How to Survive Even Though You're an Artist, Part 4
How to Market Your Art Via
the Internet
by
Fine Art Registry™
An Internet Success Story
Since this series is about marketing your art, the first thing to know (which you probably already do) is that visibility counts for a lot. If enough people can see your art, some of it is going to sell.
So, how do you establish a presence in cyberspace? There are methods of getting yourself ranked high in the search engines, but your success as an artist in selling your work on the internet will come from a variety of approaches and this article, and the DVD that covers it in much more depth, will help get you started. Like any success in sales and marketing, it hinges on promotion. This installment in our series focuses on Fine Art Registry™ artist Lorna Wallace, who has only been painting for five years, yet who has created 400 paintings in that time and sold nearly every single one of them. She is not represented by a gallery. No dealer is out there hawking her work. By any standard, she's a successful, internationally collected artist whose work is now beginning to appear on the secondary market. And she's done it all via the internet.
So, listen up, because here is a model we could all follow with our own work.
Finding a Niche
For years, Lorna's involvement in the art market was on the collecting side. Among her favorites are Picasso, Paul Klee, Willem DeKooning, Walter Keane, Marie Laurencin and Andy Warhol. She's got an early Kandinsky hanging in her living room. But in all her looking at art, she'd never come across a certain subject matter that she'd been hoping to see. After years of searching in vain, she decided to take matters into her own hands and create it herself. That whole story can be read in her profile on the FAR® web site: Lorna Wallace Profile
Clearly, this is a woman who is not given to agreement with conventional attitudes about succeeding in the art world ("It takes years to become an artist." "I must go to art school." "I need to get in a gallery." False, false and false as Lorna has demonstrated in a few short years.)
Asked to describe her art, she says, "My paintings are intended to extol the Goddess in all gals with a sense of whimsical glamour, humor and designer-wearing attitude. Without any preconceived notions, each gal takes on a life of her own with an imposing personal statement. Using simplistic lines, color and expression, without apology, I leave it up to the distinct viewer to determine the appeal."
Granted, this subject matter strays quite a ways from what many newcomers do when they first pick up a brush. No landscapes or still lifes or copies of the Old Masters. But Lorna has racked up an impressive sales record. Let's look at how she did it.
Self-Representation
Lorna has always preferred to be a self-representing artist. Now that she's proven herself, there are galleries seeking to represent her, but she turns most of them down. There are advantages to representing herself that she doesn't want to relinquish:
- She maintains total control over all her work and the way it is marketed
- She determines what pieces to sell and at what price
- She doesn't give a cut to a gallery, which is often 50% or more of the sale price.
eBay
As a collector, Lorna has long used eBay and is familiar with the site and how it operates. When she began painting, she decided to test the market to see if there was even any interest in her work. eBay seemed the logical place to start offering her art because she knew that people who go to eBay are buyers, not browsers. eBay also gets a hell of a lot of traffic; it ranks in the top 20 sites on the entire internet.
Pricing Her Work
Next, she had to determine how much to ask for her work. In Lorna's view, your art is worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it. You may have slaved over it, it may contain part of your soul, however, as with any commodity, a potential buyer only sees the finished product. He or she may want it, but at what price?
Lorna decided to start her work at an opening price of just $9.99. But, before you strain your neck turning up your nose, you should know that Lorna's original works now fetch upwards of $1,400 and her limited edition prints start at around $50. In just five years.
The method to Lorna's madness was the idea that where you start and what your work ultimately brings may be two very distant cousins. But she reasoned that if people wanted some of her work, they would also want more of her work. Her strategy was to make it easy for people to own her paintings, to get them out of the studio and onto other people's walls. Each of those early sales became an ambassador for Lorna and her art. She also knew that the window on her work was not open for long. eBay auctions last only ten days. If you're an interested buyer there's not a lot of time to wait and see.
So, that was her starting price: $9.99. Then it was $15, then $80. It didn’t take long because Lorna found out that there was a demand for her work. People who bought once, bought again. As the winning bids for her works kept going up, she began raising the opening bids. And so it has gone. It began with developing a following at a very low price. But they came back for more, and Lorna now ships her work all across the U.S. and 20 countries internationally.
Show Your Work in Its Best Light
Of course, the big advantage of a bricks and mortar gallery is that someone can see the work as it really is. To approximate this on eBay, you need to have good quality photos of your work – as good as possible. Lorna includes several shots showing the overall painting and also details of it to approximate a gallery experience where you would step closer to a piece to study the detail. She includes the usual details as to size, medium and support. She also includes information about herself and her approach to her art. She adds this to every listing because she feels that in some cases it will connect her to the potential buyer. As a collector, Lorna values knowing something about the artist whose work she is buying, so she adds a short biography to every listing.
Don’t "Buy It Now"
Lorna does not offer "Buy It Now" prices on the work she lists for auction on eBay, figuring that if she does, people or potential collectors will assume that the artist is thinking, "This is what my art is worth." (She does put a price on the work which did not sell at auction and which she then offers for sale in her Fine Art Registry sales gallery or her eBay store.) So, staying true to her idea that the work is worth what the public thinks it is worth, she never adds a "Buy It Now" figure in her auction listings. In fact, she's convinced that her paintings would not be selling for what they are now had she given buyers the chance to end the auctions early with an immediate purchase price. Instead, she lets multiple bidders determine the price.
Payments
She accepts different forms of payment: PayPal, personal check or money order. For the latter two, she waits until the check or money order clears before she ships the work and makes that policy clear in her invoices. As a result, she has never been burned by shipping a painting for which she then didn’t receive payment. Money orders can take 30 to 60 days to clear, so she prefers PayPal for international sales now.
Packing and Shipping
Lorna prefers to retain complete control of her business and wears every hat, including matting and framing her paintings and prints as well as packing and shipping. (More on this in later installments in the series.)
Looking After Your Clients
Every person who buys one of Lorna's pieces is important to her and she maintains an up-to-date listing of their email addresses. Whenever she has a new piece for sale, she lets her clientele know in a message to them.
Additionally, eBay allows potential buyers to email the seller with questions and Lorna answers all such inquiries rapidly and adds these to her address list. Lorna recognizes that casual interest in the form of a question may develop into deeper interest and a sale.
Added Exposure
While Lorna's success story began with eBay, she has taken other steps to get her work into the market and make it visible to a wider audience. She’s a listed artist with AskArt.com which publishes The Artists' Bluebook, she has a permanent store on eBay, a presence on ArtWanted.com and maintains a MySpace page where people can see more of her work and find out more about Lorna herself. This is all in addition to her entire portfolio on Fine Art Registry.
Selling 400 paintings and many limited edition prints requires considerable record keeping, a factor that becomes more important as her body of work and reputation continue to grow. With typical efficiency, Lorna solves all administrative concerns by registering all her work with Fine Art Registry.
As soon as a painting sells, Lorna registers it in her FAR® portfolio. She applies the FAR seal, which identifies that particular painting for all time, and includes the individual information about the work in the Fine Art Registry database, where anyone can access it. From that point on, there can never be questions of authenticity and provenance. By recording transfer of ownership to the new owner, the history of the painting is there for anyone to see. These records are secure and in a separate location from the work itself, so are not subject to loss or theft, unlike the paintings themselves. The seal is tamper-evident and counterfeit-proof and years from now, should a painting turn up for sale that does not bear a FAR tag, connoisseurs of her work will know that it must be a forgery. Should a work be stolen, the authorities working to recover it have complete information about the painting, including the chain of ownership. Being a collector herself, Lorna recognizes the value of the FAR tagging and registration procedures. She knows how important it is to establish provenance and authenticity. Lorna's clients greatly appreciate the fact that she takes care to tag and register her pieces and this, in turn, adds value to her works of art.
Her entire portfolio is located on FAR and she credits the numerous commissions she has received to this fact. She signs all her emails with links to her FAR portfolio and other sites showing her work, which is another seemingly small, but important detail in her marketing actions.
In her estimation, Fine Art Registry also provides much more than other online sales sites. Besides taking no commission for any sales she makes from the site, FAR has promoted her work with a profile Lorna can use send out to increase her exposure. Fine Art Registry even helped her when she ran up against the corporate lawyers at Chanel, who were contesting her use of their logo in her work, much like the problem Warhol encountered when he used the Campbell Soup logo in his paintings. FAR was able to connect Lorna with an attorney who successfully cited the fair use provision of copyright law.
Everything considered, Lorna feels that Fine Art Registry adds tremendous value to her work and greatly simplifies the administrative aspect of her art.
While Lorna feels that the model she has used to succeed is not the only way it can be done, it certainly seems that artists could do a lot worse. Not too many, we suppose, are driving around in a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow five years after picking up a brush for the first time.
Certainly, there is more to how Lorna has attained such success in so short a time, more than can be included in a single article. But you can get the complete details of how she markets her art in a DVD now available on the FAR site. During an hour-long recorded interview, Lorna covers different aspects of selling her work on eBay, including what she does if a painting doesn't sell at auction, details of her eBay store and, perhaps most interesting of all, where she lists her paintings for sale. It's not where you might think.
What we've included here, though, are the broad strokes of how one collector-turned-artist has used the advent of the internet to bring her vision of art to the market and succeed beyond her expectations. Any artist would do well to learn as much as they can about how she did it.
Read Part I: How to Survive Even Though You're an Artist
Read Part II: Different Ways Artists Managed Throughout History
Read Part III: Leveling the Playing Field
— Fine Art Registry
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September 7, 2007
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The views and opinions of individual authors/contributors expressed on the FAR® web site do not necessarily state or reflect those views and/or opinions of Fine Art Registry™ or its agents or subsidiaries.
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