Art Money & Success

by Maria Brophy

  Artists who want to remain private will hurt their sales in today’s world. You can’t be anonymous and at the same time catch the attention of collectors, not unless you are Banksy. And being anonymous is Banky’s thing, so you can’t use that idea because it’s already taken!

  Buyers want to see who you are, not just your art. They want to know what inspires you. They want to see you in action. They want to feel like they know you personally. Social media makes this possible.

  If you are new to any social media site, the best way to learn about it is to use it. Watch what other successful artists in your genre are doing and see how they interact with their followers. The only way to truly get value from social media is to use it daily. Be careful, though, not to get sucked into the time warp of social media. Sometimes I’ll go online and plan on only posting for five minutes, and the next thing I know, a half hour has gone by! Allow yourself a little bit of time each day, but don’t spend hours on it when you should be creating art instead.

  FACEBOOK

  If you were going to choose only one social media site to display your work, I would recommend a Facebook business page, especially if your buyers are over the age of thirty. Facebook might be losing favor with those under thirty, but it’s still one of the best ways to allow friends, family and new fans to see your art and leave comments, giving instant feedback. You can set up “albums” with photos of your artwork, divided by series or themes so people can easily view your work. For example “Barnyards” and “Farm animals” and “Rivers.” The albums are a great tool for showing new prospective buyers what you have done in the past, in an organized fashion.

  Set up a public Facebook business page for your art, not a private one, as you want to make sure anyone who is interested in seeing your art can do so just by looking it up and not having to “friend” you. Your Facebook business page would be set up in addition to your private/personal page. With a Facebook page, you’ll also have the option to “boost posts” or pay for advertising, to put your art in front of people you choose with specific targeting.

  Facebook also has a great live streaming video feature that gets a lot of views. Facebook controls the algorithm that allows your fans to see what you’ve posted, and for live streaming videos, they have set it so that most every one of your followers will see it in their live feed. We have experimented with live videos of Drew painting and it has gained huge numbers of new followers, when his existing followers share it. At the time of this writing, a live stream video on Facebook gets triple the views of a static post. Of course, Facebook could change that at any minute, so use it while it’s hot!

  OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SITES

  Instagram and Pinterest are excellent for artists to show their work as well. Some artists are using these platforms as an online portfolio, posting new works daily.

  We have had a lot of success with selling art on Instagram. Our formula is to post pictures of Drew working on a painting and telling people to call, text or email if they are interested in buying it. When the painting is finished we post the final image. Often, the paintings sell before they are finished.

  Take the time to learn how to use proper hashtags on your posts. A hashtag is a word that people use to find what they are looking for, with the “#” symbol. For example, with Drew’s sacred geometry art, I would use hashtags such as #sacredgeometryart, #metatronscube, #ancientwisdom, #modernart. If someone is on Instagram, looking for sacred geometry art using a hashtag, they will find Drew’s posts more easily.

  There are many other social media sites as well, and by the time this book is on the market, there will be new ones that I have not yet heard of. Try out a few and see what works best for you. Focus only on one or two or three. Don’t try to use them all, because it will take you away from the most important work, which is creating art.

  ONLINE CAMPAIGN SERIES

  One way to generate sales in your work online is by posting the making of a series. There are a million ways to do this, so you have to brainstorm what works best for your style, theme and market.

  An online campaign will generate great interest in your work and will attract new and existing buyers. It’s a very affordable (free) way to market your artwork and get greater exposure.

  Choose a number of days that you will commit to the campaign, and then announce it. Daily post photos of the work with a description. When you do this consistently, you will get great results.

  For artists who create works with your hands, you would post works in progress. For a painter, each day you would post a sketch of what you’re painting that day or week. You would tell a story about it and then post work-in-progress photos. You would mention that the pieces are for sale and give contact information on how to reach you to purchase it. Include photos of you creating, as well. Enlist a family member to get regular shots while you work.

  If you’re a landscape painter, you might do a series titled “Twenty bridges in Madison County” or “Thirty Days of Louisiana Sunsets” or “Ten weeks in the life of a Tree Hugger”.

  If you are a photographer or digital artist, you can do the same but instead of posting progress photos you would simply post one image a day and sell limited edition art prints of each. A photographer might post “Thirty days in the desert” and a digital artist might post “Thirty faces of outrageous super heroes.”

  Series postings can get slow responses at first, but as each day goes on, you will find that it will gain momentum as you continue to stay consistent. People will start to pay attention and follow your progress. People will become inspired, intrigued and impressed that you are doing such a series. And, best of all, you grow exponentially as an artist when you place demands and deadlines on yourself.

  In the fall of 2015 our business was slow and we needed an infusion of cash fast, so we decided to have Drew do fifty paintings in fifty days. Every single day he started and finished a small painting. Every single day we sold the painting. Only one painting didn’t sell during the fifty days. Due to the high demand for some of the images, we started offering paper prints of the paintings in a limited edition of 20 each. By the end of the fifty days, we had sold $20,000 in paintings and over $3,000 in art prints which sold for $40 each.

  The success of our 50/50 series was due to the following factors:

  Drew committed to starting and finishing a small painting every day for fifty days and never strayed from that commitment.

  We first emailed the work in progress, each morning, to Drew’s newsletter list.

  Then we posted the artwork in progress to our followers, which at the time were 12,000 on Instagram and 35,000 on Facebook.

  The paintings were on small canvas board sized 8"x10" or 11"x14" and ranged in price from $250 to $500 each.

  We told a story with every painting. People love stories and over time during the series, got excited to see each day’s new post.

  The trick to getting sales through social media is to be consistent with your posts, grow your number of followers, post quality pictures, and sell in the price range of your followers.

  YOUR OWN WEBSITE

  If you have a website with a shopping cart, you need to get high volumes of traffic to that site to sell in high volume. This comes easier to artists who have a large following and a big email list, as you can send out regular emails to drive traffic to your online store. You can also use social media to drive traffic to your store, but with the constantly changing rules on those sites, it’s hard to rely on.

  If you do not have a large following or email list, hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert and advertise through Google or Facebook to drive traffic to your site. This is well worth the time and money for artists who have a large body of work to sell. You should also be blogging about topics that your target audience is searching for, so your site shows up in the results.

  THIRD PARTY ONLINE GALLERIES

  A third party online gallery is a gallery website that sells the art of many artists. The best online
galleries do a great job of advertising and sell more art than a brick and mortar gallery would.

  Much like in the real gallery world, the best of the online galleries are hard to get into. Many have a jury process and you may or may not be accepted. Some take high commissions, as much as 45%, and it’s your responsibility to pack and ship the artwork. Others have monthly fees that you need to pay, regardless of whether or not art has sold.

  Paying a commission or monthly fee is entirely worth it, if the online gallery is selling your work. They will do a better job of marketing to a large number of people than many artists could do on their own, as they have the funds and staff to do so.

  If you are a creator of fine art and wish to target the higher end market, an online gallery would be worth an experiment. There are many to choose from and new ones popping up every day. Here are just a few that you can look into: paddle8.com, saatchiart.com, moderneden.com, ugallery.com and zatista.com.

  THIRD PARTY ONLINE MARKETPLACES

  A third party online marketplace is a website where you set up your own “store” using their platform, on their website.

  Examples of online marketplaces in operation today are artfire.com, zibbet.com, icraft.com, etsy.com and aftcra.com. There are many, many more.

  An online marketplace is different from an online gallery, just as a retail store is different from a brick and mortar gallery. The gallery specializes mostly in hand made fine art, while an online marketplace sells arts, crafts and products.

  The advantage to using an online marketplace is that you don’t have to pay to set up and run a shopping cart on your own website; they provide the store and an easy set up for you on their site. It’s a quick, easy way to get your own store online.

  The disadvantage is that you can’t predict what the marketplace will do in the future. If you put all of your time and focus on it, and then they shut down, you are back to starting over again. This happened with the briefly popular marketplace, Goodsmiths.com. They launched in 2011. At their peak, they had over 6,000 artist shops on their site. However, due to financial troubles, they shut down in 2014.

  An online marketplace tends to be geared towards a mid to lower priced market. You can do high volume sales if you learn how to work it.

  One artist I know creates children’s digital wall art. He is newly retired from teaching and just started making art a few years ago. In his first year of selling on Etsy.com, he sold about $25,000 in art prints. By year two he doubled his income and in his third year, he broke $100,000 in sales, selling paper prints!

  This particular artist hit on a popular art theme, has his prints priced properly for the market, and learned the ins and outs of getting sales on Etsy. It’s the only place he sells his work, and so his entire focus is on growing Etsy sales.

  I’ve experimented with selling Drew’s reproductions on Etsy.com and have had some sales, but nothing to brag about. However, we didn’t put much time into Etsy, as we are focusing in other areas. Where you place your focus, your sales will grow.

  PRINT ON DEMAND

  Print on demand websites, also known as POD, enable you to upload your artwork and make it available to be printed on a variety of products. The products include art prints, posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers and cell phone cases, to name a few.

  There are many POD companies to choose from. Three examples are fineartamerica.com, cafepress.com and zazzle.com. Some are producing high quality products, and others are not. You have to test them out to decide for yourself.

  The advantage to POD is that you never have to handle the actual printing or shipping of anything. All you have to do is set up your account, upload the art, and generate sales. They do the rest.

  The downside is that with some POD websites, you get paid very little, in some cases, only 15% of the sale price of the item. The other disadvantage is that it is hard to control the quality. If you are concerned about the quality of items that your art is printed on, you will need to be careful about which company to do POD with.

  There are only a few artists making a good living selling exclusively on POD websites. To do high volume sales, you would use several POD sites, offer a huge library of images and invest a great deal of time driving traffic to your POD store sites.

  At the very least, it’s fun to see how your art would look on a coffee mug or mouse pad, and these websites make it easy to order items with your art printed on it.

  15

  Working with GALLERIES

  “The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.”

  —Jerry Saltz, American art critic

  Once upon a time, artists needed galleries to sell their artwork. A select few lucky artists were accepted into the gallery system, and the rest were rejected, left with little to no alternatives to sell their work.

  The best galleries would take care of their artists, handling marketing, sales and exhibits. It was a dream relationship for any artist, because as we know, artists want to create art, not sell it.

  This system died long before I got into the business of selling art. But it worked for generations of artists before it went down. Maybe that’s why this strong need to be taken care of is encoded in most artist’s DNA. The desire to have their art discovered by one mythical person or to have their art accepted into a gallery has been passed down through generations.

  Today, there is a very small percentage of artists that are making a full time living selling their work through galleries. Most of the artists that exclusively sell their work in galleries are not earning enough to survive.

  If you are selling your work exclusively through galleries, and your income goal is $100,000 a year, you would have to sell more than $300,000 in art yearly. Of that, you would pay 50% to the gallery, which is $150,000. Subtract your expenses from your remaining $150,000, which are going to be close to 40% (for permits, framing, art supplies, studio rent, travel, web-designer, computers, software, etc.). After expenses, you’re left with about $90,000 before taxes. Yes, there are some artists who sell artwork in the high end market and earn $300,000 in a year. But that’s not the norm.

  If you plan to sell your work through galleries, be sure to supplement your sales by selling through other channels as well. Let the gallery system be just one of your many streams of income.

  There are many benefits to having your work in a gallery. If you get into a good gallery, they will help you to better develop your work. Galleries will host exhibits and expose their large list of collectors to your work. If they are doing their job well, they will sell more of your art than you would on your own.

  One thing I like about selling in a gallery is that it provides a physical place to send people. When someone asks “where can I see your work?” you can direct them to the gallery.

  The downside is that working with galleries can be costly, particularly if you have big pieces that you have to ship across the country or overseas.

  We get many requests from galleries in Hawaii to show Drew’s work, however, the cost of shipping art to Hawaii from the mainland is high. Most galleries expect us to cover the cost of creating the art, having it framed, and then shipping it there, and they still keep 50% of the sale price. When we do the math, we find there’s little profit in it for us.

  We’ve considered having Drew fly to Hawaii to create an art series, as he likes to paint very large pieces and it would save in shipping. But then there’s the expense of hotel, rental car and airfare. Either way you slice it, it’s costly.

  For every opportunity, we have to look at the expense versus the profit. If the cost of getting art into the gallery is close to the amount we would make when it sells, there is no financial incentive to do it.

  In one case, I had a gallery in Hawaii agree to pre-purchase Drew’s paintings at wholesale prices. They paid for shipping, too. However, this is rare and most galleries won’t buy your work outright. Not unless your work has a long history of sales.

/>   I like showing in galleries that are close to home, as there are no shipping costs and you can control how the art is displayed, as well as keep in constant contact with the owners.

  Some artists want to build up their resume by showing they have exhibited their work in many galleries. That’s good, but don’t go broke doing it. Consider the expenses versus the profit for each opportunity.

  You can make a profit selling in galleries, even if they are located far away, if you are selling to a large number of them in one geographical area. I know one California artist who sells his work in over a dozen galleries in Hawaii. He flies there twice a year to create new art and do exhibits. Because he is in many galleries in one area, and his art is selling well, he makes a good profit.

  THE LEGAL DEAL WITH A GALLERY

  Most galleries will require your work to be provided on a consignment basis. This means that you will not be paid until after the work has been sold. If it doesn’t sell after a period of time, then you get the work back.

  The typical deal with a gallery is that the artist splits the sales of the work 50/50. You get 50% and the gallery gets 50%. The gallery needs 50% because the cost of having a brick and mortar store is high.

  I have worked with galleries who take only 30% or 40%, but they are less common. Some of the galleries in higher rent districts keep 60% of the sale and the artist only gets 40%. I feel that anything over 50% to the gallery is excessive. The only way I would pay over 50% commission to a gallery is if there are guarantees and they are selling in massive volume and we are benefiting as much as they are.

  If the artwork you create uses very expensive materials, ask the gallery to agree to a 50/50 split after deducting the cost of the materials. When Drew paints a fine art surfboard, he will pay a surfboard shaper as much as $1,000 for the surfboard before he paints it. If it sells for $5,000, we ask the gallery to pay us 50% of $4,000 and all of the $1,000, which was the cost of having the surfboard made. The split looks like this: Sell price is $5,000. We deduct the $1,000 surfboard cost and add it to our 50% of 4,000 = $3,000 payable to us and $2,000 to the gallery. I have never had a gallery disagree with this.