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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.

I do not think entering groups and/or contests, in and of itself, is going to lead to direct sales to any significant level vs using that same time to advertise outside FAA.

There is always going to be someone come along and say they made sales from a contest or from groups and yeah, I get that. I am not saying there are NO sales from groups, I am saying compared to the same effort spent outside FAA that effort is gong to give you a lot better results.

I joined about 200 groups and entered dozens and dozens of contests in the first 2-3 years I was here. I tracked the sales the best I could. I failed to make any direct connection between groups and/or contests and sales. When I stopped doing groups and contests I did not see even the slightest dip in sales. Not even the featured art or contest winners or places saw any sales that I could relate to those groups or contests.

After a year or two of not belong to any group I came up and a marketing plan using groups to promote outside FAA.

I joined 50 groups or so and I posted to them only when I did new uploads. I posted the same image to as many of the groups where the image was appropriate. As soon as I had three or four images with two or three features each I would put together an album on Facebook and promote the album as these images have received special recognition at FineArtAmerican, home of 500,000 of the world's greatest artists. Or wording similar.

I think the same thing could be done with entering the contest and winning or placing in the top three of the contest.

I suggest that joining groups and developing a marketing program around them is the way to go. Just joining groups and thinking that alone is a marketing program, IMHO is not worth the effort.

Pricing Your Artwork - What To Do, What To Do by Arnold White

Do you know the value of your work and how to price it? Probably not.

As a publisher, distributor and consultant in the art world, I have personally reviewed the work of thousands of artists over the last 30 years. In all of that time only a handful were able to say, "yes" to that question.

Pricing art is actually not that difficult. It is basically no different than pricing any other product. The problem with artists pricing their own work is that they generally don't view their work with the same eyes that other businesses do. This is because they are emotionally tied to their product.

Let me make it simple and easy. First, you have cost of materials. Second you have cost of labor.

Such items as paint, brushes, canvas, and other supplies becomes your cost of materials. The cost of labor is the actual time spent in creating your image (product). Determine a value for your time $25.00 - $100.00 per hour. Add the cost of materials to the value of your time and you have a starting price.

What you can do next is to take that price and check comparable work. Comparables are works similar to yours in size, style or subject. You obtain comparables by going to actual or online galleries, trade shows, fairs or festivals.

An interesting exercise would be to apply this to previously established pricing for your work, and compare it to the formula provided above.

What should an artist do about "Wholesale vs. Retail"?

First of all it is important that you fully understand the difference. As the manufacturer of your product, you are the one who needs to establish both retail and a wholesale price for your art.

The retail price is the asking price to consumers or collectors, the person purchasing your work to hang in his/her home or office. The wholesale price is the lowest price for which you are willing to sell your product to a gallery or other retail entity. Usually the difference between the retail and the wholesale is 50%. So, if your retail price is $3,500.00 your wholesale price will be $1,750.00.

It is always better to price your work higher than lower. It is easier to start high and go down than vice versa.

When selling your work directly to a collector or consumer, it is essential to protect the integrity of the retail price. Otherwise, you will be in direct competition with your gallery affiliations. If you are still having difficulty with the pricing of your art, art agents or consultants can be of great assistance to an artist struggling with the pricing and marketing aspect of the art world.

Remember that every year the cost of living increases and so should the price of your art. A good rule of thumb is to have a yearly increase of between 5 and 10%.

Finally, the second rule of thumb is to try and maintain objectivity and to apply the formula. It's only natural that artists have emotional ties to their work, but emotions can cloud their vision and dilute their business judgment.

Arnold White has been a publisher and distributor of fine art prints for over 40 years. He is retired now from the firm he founded that assisted artists seeking to enter the print market.

So, you have X number of images, every one of them is very desirable and very sellable.

You have accumulated a significant number of features, likes, comments, followers, and favorites. You have joined dozens of groups and entered all the contests you can. However you still only have a few numbers of views and very few, if any, sales in the time that you have been here. So what are you doing wrong?

You are working hard at all the wrong things, IMHO.

The way FAA was set up in the beginning, all of those things meant something. There was no really famous or well-known artist here at that time. There were no large galleries and there was a mere fraction of the number of members and images. If you had good art and you worked the system and did some outside marketing, you were able to work your way up in the FAA search.

That is how most of the people that are selling and posting in the treads got to where they are in the search and because they are still collecting likes and favorites and features and etc, etc. they are still fairly high up in the rankings. In effect, these people have a giant lead on the rest of us that just got here the last year or two. Their 'leg up' or head start in the search ranking is contributing a great deal to their success. And that means sales and that puts them even higher in the search ranking. There is no doubt in my mind that if they had to start from scratch today, most if not all of them would be struggling just like everyone else because none of these people posting, are famous or have much if any following outside of FAA.

So how is a person to catch up? There are thousands of large sellers that have thousands of likes, favorites, comments, etc. And they are still collecting them. And they are collecting them at a significantly faster rate than you or I or any of the new people. The fact of the matter is you can't catch up. In fact, some of the people that were once much larger sellers are slipping big time in the rankings and sales. You see them saying that in the treads all the time. But they are also still trying to do it the same way they did it before. And it is not working for them. They admit that themselves in the dozens of threads they keep opening. And it is not ever going to work for them the same way it once did.

Does that mean we should all give up? No, not at all. But we must work smarter not harder.

We have to accept the fact that we cannot like, favorite, feature and all of that other traditional stuff to any significant rankings in the search. But we can sell our way in because sales have a much, much greater weighting in the rankings than all of that other stuff.

Now that seems like a chicken or the egg situation, right? Not at all. And that is why I keep hammering and hammering to get outside of FAA and promote your work and ONLY your ArtistsWebsite. Forget or at least minimize your time working on the likes and favorites and thing. It is simply not the best use of your time.

You need to reach outside of FAA and get your work seen by tens of thousands or millions of people. You need to advertise specific pieces and you need to make sure the links come back to those pieces in your ArtistsWebsite, not to your space in the main FAA site. When you link to the main site, you are exposing your hard-earned, prospective buyer to over 200,00 members and over 7,000,000 images with just one click away.

I know this works. I have been a regular seller here from the first day I started doing uploads. I recognized the problem with trying to win the battle for search ranking very early on and I decided I was not going to play that game. My sales have pretty much gone up month over month for each month I have been here. I did it by working smarter not harder. I have been able to gain first-page ranking on several specific images. I see it as no small coincidence at all that they are some of the images that I have advertised the most.

I am not saying to totally ignore the search, keywording, and descriptions. Anyone has at least a small chance of someone paging deep enough through several pages of results that each search returns and being found. I think everyone should do the best job they can on keywording and descriptions but then let the search take care of itself.

Now that said, I am not anywhere near as large a seller as the big guys, not anywhere close. That is not my goal. My goal is to make regular sales day in and day out. And I am doing that. I am doing that by spending time adverting and promoting outside FAA. I don't pay any attention to trying to gain search ranking with any other method other than selling through that advertising. I don't chase that other thing, enter groups or contests or likes and comments.

I have been selling art prints and originals for over 40 years. I was selling prints online before FAA or Amazon or even before eBay or any of the others. I have made a great deal of money selling what I guess maybe as many as 2 or 3 million prints over the years. So I think I know a little about selling prints and the art market in general.

You have to be careful with those Discount Codes.

The discount you offer is figured on and paid out of the fee (your markup) you get from FAA on a sale. FAA still sells the product for their full price less your discount. In the example below your 25%, discount would net out as a 6.35% discount.

So, if you offer a 25% discount on a $200 product the customer is not going to be able to buy it for $150.

If your fee is $50, they will get 25% ($12.50) off that $50 so the price they pay will be $187.50.

You have to be able to explain that to your shoppers and prospective buyers or it will confuse them and maybe even annoy some enough to shop somewhere else.

This does not apply to the sales that FAA runs. Only the Discount Codes.

I want to mention some thoughts on using #Hashtags in FB groups.

I personally don't use them at all and I do not recommend them.

Yes, you may get a hit or two because of the #Hashtag coming up in the search, but the other thing it does is it shows people the door when they are already sitting there looking at your post. It gives them the choice of going to your image where it can be bought or to any number of places, none of which are places where the artist can make a sale.

Here is a case in point. I don't mean to embarrass anyone but here is a recent post in a FB group with ten #hashtags.

#totebags #giftideas #shopsmall #naturelovers #butterflies #artforsale #environmentallyfriendly #nomoreplasticbags #christmasgifts #washable

When I click on the first one, #totebags, it takes me to a list of four stores where tote bags are sold. NONE of them are selling tote bags for the artist that made the post and none of them are FAA sellers. In fact, one of them is featuring a tote bag where a cat if flipping people the finger.

When I click on the #shopsmall, it takes me to a whole list of shopping malls on Facebook, not of them FAA stores.

My idea of posting in the FineArtAmerica group I started was to help promote FAA artists and to keep the shopper in the group as long as possible hoping they find something for one of us that they want to buy. Or the click on something from one of us and they end up in FAA or Pixels and find something to buy.

I am not really thrilled about sending people to stores and sellers outside of the FAA family.

I wrote a series of Marketing on the Cheap articles and they are still out there around the net. If you search Google for Marketing on the Cheap by Floyd Snyder you should find most of them. These were original articles that I wrote for Strictly Business Magazine, a monthly publication I use to own. This was written in 2002 I think so it is a bit time dated and you need to keep that in mind. But the concept is still valid. At one time I had several hundred or a thousand articles on what was then the four major article circulation sites. All of these articles had been picked up and reprinted on any number of websites. I used to be a major player in the Day Trading craze that swept the nation a few years back and I have tried to remove most of those articles because I get tired of being asked for stock tips. lol

Marketing on the Cheap: Write? Right!!

We all know the value of writing articles for promoting your website or online store. However, writing articles to promote your old-fashioned, traditional brick and mortar business has been around forever.

Contact your local newspapers, and chances are, depending on what business you are in, they may be interested in giving you your own column. Most small or medium-sized media markets will have at least one daily serving the communities and probably at least one weekly newspaper. Offer to supply a weekly or even a monthly column for free. They are always looking for editorial content and "free" is always attractive. Be careful about a daily commitment, this can get overly demanding in a hurry.

It may be a little more difficult to approach the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times, but in major media markets, there is any number of regional weeklies that can be approached.

Other considerations may be regional or even national trade publications, Chamber of Commerce newsletter or other professional associations and organizations you may belong to.

If you can't get the column for free, don't be afraid to pay for it. But make sure the layout is designed to look as much as possible like a regular story or editorial content. The paper will probably require that you put some sort of disclaimer on your column like the word "advertising", but this is not a big deal.
Have a professional photo taken and include it in your articles whenever possible. Don't use your high school photo or one that is touched up to make you look totally different than you actually do. You are trying to build recognition and credibility. After your column has run for some time, you will be surprised how many people will easily recognize you. People like to do business with people they know.

Okay, so now you have own column; make good use of it. Give it value. Do not make it a blatant advertisement and/or sales pitch. In fact, except on extremely rare occasions, you probably don't want to sell anything directly in your column at all. You want to write real content, stories that are either of real value or entertaining. I had a friend once that owned a restaurant. He paid to have his own column in our local newspaper. He never once wrote a story about his own restaurant. Instead, he wrote about his world travels, famous chefs, and the wonderful restaurants he had enjoyed.

Another approach you may want to consider is a "How To" column. I once supplied a weekly column for an art gallery/picture-framing studio. We wrote a series of how to buy and frame your own artwork.

Check your local newspaper and you will no doubt see examples. If you are writing the column for the newspaper and not paying for it, make sure you retain editorial control and copyright to the work. If you are paying for insertion, ask your ad representative or ad agency for samples. As you travel around, pick up the local newspapers in the area you are visiting and see what others are doing.

If you don't have the time or the feel you are not capable of writing your own column, check with an ad agency. You should be able to find one that provides this service. If you belong to a professional association, check with them and see if they supply "ghost" stories. I have worked with accountants, stockbrokers, lawyers, and others using ghost stories.

I will suggest that if you are not writing the story yourself, you may want to avoid the byline that says "by" and use "furnished by" or "supplied by" or something of that nature. The last thing you want to do is get caught taking credit for writing something someone else wrote. If you pay a copywriter for the original copy, this is not as likely to happen. But if you use ghost stories from an association, you are more then likely not going to have exclusivity. Someone in another publication may be running the same story.

When you start this project, think long term. It takes a commitment. It will take some time to build readership. You are establishing yourself as an expert in your field to people that don't know you. This will not happen overnight.

I mentioned retaining editorial control and copyright. After you have created a number of columns and/or stories, you may want to consider putting them all together in a book. Keep this in mind in the early stages. If you are working with a ghostwriter or ad agency, make sure they understand your intentions so proper preparations can be made and taken into consideration from the very beginning. If your traditional non-web based business does have a website, and it should have, make sure you prepare your writings for distribution on the net as well.
Once you start writing you can use the materials in any number of different ways.

So go write something!

September 5, 2008

What's It Worth?

We get a lot of request from many very nice people hoping we can shed some light on the value of a piece of artwork they already own. Unfortunately, as much as we would like to, we are not able to respond individually to these request. One of the reasons is, there is just way to many of them. Besides that, we are not art appraiser nor do we deal in the secondary art market. But even if we were, it would still be irresponsible of us to try to put a price on a piece of artwork that we have never seen.

Hopefully the following will be some assistance to you.

For the most part you can probably find some indication as to value by searching the Internet, including eBay, and see if you can find someone trying to sell an exact or similar piece.

You may try taking your piece to a local gallery, picture framer or art historian. Try contacting the art department of a local university or even a junior college in your community.

Another source may be your local art association. They may be able to direct you to someone in your community that can help you.
You may also what to consider a professional art appraiser. However, I suggest you do that only after you have convinced yourself there is indeed real value here. Art appraiser fees can be substantial.

Check with local galleries for the name of an appraiser. If they cannot help you, try your own attorney, especially attorneys that deal in estate and or divorce law. They very often have appraisers they use and may share a source with you.

I also want to mention the Framehouse Gallery connection or lack thereof. Back in the 1970's and 80's they were a well know publishing house that represented a number of very well know artist including some whose work we handle; Snidow, Frace, and Gordon to name a few. However, that company went out of business some 120-25 years ago. We are not associated in any way with that company and never have been.

Good luck in you research and we hope we have been of some assistance.

Floyd Snyder
FASGallery
FrameHouseGallery

"I thought that since Canon is a brand name, all their gear had to be good, right? Wrong!!! I had a whole bag full of lenses covering every possible situation, but they were very poor quality. '

Yup, branding is way overemphasized here, IMHO. There is really very little in the way of actual branding going on here in the same sense of the term when it applies to Nike or Coke or Ford. What is going on here is more like building a following of loyal buyers and some level of name recognition.

Branding suggests that you have or are going to achieve some kind of top of the mind awareness in the overall marketplace. That is very, very unlikely to happen for the average and even significantly above average seller on FAA.

The other thing that is overemphasized is the idea of having to qualify every FB friend and Twitter follower, often referred to or stated as target marketing. Target marketing is extremely important when you are paying for advertising to reach your market. Especially if you are doing direct mail, traditional or email, and have to pay for each email or mailing piece.

But on SM there is no cost unless you are paying for ads and then you are limited as to what you can choose for your target market.

If you build a list of 2000 or even 5000 qualified buyers, it is my opinion that if you really want to make significant sales and significant money, that is simply too small of a market.

As I have said many times in the past, if I had to choose between 5000 of my hand-picked followers and 2 million people that chose to follow/friend me, I will take the 2 million. I have no doubt that in that 2 million there are going to be a lot more than 5000 qualified art buyers.

But the good news is, you do not have to make that choice. You can and should do both.

As many of you know, I come from a 40 year background in both selling art and advertising.

Having been the owner of three brick and mortar art galleries, a publishing company and an ad agency, I am a big believer in traditional advertising. The Internet has changed a lot of the thinking but the basics are still the same. Get the product seen by the largest number of potential buyers as you can. And of course, it goes without saying that it has to be done with a plan that is economically efficient.

Most advertising plans start out with a budget that is usually some percentage of the gross sales. The number most agencies will use is 15% of sales. Simply put that would mean if you do $100,000 in sales, you should be spending $15,000 in advertising. I am not interested in hearing the arguments on rather you agree with this or not. It is long-standing practice that we do not need to discuss here. I am just laying down some very basic principles so you can see what the new plan is based on. And I am not suggesting anyone has to spend $15,000. The budget is going to set itself based on your individual sales.

There are two basic concepts in play here that we are going to actually try to compromise here to keep cost down. That means the overall plan is going to be based on how long it is applied instead of how much money you spend on it in the short term.

First, advertising is all about impressions. Tell'em, tell'em what you told them and then tell'em again. Repetitiveness is crucial for success.

Second, one needs to understand the principal of vertical vs horizontal advertising. For this program we are going to go for the vertical not the horizontal. A simple explanation is that with a limited budget, you need to focus on one (or two at the most) Social Media outlet for your message. If you want to read more on vertical vs horizontal reach, Google it or read my blog Understanding Advertising and Why You Simply Can Not Do It All https://fineartamerica.com/blogs/understanding-advertising-and-why-you-simply-can-not-do-it-all.html

Okay, so there is the basic we are going to apply here.

The program is much simpler then the prelude! :-)

Recently, I have been sharing my sales with a few of the Facebook groups that I started and the largest of the other groups I belong to. Every time I post one of these “Recently Sold” announcements to Facebook I get asked if I want to boots the post. The buy in is at a very low level or pretty much whatever you want it to be.

My idea is that for every sale you make you take from 10% - 20% of the profit you make only on that sale and boost that post for that amount. At the same time, you make sure you share those same posts in as many FB groups as you can and with as many friends that you can.

This will give you an ongoing advertising plan that is easy to keep track of and not break the bank. Part of the thinking is that if the image sells once, it will probably have a higher potential to sell again. I know that is not a 100% so please don't tell me how that is not a for sure thing. I get that.

The other thing I am suggesting is that you make the posts look exactly the same as much as possible. Using the FAA share button from the image page itself is what I strongly recommend. I never use that notification that you get that says something like help Joe spread the word or whatever it says. I only use the one from the image page on my ArtistsWebsite or Premium site.

I suggest you develop some kind of positioning phrase, or signature of some sort. It does not have to be much but it should be unique to you. I sign all of my post with just simply Enjoy! Floyd Snyder, FASGallery.com.

I also mention that the image can be bought on paper, canvas, and on consumer items. I don't really like it all that much because it is too commercial and way to long. So far none of the groups that I posted it to have rejected it so the group administrators do not seem to mind.

I just recently did this for an image I sold and as soon as I launched the "boost" I did make a sale of the same image. Absolutely no way in the world to know if it came from a post that the resulted from the boot.

Here is the draw back. This is pretty low dollar, directly related to how much you sell and there is no auto FAA tracking. In order for it to really be tested to where we can see if it is creating any sales, it is going to have to be a medium to long term program and you will have to track your own sales and see if you get repeats on those specific images that you boost. There is no way to tell if you get residuals or not by someone clicking on the boosted ad but buying a different image. But of course over time I would expect that to happen.

You are going to have to be willing to add to the money for boosting if the profit on the sale is very small. Or you can accumulate the money and added it to where ever you decide. I am going to add budget because I want the repetitiveness of people seeing that I am making sales giving them the impression that I have great stuff that people are buying. Some may want to consider adding 15% to your prices if you think they can stand the price increase. That is up to you.

I have several Facebook Groups that I stated to help people get seen on Facebook. You can go to any of those group pages and scroll down and see these posts that I have been making. Here is a link to the blog that has the group names and address. https://fineartamerica.com/blogs/four-facebook-groups-for-faa-and-of-pixels-members-to-consider.html

Feel free to leave a comment below.