How do you price your work, especially at the beginning of your career? Artists often look for a shortcut, a simple way to figure out pricing, like adding up the cost of materials or charging so much per square inch or counting the number of hours it took to create the work. These methods don’t work because they ignore how the art marketplace operates. It is not just your time, but your talent and experience. Think about it. A 36” by 24” oil painting might sell for $500 or $5000 or five million dollars. Your name and reputation determine your prices. In order to establish your first prices, you need to do research. Visit local galleries and art centers who show emerging artists. Find a juried group show that includes work in your medium, like traditional landscape painting or abstract art or ceramics. Choose artists whose work you admire, and note their prices. Later on you can check the websites of these artists to evaluate their background. Are their prices justified by a solid record of accomplishments? Now look at the wider art world. You can do most of your research online. Both UGallery and Zatista are juried sites that offer original art for sale. Again, find artists in your own category whose work you admire, and note their prices. You can also look at large retailers, like Crate & Barrel, who sell both prints and original art online (see “wall décor”). Compare the artists’ resumes with your own. If you are a maker of handmade goods, you can do research in the same way. Take a look at the range of prices on Etsy. Find items that are similar to your own in terms of quality of materials, originality, and skill, and see what they cost. Does your jewelry fit at the low end, in the middle, or in the higher “one-of-a-kind” market? When you are ready to establish your own prices, start with your largest and most complex work. Based on your research and your own selling history, what would a fair price be? Imagine yourself walking away with a check in that amount. Are you smiling or puzzled? Do you think you’ve received fair compensation for your effort? Then price medium-sized and smaller works accordingly. You might want to provide a range within each category, so that you can adjust prices for works that are more or less complex. Your goal is to establish prices that are credible in the current art marketplace. The next time a buyer asks “how much is that?” you will have a confident reply because you know the value of your work. Mary Mary Edwards, Ph.D Career & Life Coach for Artists “Left Brain Skills for Right Brained People” Instagram: coachingforartists.maryedwards Your art career might seem like a pile of unrelated puzzle pieces. You are trying to do a lot of different things: make a plan, be strategic, use social media to become visible, develop a coherent body of work. But when will the whole picture become clear? Entrepreneurs face the same challenge, and you can learn from their experience. Artists and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. You both struggle to make an idea happen. Entrepreneurs have to identify potential customers, just as you need to find your audience. You both need to present your work in a clear and compelling way. Successful entrepreneurs have an attitude that can be inspiring to artists. They approach their work with an open mind and a spirit of experimentation. They take risks, they invest in themselves, they get advice from experts, and most of all, they learn from their failures. Biographies of entrepreneurs always tell stories of their early efforts: an idea that proved impractical, an experiment that didn’t work hundreds of times before it succeeded. Artists embrace this spirit when they are making art, but somehow forget to apply the same attitude to their art career. You try something once, and if it doesn’t work you give up and blame yourself for your failure. Entrepreneurs teach us to embrace two ways of being in the world. First, you organize and plan. You set goals and measure your progress. You ask for advice and follow it. These activities start to fill in the outlines of your jigsaw puzzle. They help you see the larger picture of what is possible. And then you let go, and open yourself up to the random gifts of the universe. Again and again entrepreneurs tell us about the opportunity “that came out of nowhere,” the accidental meeting with an investor, the sudden insight about a new approach. These seemingly random happenings are the result of all the hard work that went before. Think of your art career as a jigsaw puzzle, where your job is to put enough pieces in place so that the outline of the whole picture begins to take shape. That’s when the magic happens. Mary Mary Edwards, Ph.D Career & Life Coach for Artists “Left Brain Skills for Right Brained People” Instagram: coachingforartists.maryedwards |
Mary's BlogAs an artist coach, I bring a unique combination of business knowledge, art world experience, and professional coaching skill to my practice. |