Print Society's Guide To Selling Prints

If you're anything like us printing and selling your art can seem like a wild, surreal idea best left to high-brow artists with high-brow galleries. Who'll buy it, and where do I even start? We're here to tell you it's just a print, not rocket science! We built Print Society to make it easy for you, fabulous photographers and genius illustrators, to connect with art lovers around the world and get your work into their hands. Everyone loves great art, and now they have a place to find it. This guide will walk you through turning your art into prints with the same tools those mysterious galleries use, offer some thoughts on how to price your work, how to post it online, how get the word out, and finally how to ship your prints to happy customers. Let's get started!

1. Where to print your artwork

   OK, so once you've done what you do best -- take an killer photo, paint a beautiful painting, or illustrated something amazing -- you need to get those suckers printed. When you start talking to printers or research how to print your art yourself you'll no doubt encounter a plethora of printing methods, technologies, and words that may or may not be french, most of which are liable to make your head spin. Lucky for you we've done a bunch of research and created a list of great printers around the world that will help you make beautiful prints. We've also got a few suggestions as to which kind of prints to make and some tips to make the process easier and, hopefully, a bit clearer.

   Browse the Print Society Print Shop Index

   Recommendations for beginners: Don't try the super fancy printing right off the bat. Try doing some simple Giclée printing (that is, Inkjet printing) at first, something of archival quality, then move on to fancier stuff if you like. Don't let the myriad of choices slow you down, do something simple and go for it.

2. How to sell your prints

   The easiest way to sell your prints online is by setting up an Etsy Storefront. They're free to set up and you can easily post your prints to Print Society once your storefront is up and running.

3. How to price your prints

   There is no easy answer to this question, but we do have a few suggestions worth noting. Firstly, the price of any print should be a function of the quality of the artwork, the quality of the print, the quantity of prints created from the respective artwork and the reputation you've built as an artist (and, if you want to get complicated, the print market in general). One end of the spectrum of pricing is represented by well known artists who've had their artwork professionally printed and who's artistic skill is exceptional. On the other end of the spectrum there are artists who've yet to sell a print, who haven't mastered the artform of their choice and who aren't printing their work with extreme care. A small edition of prints sold by artists at the former end of the spectrum should be priced relatively high, in the many thousands of dollars, while a large batch of un-editioned prints by an artist who has created a mediocre piece of art (it happens to the best us!) should, understandably, sell for quite a bit less. Of course this is a general rule, and the wide variety of artistic tastes represented by collectors is proof enough that there is a wide palette of interest in fine art prints. Don't let pricing get in the way of printing your work -- just do it.

   A suggestion for emerging artists: Experiment. Sell three editions of one or two of your best images in the same way that Jen Bekman and crew do at 20x200.com (say, an edition of two hundred 8x10" prints for $20 each, an edition of twenty 10x15" prints for $200, and an edition of two 20x30" prints for $2,000). You'll get a good idea of what people will pay for your particular prints, which pricing generate the most income, and which prints are worth spending your time promoting and selling. If you only succeed in selling one hundred prints from your two hundred print edition over six months you may want to lower the quantity of prints in your next edition and raise the price slightly, for example.

   A suggestion for experienced and recognized artists: Work on building a following. Print Society offers a number of tools to do just this, so take the time to engage your audience through Print Society, your blog, twitter feed, etc. See which images of yours fans want printed. Remember, 100 loyal fans can tell a thousand friends to buy your prints.

4. Photographing your prints

   Here's how you do it:

5. Getting your prints on Print Society

   If you're using an Print Society storefront we'll post your prints to Print Society for you -- no problemo. If your prints are being sold through another website or you're using another type of online shop you can easily post your prints, for free, to Print Society by using our easy upload tool. It's that easy.

6. Spread the word

   Fortune has smiled upon you and given a few billion fellow citizens the internet. Use it well and you can capture the attention of anyone interested in beautiful art. Print Society was built with this phenominon in mind -- we live to make it possible for artists of all caliber to build relationships with every fan out there looking for him or her, and we've built some great tools into out site to do just that. So, for starters, post your prints to Print Society. Anyone visiting our site, googling for great prints or the the contents of your images will have a great shot of finding you and buying your work. They'll also have the ability to subscribe to your prints, so any time you publish something new they'll know about it. Secondly, tell your story. It's in our DNA to want to hear stories, and if you can add to the story your prints already tell with anecdotes about how your prints were created, why you spent the time crafting them, etc., people will care, too. And don't just rely on Print Society -- start a blog and a twitter feed dedicated to your prints, link to Print Society and use Print Society to link to your blog. Building a small, dedicated readership of 100 people has an immense potential. As we mentioned above, 100 dedicated fans, if they care, will tell a thousand of their friends about your work, and those people may each tell 10 of their friends, meaning 100,000 people may see your prints. Think small and big things can happen.

   The End
   Updated March 30, 2009