The Art of Selling Artwork
This question pops up all the time on sites like Fine Art America, Pixels.com, RedBubble Crated or other POD sites.
There really are only two possible answers.
- Your artwork and images aren’t good enough
- Not enough buyers are seeing your images
Artists who think that all it takes is uploading images on to POD sites and then kicking back and waiting for the sales to roll in are sadly mistaken. Typically after a year of no sales (sometimes three or four) they wake up and remember that they had images on a certain site and come around on the forums asking why they haven’t sold anything.
Reasons You Might Not Be Selling your Artwork
Consider this, there are hundreds of thousands of other artists – professionals and amateurs trying to sell their work. Most likely there are more people who would like to sell art than there are buyers. And the top 10% of well known artists no doubt suck up 80% of all the money going towards buying art. This means hundreds of thousands of artists are competing for the 20% of what’s left.
Selling Art – Quality Comes First
Unless you are offering something very rare and collectible, the quality has to be there. If your work is not up to the standards the buying public expects to see, then you are not going to sell. If your work looks like something the buyer could create on their cell phone, you are unlikely to sell. Take a look at your competition. See what sells on a site. Compare your work. If its not in the same ballpark, go back to learning how to create quality artwork and photographs.
You can buy what you can’t see
If your quality is up to snuff then the challenge is to get enough eyeballs looking at your work and hoping that it resonates with a buyers so that they pick your image over the thousands if not millions of other choices they have to spend their hard earned money on.
Uploading an image to a print on demand site or POD is only the first step. Promotion of your portfolio and marketing your brand is up to you. Consider that you have to claw your way to the top over the backs of other hard working, hard promoting and more established artists who are not going to give up their sales without a fight. There are only so many buyers out there and there is a lot of great art and artist providing images. You are going to have to want it more than the next fellow.