Artists Selling Direct
Aug. 27th, 2017 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHere's an interesting article about artists selling directly to collectors, rather than going through dealers or galleries. Artists are asking why they should give up 50% of the sale price to someone else. Well, if they can find their own buyers, they shouldn't.
Effective business models for creative arts do change over time. Used to be, an artist sought a patron, one rich person to support one whole artist (or several, if super-rich). But that made a very small pool of successful artists. So people came up with galleries and dealers as a way to pull in more art lovers to support more artists. That part worked, but the artists kinda tend to starve under that model, which sucks for them. Galleries are great for dealers and collectors though. They might stick around.
Meanwhile, people invented the internet. Now it's easy for folks to find each other. Making yourself heard amidst the hubbub of billions is very difficult, but a good hub site (such as webcomics use) or a knack for niche marketing (such as many crowdfunders use) can work very well.
If you just want to make stuff and hand it off to someone else, then paying them to do all the business shit may be worth 50% of your sale price to you. But if you want to make enough to live on, then it is to your advantage to explore whether you can do more of the selling yourself (or find volunteers, or barter) so as to keep the cash.
A huge advantage of crowdfunding is the high feedback level. If you like to make many different types of art, then a gallery show is a giant fucking gamble because you have to fill whole walls on spec. In crowdfunding, your patrons tell you a lot more about what they like and what part of your work they want to expand.
Say you like painting animals. In a gallery you might put up paintings of 20 different animals; a horse lover and an adventurer buy the Arabian stallion and the elephant, and nothing else sells. If you're crowdfunding, you might paint the Arabian, paint a panther, sell the Arabian, paint an elephant, the horse lover says hey can you do me a herd of Clydesdales? So you start on the Clydesdales, and the elephant sells. You sell the finished Clydesdale and the adventurer wants a giraffe. You paint the giraffe and sell it. Nothing else comes up so you do a koala. Then the horse lover wants you to paint his prize broodmare and her new foal, so you do that and sell it. You have made 7 paintings and sold 4 of them. Your throughput is better, your fans are thrilled, you all get the fun of hanging out together, plus you can still paint whatever catches your fancy between times.
You could also do a painting fishbowl like I do the poetry ones. Today's theme is horses, so people ask for stuff like wild mustangs or a colt scratching its nose with a hoof or an Icelandic horse tolting. You take the prompts one day and spend the next month painting them up, working in a size small enough to complete them in reasonable time. While you're working on the later ones, some of the earlier ones probably sell. But at the end of the month, you probably have a good batch of related paintings left ... say, enough for a panel or two at a show. You could either do a small show, or you could save more paintings and do a bigger show once or twice a year to sell your backstock. You'd have, say, a panel each of horses, African megafauna, Asian microfauna, cute kitties, etc. That's a nice balance between variety and thematic clusters.
The internet changes everything, including business models. Choose mindfully.
Effective business models for creative arts do change over time. Used to be, an artist sought a patron, one rich person to support one whole artist (or several, if super-rich). But that made a very small pool of successful artists. So people came up with galleries and dealers as a way to pull in more art lovers to support more artists. That part worked, but the artists kinda tend to starve under that model, which sucks for them. Galleries are great for dealers and collectors though. They might stick around.
Meanwhile, people invented the internet. Now it's easy for folks to find each other. Making yourself heard amidst the hubbub of billions is very difficult, but a good hub site (such as webcomics use) or a knack for niche marketing (such as many crowdfunders use) can work very well.
If you just want to make stuff and hand it off to someone else, then paying them to do all the business shit may be worth 50% of your sale price to you. But if you want to make enough to live on, then it is to your advantage to explore whether you can do more of the selling yourself (or find volunteers, or barter) so as to keep the cash.
A huge advantage of crowdfunding is the high feedback level. If you like to make many different types of art, then a gallery show is a giant fucking gamble because you have to fill whole walls on spec. In crowdfunding, your patrons tell you a lot more about what they like and what part of your work they want to expand.
Say you like painting animals. In a gallery you might put up paintings of 20 different animals; a horse lover and an adventurer buy the Arabian stallion and the elephant, and nothing else sells. If you're crowdfunding, you might paint the Arabian, paint a panther, sell the Arabian, paint an elephant, the horse lover says hey can you do me a herd of Clydesdales? So you start on the Clydesdales, and the elephant sells. You sell the finished Clydesdale and the adventurer wants a giraffe. You paint the giraffe and sell it. Nothing else comes up so you do a koala. Then the horse lover wants you to paint his prize broodmare and her new foal, so you do that and sell it. You have made 7 paintings and sold 4 of them. Your throughput is better, your fans are thrilled, you all get the fun of hanging out together, plus you can still paint whatever catches your fancy between times.
You could also do a painting fishbowl like I do the poetry ones. Today's theme is horses, so people ask for stuff like wild mustangs or a colt scratching its nose with a hoof or an Icelandic horse tolting. You take the prompts one day and spend the next month painting them up, working in a size small enough to complete them in reasonable time. While you're working on the later ones, some of the earlier ones probably sell. But at the end of the month, you probably have a good batch of related paintings left ... say, enough for a panel or two at a show. You could either do a small show, or you could save more paintings and do a bigger show once or twice a year to sell your backstock. You'd have, say, a panel each of horses, African megafauna, Asian microfauna, cute kitties, etc. That's a nice balance between variety and thematic clusters.
The internet changes everything, including business models. Choose mindfully.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 01:09 am (UTC)It seems to work especially well for specific niches with narrow but deep appeal! Sure, at Boston Comic Con my table had nothing on the production value of the big superhero guys... but I also wasn't competing with them in the first place. Not really.
--Rogan
Thoughts
Date: 2017-08-28 01:54 am (UTC)I've done both. And of the two, I have made way more money selling direct to fans than I have to editors. My fans can keep up with me. Editors are just too slow. I was especially amazed to find that my fans will pay more! I made $200 on a poem twice to editors. I make that monthly selling to fans.
>> I want to build those skills but hey, if I only have one set, I'll take the direct sales powers first, for sure! <<
Agreed.
>> It seems to work especially well for specific niches with narrow but deep appeal! Sure, at Boston Comic Con my table had nothing on the production value of the big superhero guys... but I also wasn't competing with them in the first place. Not really. <<
Yep. A lot of my fans love Polychrome Heroics because it has superheroes, but it's way more diverse -- in plot as well as character -- compared to DC or Marvel, and they like my tone better too. So we're in the same genre, at least sort of (they do almost entirely crime comics, while I do all kinds of other genres like romance and sociological fantasy) but we're not in direct competition.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 03:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 05:29 am (UTC)'sfunny. She wanted to take her craft to the next level, so she did a big crowdfunding campaign back in early 2014... including a top perk of "I will marry you.... to the person of your choice". It was a HUGE thing... like an order of magnitude bigger than the next level.
And then she dropped the price on it sommat.
And her musical partner, Ben Deschamps, walked into her office and said, "Somebody took the marriage prize."
"Aw, pshaw!" No possible WAY that could've happened.
And then he dropped the name of who'd claimed it.
I heard tell you could hear the squee for kilometres... ;)
*tries to look innocent. collapses in a gigglefit*
So, yeah. I know damn well it works in fields other than poetry... :D
When I grow up, one of my side projects (or maybe my main one? Depends on how this ministry thing ends up looking...) is gonna be *facilitating* awesomeness like that.
If I'm lucky, you will be too.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 05:20 pm (UTC)Yes...
Date: 2017-08-28 05:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 07:43 pm (UTC)(and I freely admit I'm not good at web site aesthetics, and I can't keep his up to date with living 500 miles from Phoenix)
Very frustrating. I wonder if Etsy works for pricey things like these.
Thoughts
Date: 2017-08-28 09:13 pm (UTC)Alas.
>> My dad is a prime example. He's really amazing at turning wood bowls, but he can't sell them at a decent price. He's tried selling them through galleries in Scottsdale and other artist/tourist spots in the Phoenix area with very limited success and has given up, even though he continues turning them out. <<
That's really sad.
>> The problem is that he wants probably $3-500 per bowl as he puts A LOT of time in to each bowl, and people see bowls in tourist shops for $50-75 and think that's a good price. There's no comparison in quality if you see one side-by-side with one of my dad's.<<
One tactic, then, would be a display which includes a $50 bowl for comparison.
>>Very frustrating. I wonder if Etsy works for pricey things like these.<<
Probably not. That's really fine art / folk sculpture pricing. I have seen bowls that are worth that kind of money, but not often, and the collector market for them is limited. *ponder* Although if he could locate those collectors, he could probably build up enough of them to support himself, because there aren't many makers at that level either, which leaves the collectors frustrated. So I would try to figure out a way to identify people who want to buy high-end woodcrafts.