(Experienced print marketer and founder of WorldPrintmakers.com, Mike Booth knows a few things about selling prints. This article appeared originally on the World Printmakers website. --Harald Johnson) The Secret of Fine-Art Print Sales In a Virtual World by Mike Booth Editor & Publisher, WorldPrintmakers.com October 15, 2003 © 2003 Mike Booth End of the Mystery: Shall I Tell You How It's Done? I know what works. It's taken a few years of banging my head against that virtual wall, but I now know how to sell fine-art prints over Internet. Shall I tell you how it's done? First of all, the basics: you'll need a website. If you're a visual artist you need a website in any case. It's your virtual calling card, catalog, and studio visit. I am fond of saying that if an artist doesn't have a website, she doesn't exist, and that's only a slight exaggeration. You need your own domain; don't settle for free hosting and a Hotmail account. If you do, your clients or customers won't take you seriously. So pay for your own domain (www.marysprints.com) and e-mail account (mary@marysprints.com). It's cheap, and it will help you to achieve the credibility you need to get strangers in far-off places to send you money for your prints. All business is about credibility, but online business more so, as your whole operation is somewhere out there in the ether with no tangible office, store, nor parking lot, nor smiling sales clerks, and clients are naturally wary. Virtually everything you do online will be designed to build the credibility necessary to overcome your potential clients' natural reticence. ABOVE: Norwegian artist Mamta Herland has a website that showcases both her acrylic paintings and digital inkjet prints. To Flash or Not to Flash Your website needs to be tasteful and professional. There are different schools of thought on site design. Some people prefer their sites to reflect advanced design and technology concepts, with ornate presentation pages, Flash animations, etc. I'm of the other school: plain vanilla with text links. You can go either way, but if you opt for the former you'd better do it well, as highly "designed" pages take significantly longer to download. If you've navigated the Web much you know that speed is of the essence. Just as in the real world, customers are put off if you make them wait. The question of colors and layouts I'll leave to you. You are, after all, an artist. Having said that, I'll confess that I prefer combinations of black, white and grays. That way the background colors don't clash with or distract from those of the prints you display. All the images you put on your site should be of professional quality, of course. You are selling images. That's not too complicated in these days of digital cameras. Even if you don't have a digital camera, you can still make excellent images of your prints with your old SLR camera and color negative film (yes, the same kit you've taken on vacation all these years!) When you drop the film off at the photo lab for developing, tell them you want the strips of negatives scanned onto a disk. This procedure gives excellent image quality and saves you an infinite amount of time and frustration scanning prints. Whether you opt for digital or film, the absolutely essential element is the tripod, without which your images will be deficient. Of course, if you're a digital artist, you can forget this entire paragraph; your images are already digitized. Finalizing the Site Content is king. People don't log onto the WWW to see flaming whirligigs. They go to find useful, interesting information and, in your case, beautiful images. Make sure your site has some of each, whether it's notes about techniques, articles on printmaking history or art criticism, a thoughtful collection of links, and, of course, your prints. Information--relevant, interesting, attractive and timely information--is the cheese in the trap. ABOVE: Mamta Herland adds instructive articles and papers about the digital printmaking process to add value to her site. If you've gotten this far with your site, all that remains to do before publishing it online is to fine tune it for search engines. One of your computer-hip nephews can help you with this. It's about metatags and keywords, stuff that you'd rather not bother with. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate So, now your site is published. Congratulations, it looks pretty good. Now you can sit back and wait for the orders to come rolling in, right? Well, not exactly. Actually, if you really want your website to function for you, your work has just begun. Now you need to start to promote and update. Start by putting your URL (Web address) on all your correspondence, business cards, e-mails, etc. Send out notes announcing your new site to all your friends and associates, art galleries, the local paper, art publications, etc. Are you an expert on some aspect of printmaking or a related subject? Write an article on it and get it published on the condition that they publish your site's URL at the bottom of the article. Find the Internet newsgroups related to printmaking and participate in them. If you work them patiently and discreetly, they will give you not only publicity but valuable feedback on your site. ABOVE: E-mail and Internet discussion groups and forums, like digital-fineart (shown), are great places to share and learn and to spread the word about your website. A bonus is that members are usually willing and able to critique your site and give you tips for improving it. So far, so good. By now, the content on your site will be getting a little musty and could do with refreshing. This means new images and articles. When you get the new material online don't fail to send out a little newsletter to everyone. "This is starting to sound like a lot of work!" you say. Well, yes, in fact it is a lot of work. You were expecting something else? A silver get-rich-quick bullet, perhaps? Forget it, that's not going to happen; the Lone Ranger and the dot-com bubble are long gone. And things get worse before they get better. Read on, if you're not too demoralized already. The "Secrets" of Success It turns out, as you have correctly if reluctantly deduced, that the secrets of success in the virtual world are the same as those of the real world: professionalism, efficiency, perseverance, honesty, communication skills, good business practices, and a pinch of creativity. So, follow this painstaking formula for a couple of years. Be unflaggingly cheerful and helpful to everyone who comes your way. If you receive requests from art students, attend them lovingly; they are your future colleagues and partners. The Internet is a big world made up of many small worlds, and the printmaking community is one of them. Answer all e-mails on the same day they arrive and treat potential clients like the VIP's they are. Smother them with information and attention. Pack their prints securely and honor your guarantee scrupulously. You've been working on your micro-mini dot-com print enterprise for a couple of years now. You've learned a lot about the Web, about site design, e-commerce, promotion, and dealing with customers. Your site is approaching critical mass, that magical point where the various threads of communication, promotion, good business practices, and a smidgen of serendipity have woven themselves into a solid fabric of credibility. (Remember credibility?) Though you're not exactly a household name, you are known and respected in printmaking circles, you have published articles and been interviewed a few times for your printmaking expertise. You have been seen at major printmaking fairs and events. Certainly now, you can begin to think about leaving your day job and making your living from your prints, no? ABOVE: Being interviewed, whether in print or online as above, is one way to promote yourself and increase your visibility. April Vollmer interview on WorldPrinters.com shown. Not a chance. Not yet. Regardless of how well you've done your homework thus far, you're not going to get enough orders over Internet to permit you to live from the sales you make from your website. (I warned you it would get worse before it got better!) It's not only about the number of orders you get, but the type of orders, which will be mainly for single prints. Just the time and expense involved in packaging and mailing prints one by one will eat up most of your profit. The Best Part Are you thoroughly demoralized? Don't give up now, because I've been saving the best until last. If you have conscientiously laid down a solid foundation of credibility over the past couple of years, there is a reliable formula for capitalizing on it. It's called "B2B" or "business-to-business e-commerce." Properly carried out, a B2B campaign will sell a sufficient volume of prints--not just single prints but whole editions--to enable a professional printmaker to devote him or herself exclusively to art. How does one go about it? B2B, at its most basic, is little more than the virtual version of the time proven direct-mail business. You send out mailing pieces via e-mail to companies offering your original, limited-edition, fine-art prints as corporate gifts and office decoration. Keep these e-mailings brief and tasteful, and direct them exclusively to businesses. There are lists available on the Web. Your mailing should be designed to lure prospective clients to your website, where they can browse your offerings and get to know you and your work. (Note: Your site must be designed with this in mind; make sure that the route to your "Order" or "More Information" button is a short, clear one.) ABOVE: Digital artist Ileana's "route to purchase" takes only two steps from her home page. Most of your e-mail prospects won't answer at all; some will just say no. But a few will reply, often timidly, that, yes, they would like to know more. Once you've gotten a business client on the line, it's just a question of reeling him or her in with attentive, professional customer-care techniques. This usually becomes an exercise in educating clients, while at the same time introducing them to the magical world of fine-art printmaking. When companies buy prints for gifts or decor they don't buy just one. They buy dozens or hundreds; entire editions. (We are currently working with a client on an order for 4,500 prints!) The best news is that if a client buys this year, next year he or she will, in all likelihood, be back for more! Our best client to date is a CEO of a big French real estate firm who knew nothing about fine-art prints in the beginning. But little by little, she's been drawn into the Enchanting Realm of the Print. She commissions 400 prints for her company every Christmas. And soon after every New Year she's inquiring eagerly, "What can we do for next year?" In order to plan and carry out your B2B campaign, you'll have to get up to speed on copywriting, layout, list management, and the rest of the B2B techniques, not to mention the logistics of order fulfillment. But that's not beyond your reach. You're a creative person, and in six months you can learn anything. A Final Thought I know what you're thinking: "Very well, suppose I manage to master this whole process and actually make it work. Where do I find the time to do any printmaking?!" Excellent point. Ideally, printmakers should make prints and not have to worry about marketing them. Isn't there a professional service somewhere out there that will take care of all these bothersome details for printmakers: website design, site promotion and updating, public relations, B2B, and client care? There must be a few of them, but you'll forgive me if I confess that I only know one. It's called World Printmakers. About the Author: World Printmakers founder, Mike Booth, is an American expatriate journalist and editor resident in Granada, Spain. World Printmakers is a specialist website that showcases fine-art printmakers, both traditional and digital, from around the globe. It can be seen at: http://www.worldprintmakers.com. ^ back to top Home | About Us | Advertise | Contact Us News & Reviews | How-To's | Resources © 2002-2005 Harald Johnson Communications. All rights reserved.