Every artist should have at least three pricing points

Every artist should have at least three pricing points: Distributor, Wholesale and Retail.

When you go to a gallery you consign it at wholesale. They ask retail, that is normally 50%.

The last thing you want to do is undercut your gallery. Gallery owners in the same areas talk. They share experiences.

A $500 piece, original or print is going to sell out of the gallery for $1000. You can not have it all over the web asking $500 for it. Most gallery owners will not allow it. That makes them look bad. But worse than that it makes you look bad. If you sell many pieces at all, sooner or later one of these buyers is going to find your stuff at $500 and they are going to be mad at both the gallery and you.

The distributor price is for the occasion where someone wants to buy more than one piece, some kind of volume. For a higher volume buyer that price is going to be 50/50 or 50 less 50. Meaning a $1000 retail piece is going to go to that distributor for $250. But again, he has to buy volume. What that volume is for you to decide.

There are eight or ten galleries in the local area here where I stop in and visit all the time. I have high-priced, limited edition prints on consignment at one of them. Some of them will not take local artist any longer at all or only in rare instances because they got tired of seeing local artist selling for half price on the Internet.

This is also a big reason why a lot of galleries are going to all Gicles from large publishing houses where the artist understand the business.