Business side of Art
I think the business side of art is something that is overlooked in most art practices. I know up until a few days a go I had given little thought to it.
However when I leave and have to start earning a living a thought about all the thing I would like to do in art and most, if not all of which require a least a little business acumen.
So this past week I have spent most of my time researching marketing, techniques that artist use for self promotion etc.
The reason I started this type of research was because of my Fine Art America website (link Below). FAA is an online platform for artist to their work- prints and originals. It is free to set up and only $30 a year for a premium membership that gets you little more but is still very reasonably priced. Long story short I set up an account and started uploading my art about a year ago. In this time I have made somewhere near $800 in print sales and have sold no paintings. This in itself isn’t remarkable and up until I started looking more into it, I thought it was the norm.
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/1-richard-day.h…
As it turns out it isn’t the vast majority of people on FAA hadn’t sold anything in the first year and in addition to that have a lot more views on their work than I do- sometimes 10- 20x more. I say this not to brag but to highlight the conclusion I drew from this. There must be something about my work that people like- that they like enough to just spending up $250 on a print.
It’s worth pointing out that none of these people have ever met or even heard of me- with all of my sales bar one coming from America or Canada (the other from Paris). The conclusion I drew therefore was that if I could attract more people to my site I would get more sales- easy…. easier said than done.
I started out by reading Dan Turners & keys to selling art online and then The Art of Social Network marketing. Both of which were very helpful particularly The Art of Social Networking as It was more extensive than Dan Turners slide show and introduced me to things I hadn’t considered (Links below).
http://1stangel.co.uk/downloads/
http://powersfineart.com/books/
As it stands at the moment I am setting up a bi monthly mailing list, twitter Google plus and Facebook accounts exclusively for my art and writing a separate blog on the FAA website linking it more towards the work I have there. Surely now my profile with be inundated with so many views that FAA will be forced to buy new servers as their old ones will be unable to cope with the profusion of new customers falling over themselves to buy my art.
