Above: “My Little Red Scooter” by Edward M. Fielding –
https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/featured/my-little-red-motor-scooter-edward-fielding.html
It is 2021. There are already tens of thousands of artists selling on Fine art America and millions of images for buyers to choose for their home decor – prints, framed art canvases, metal prints, wood prints, tote bags, greeting cards, throw pillows – how is a new artist going to get noticed among this crowded field?
It takes great artwork, lots of commitment, and time but I’ll show you the secrets to success on Fine Art America!
It all starts with great art
You are getting ready to compete with lots of great artists for buyers hard-earned dollars. Make sure your work is up to snuff.
In the early days, like 15 years ago, you might have gotten away with “so-so” work but in today’s highly competitive market, you need to have top notch work if you expect to sell.
Spend a lot of time honing your craft and creating great quality work. Also spend a lot of time looking at the recently sold pages on Fine Art America to see the type and quality of the work that is actually sold every hour of every day.
Go to museums, go to art galleries, visit home decor stores, look at what is being offered and what is being purchased. Go to art fairs and see the quality of the work being offered and which artists get the most attention.
If you are a photographer, look at magazines, look at books, go to art exhibits. Study the masters, follow the top fashion photographers and go to photography shows. Strive to create work that goes beyond a snapshot and create compelling work that will stand out from the crowd.
No one wants amateurish, snapshots of boring subjects — everyone has the capacity to create these every day on their phones!
What sells on Fine Art America?
You can look at the buyer’s comments page to see what sells: https://fineartamerica.com/buyercomments.html
You can also look at the recent print sales page: https://fineartamerica.com/recentprintsales.html
Prepare your work for sale
Create a professional, ready to sell, quality product. If you are painter, learn to photograph or scan your artwork with even lighting. The images should be museum quality reproductions.
If you’re a photographer, prepare your work to high-quality industry standards. Throw out the junk! Get rid of out-of-focus images – these can’t be fixed, just dump them and move on. Get rid of the boring stuff. Maybe at the time, you were excited to see your first squirrel, but do you really think anyone else will be as excited? Save those “I saw this funny thing on the ground” type images for sharing on Facebook.
Think about some of your favorite artists an photographers on Fine Art America, would they have such an image in their portfolio? Since they are your competition, learn to think and edit out your images as they would. Consider that the bad, boring photographs only help to sell the good stuff.
Then take your great photographs and prepare them for final viewing. Post-process them to bring out their best, get rid of imperfections like dust spots, crop, straighten the horizons, basically bring the images to the point of pride.
Someone might purchase a large canvas print of one of your images – imagine
Are you ready for the Grand Opening?
Imagine your online portfolio on Fine Art America is a store. First impressions are important as well has having enough inventory to browse around.
Fine Art America allows you 25 images in their free or test account. After 25 you have to pay $30 which allows you unlimited images and a few other perks like setting up your own artist site.
Imagine walking into a store with only a few items. You’d be in and out in seconds. So you need to have enough inventory for potential buyers to browser around for a while.
At a minimum, you should have 25 great, sellable images. No clunkers that will scream “amateur” and send the buyers on to the next portfolio.
Think of your portfolio as a show at a museum or gallery. Which 25 images best represent your work and have the best chance of selling as home decor?
Let’s start building your art business
Ok, now you have your 25 ready to sell, quality images – time to start learning about and building up your business.
Start to get a feel for the site by uploading a couple of your images. It’s important to take your time and fill in as much information as possible.
Google and the FAA search engine need words so buyers can find your images. Fill out the keywords, tags and descriptions. Carefully consider your titles.
Fill out your artist bio. Create Collections and give them meaningful descriptions.
Look around in the “Behind the Scenes” area and explore every bit of what Fine Art America has to offer in terms of promotional tools like blogs, press releases, limited time promotions and more.
Look over the forums and discussion boards for tips and ideas.
Consider your pricing. Perhaps look at the recently sold page and see what sells. Art is not too price conscious, people buy what they like but you don’t want to be too out of wack with the average pricing for reproduction prints.
You also don’t want to sell yourself short. Buyers have a budget but they don’t necessarily buy art because it’s the cheapest option. And if you are lucky enough to connect with a buyer, you want to be satisfied with the compensation you receive for all your hard work.
Selling Art Online is a marathon, not a sprint
Think of building your online presence as a marathon not a sprint. It’s not the case of tossing up a bunch of images and watching the money instantly role in.
You build your business step by step, sale by sale. Consider that it takes time for fans to find your work, follow your process and then eventually buy.
Often art buyers will watch artists over years before they get into the position of being able to afford a purchase. They might have some life changing event such as getting married or moving before they will buy.
You want to create followers buy teasing out new images over time. It’s much better to upload a new image each week or each month and properly promote and market each image then to toss them all up at once.
Art does not sell itself
The most important thing to understand is that Fine Art America is not going to sell your work for you. You can’t just upload a few images and then think you’ll sit on the beach watching the money roll in.
Think of
But your work will never be seen amount the hundreds of thousands of other sellers unless you proactively market your work on social media and other places.
Other successful artists on Fine Art America are blogging, Pinteresting, Instagramming and showing their work locally to build up their following, presences and sales.
Success breeds success
Think of your art business as pushing a snowball up a hill. You start small, it starts to build and eventually you’ll reach the peak and the ball will start rolling down the hill.
It might take months or years to get to this point but if you approach your career every single day and add a bit to that snowball and push it up the hill just a bit more, eventually you’ll start getting some momentum.
And Fine Art America site rewards success. Sell more and you’ll move up in their rankings. It makes sense as any retail likes to promote the bestsellers and highlight them in their flyers and front windows. Your goal is to move up the ladder step by step like the high flyers on FAA did. They all started at the bottom and moved their way up.
About Edward Fielding
Edward Fielding started with Fine Art America in 2011 and has become one of the top art sellers on the site. His work has been featured on the home page and in Fine Art America’s advertising campaigns. Fielding has sold over 3,000 prints and products on FAA and sells something nearly every single day.
You can see his portfolio of over 6,000 fine art photographs and artworks here: https://edward-fielding.pixels.com/