the foot of the mountains where he made his images so that every walker, climber and tourist who visted the place was confronted with an aid memoir of their visit before they left.

So answer me this: Why would anyone want to buy one of your images? Is it because it has high resolution? Is it because it is tack sharp. Is it because it is black and white?
Is because it is colour? Is it because it was made on a 4x5 camera. Is it because it was hand printed? Should any of these be a prime reason for buying an image to hang on your wall so that you can show it off saying it's tack sharp?

Once you have resolved for yourself that none of the above are valid reasons to buy a print then you may begin to understnad why no one is buying yours.

[Don Boyd]

The issues around pricing photographs for the Art Fair market are discussed in depth on many Art Fair forums on Yahoo and elsewhere. Jerome sites many sources in an earlier post. While I spent a great deal of time researching prices and business practices at the art fairs that I showed in, beyond keeping prices well below what you might expect from a gallery, I could not find a consensus of thought on how to arrive at a price. So, I set my prices at what was probably slightly in the upper half of the market in the areas that I expected to sell. (By the way, my 8x10 price was $45 not $90 as I originally stated, 11x14 prints were priced at $90.) After doing a half dozen or so fairs and talking with a number of vendors in general and many other photographers who were selling, I arrived at the following conclusions: sales were much better prior to 9/11; lowering prices helps the sales volume; you need a large inventory of many images; most, but not all people selling well do it as a lifestyle and do as many as 20 shows a year; prints on canvas moved better than prints alone or matted prints; on the whole, photos of people and animals sell better than landscape images. A couple of photographers seemed to do well selling prints on canvas at low prices. One in particular did very well selling decorator color European street scenes on canvas with gaudy, ornamental frames, at very low prices. Clearly the volume had to have made a difference for him. (I also suspect that, in spite of his protestations and the fair rules, he farmed out the entire printing and framing process to a sweat shop somewhere. And yes, I was jealous of his success, but not his images.) Another photographer, whose work I enjoyed and was awarded a best of show, seemed to have sold quite well.

I also think that improved digital camera technology is impacting the market in many ways. One important change is that digital camera owners are more likely to believe that they can take high quality images, and therefore are less likely to see photography as art; certainly not something that they should pay a premium price for. One booth browser said it this way after viewing my prints at a fair for 30 minutes, “I would love to buy one of your prints, but my wife would just say, “Hey, you could take that image yourself, why are you buying one?”” He knew that he couldn’t but had to live with her judgment about it. True or not (boy, I don’t want to awaken this discussion here), digital imaging has contributed to the public’s perception that good photography is easier than ever and therefore has less credibility calling itself art, and therefore pricing itself that way.

Next year I will try a few shows if I can get into some of the better ones in the statewide area (NM). I won’t expect to make much money at them, just to have people see and talk about my work. As a photographer, and a relatively novice one at that, I believe that I am still growing and feedback from the public can make a contribution to how I see my work. Marketing, although I am apparently not very good at it, is not a dirty word. I will continue to try to improve my seeing, photographing and printing, while finding ways to sell my images so that I can afford to make more.

[jetcode]

The market attracted many 'tire kickers' who were just out for a Saturday stroll, but there were also people who truly seemed to enjoy and 'get' photography. I had many compliments on my work - but I only sold one print (plus a couple of concert photos and a bunch of cards). People liked the work - many commented on how they loved B&W photography. I tried to play up the fact that these were traditional processes and not digital images - again, people seemed to respond to the 'retro' angle. But few sales.

sounds like you have a good card business, that may be a good place to further visibility

[QT Luong]

what does that work out to in GB of bandwidth per sale. I'd guess 5GB per sale which is a lot of overhead unless you somehow have real cheap bandwidth available.

5.1GB / 50,000 visits. You are spot on about bandwidth ! (but not about costs: I pay less than 50 cents/GB/month).

[Rob Champagne]

that's very cheap, especially for the UK. But then for that volume of visits a dedicated server with unmetered bandwidth would probably work out to around that. All I need now is enough hits and sales and to warrant it

[domenico Foschi]

I had no time to read all the posts, too long a thread, I will get back to them later.
These fairs or markets, are a good venue for contacts.
Sales are rarely satisfactory.
I would make a portfolio of portraiture and promote your services as a black and white portrait photographer as well.
The idea of the greeting cards is a good one as well, although it is taking a lot of time, I am sure, to prepare all that material.
It is my opinion that the dawnfall of the art market is strictly correlated with the real estate crises in this country.
I have heard of galleries experiencing a loss of 50% in respect to 2 years ago.
I am talking about Southern California....
If people have no freshly painted walls to fill, they have no need to buy Art.
Of course there are the collectors, but I doubt many of them ever will go to these kind of venues, as they look not only for good work but for collectible as well.
Yes, these are tough times.
Hang in there.

[tim atherton]

Selling photography is hard because people do not consider it art but rather reproduction and hence bad paintings out sell excellent photographs all the time because there is only one and it takes more than pushing a button to produce it!

That my friend is the battle you are up against.

Until you are ready to step up to the plate and realize the flaws in the photographic medium you will continue to starve unless you are willing to start thinking like an artist and produce originals. Then educate your clients / potential buyers and show them why your original is an original and all these other photographs are just that, reproductions, a dime a dozen, worthless, nothing unique.

I already know what I have started doing and I am not even going to look back...

Selling 1/1 likely won't make any difference. In the end it's the image that counts (and knowing your market)

[kjsphotography]

Selling 1/1 likely won't make any difference. In the end it's the image that counts (and knowing your market)

As usual you have no clue as to what you are talking about.

[paulr]

As usual you have no clue as to what you are talking about.

why not cite some evidence that someone's wrong, instead of hurling an absurd generalization at them.

and speaking of evidence, i'm curious about your signature stating why "no one considers photography art."

how do you suppose all those people paying all-time record prices for photographs haven't gotten the message?

[Tim Hyde]

That was unnecessary, Kevin. I love your work, own a couple of your bags, and might end up using your software, but in this case I'm afraid that Tim is right.