Print Prices for Online Sales

[Frank Petronio]

Hey maybe I could get an advance from the Art Capital Group in NYC, Annie Leibovitz's benefactors?

[mandoman7]

I know that some artists are doing well with selling their work on the internet. I'm still curious to learn if anyone is doing so who doesn't have some career momentum in another respect, like a magazine article, or a popular book. Can you actually just put work on the internet and get good sales, without anything else on your resume?
Are the successful people on the internet only those who have good exposure elsewhere? I have no idea really, just curious.

[QT Luong]

> Can you actually just put work on the internet and get good sales, without anything else on your resume?

In my experience yes (see also Dan Heller), but maybe not "just" (it's a *lot* of work. one word: google). Note that in the process, you can also pick up opportunities that will end up building your resume.

[PViapiano]

Anyone can put up a website, but the traffic has to be directed to it and that's the rub, as the Bard would put it.

It definitely helps when an article or portfolio is featured in a magazine like LensWork.

I once took a seminar in self-promotion for freelancers (not photography-related) and one of the basics I learned (and never forgot) was that people perceive your position in the marketplace by your price. If you're the low-price leader, people will just assume you're not that good, and vice-versa regardless of the actual quality of your product or service.

Customers who can't afford you now, will come back to you when they do have the money, because they'll perceive you as the best.

This is an oversimplification but the basic tenet holds very true. How many times do you go to the store to buy something and you're faced with 3 price points. Depending on the product, you rarely choose the lowest priced one.

You have to value yourself and have the self-esteem to step up to the plate with your work. It is very hard to make a living in the fine arts, especially without teaching or doing commercial work.

[Ed Richards]

> If you're the low-price leader, people will just assume you're not that good, and vice-versa regardless of the actual quality of your product or service.

Brooks Jenson has taken a very different view, and seems to have built up a pretty good business on his model. But I think there is a huge difference between a service provider like a free lancer, and a product whose attributes are completely obvious to the buyer.

QT points to the key issue - if you want this to be a real business, it takes a lot of work. For myself, I have a demanding but flexible day job. I take pictures for relaxation. I would like for them to available for the public, and I would like to recoup my expenses and make a little profit, if possible. If I were trying to be a full time professional photographer, I would do things very differently. (Starting with not taking pictures of stuff no one wants to see hanging on their wall.) Maybe I will do some work that survives me - I think history is clear that the original selling price of the work has little to do with its long term value.

[Frank Petronio]

Obviously QT has a working business model, with commercial stock and retail print sales, but he also has beautiful work that mainstream customers want.

Hurricane and disaster photos just aren't the sort of things "normal" people hang over the couch, and the stock agencies are flooded with Katrina images (please excuse the pun). It's not like Ed is going to hang out at a craft fair... But same for me, people don't generally buy portraits of strangers and while some of my photos maybe have broader themes, most of my stuff isn't "hangable" to regular people or even that marketable to advertisers.

It takes a lot of work to get yourself into a gallery situation where you can make real money, and in my case getting into a gallery is not a primary goal, just something that may happen organically some day. And actually I think if demand requires a gallery, then I am in a great position since I'd be on the high end of the market.

So why not just set the price at what is easy and worthwhile to do like Ed suggests?

Looking around Etsy, you see a lot of $10 photos. But they take barely any effort -- an inkjet and a stamp -- not that I would go that low but more power to them.

[Robert Hall]

The most that EW received in his lifetime for a print was $25. That was the going price in 1958 when his sons divided up his work and started selling it.

IIRC Edward received $200 each for a series of Kodachrome 8x10's he made for Kodak to market the film.

I'm sorry, I don't have the book handy from which I recall this information and technically those were transparencies not prints.

[mandoman7]

I had the opportunity to work at a gallery a couple of years ago that sold a lot of paintings. One of the most successful galleries at selling the work of living artists in the SF bay area. In the area that I live, N. Calif. wine country, many rich folk were (!) building expensive houses with large walls needing artwork. It was a great opportunity to observe the circumstances under which people are really pulling out their checkbooks.

One of the main things I learned was that people would more readily spend $8000 on the work of an artist with a resume than they would spend $300 on an unknown artist's work. The resume would include a good educational background (association w/name artist hopefully), a good list of exhibitions (in institutions hopefully, not just galleries), and thirdly, the work must be in recognized collections. These three aspects of the artist's resume were working in conjunction with a knowledgeable and attractive person who would be describing the artist's intentions and character. If a good resume was indeed present, it was shocking to see how freely people bought these painting at 5 figures. Since I had shown work in photo galleries a fair amount without very good sales, it made an impression.

To understand the nature of that process, we have to go back to the basic principle that almost everything people do is to impress their peers . The big cars, the big house... why bother with that crap? Well, its to impress their circle of cronies. Not everyone would agree with this, but stay with me for a moment.

This need for peer approval plays a role in the selection of what art they want to fill their wall space. Having selected an artist with a background story, they cite this information at the cocktail party when they're showing off their nice house. They can point to the investment value, which is always a safe area to get endorsement with the landed gentry. These concepts are circling around the decision maker's mind as they begin to focus on a piece.

It sounds cynical, but its always been this way in the art world, and others too. Good work is helped a great deal by good credentials. People need corroboration.

It helped me to observe this stuff in that I realized that I was clearly in the unknown and uneducated category, and that I had to recognize that reality in my pricing. That there was no point in making comparisons with the pricing of a recognized and credentialed photographer's work, no matter how bad I might think it was . It was a matter of trying to get real with expectations.

[Merg Ross]

IIRC Edward received $200 each for a series of Kodachrome 8x10's he made for Kodak to market the film.

I'm sorry, I don't have the book handy from which I recall this information and technically those were transparencies not prints.

Robert, you are correct. He was paid by Kodak for the Ektachrome and Kodachrome work on a per transparency basis. I should have been more specific. It was his black and white work that sold for $25, top price, during his lifetime.

[PViapiano]

> Brooks Jenson has taken a very different view, and seems to have built up a pretty good business on his model.

Brooks Jensen is well-known and has 18,000 subscribers that read his magazine and editorials each month. This is the built-in audience that drives print sales for him, although I have no idea how many prints he actually sells, of his own or of the newer portfolios of others he's been releasing lately.

The other thing to realize is that mostly Brooks is selling prints to other photographers.