Fine Art America print pricing for 2019
Way back in 2015 I did some research on the pricing of images that had sold on Fine Art America. I’ve stuck with that pricing ever since and I have had sales as I report here, but am I leaving money on the table?
So I decided to repeat my research and see how pricing of a representative sample of images that had sold this week on FineArtAmerica had changed. What I found was intriguing! There were definitely sellers that had significantly higher prices than the ones I am using, and large sellers like the New Yorker magazine for their front covers were higher still. I see sales for those magazine covers every time I go to FAA, so the higher price is not putting off the buyers. I looked at 25 sales that were somewhat similar to my images. They all had to be photographs, mainly travel or landscape and of a quality that I felt matched my own uploads. For the 25 sales, I checked their pricing for prints only for 8 inches, 20 inches, 36 inches and, for some, 60 inches. The resultant table looks like this:
I calculated the average price and the median (the one in the center if you ordered them from low to high). What you will see is that there is a large range. Not so much for the 8 inch prints (although that goes from $15 to $42, but as you get to the larger sizes, the range of prices broadens significantly.
I decided to plot these out on a graph:
The bottom axis is the price and the vertical axis is the number of contributors that chose that price for 8, 20 and 36 inch prints. These are sale prices, not the margin the person is looking for. This graph really shows how wide the 36 inch range gets – from $95 to $340 or so. And these are not just sitting in the database somewhere, someone has paid this plus extra for framing and delivery.
My old prices were $27, $75 and $142. Not bad at the low end, a bit low in the middle and way out of line with some of the competition for the larger prints. After mulling this over I decided I could try some new pricing around the three price points of $28, $95 and $190 and settled on this table:
The center column is the one I will enter into the site and the price shown to the customer will be the one on the right.
I haven’t actually done this yet – I wrote to someone on the FAA site who had some of the higher prices to ask if her sales were impacted, but she didn’t reply… So should I pull the trigger and put these new prices into effect? Anyone got experience of higher priced sales on the site?
Another great post from the master! As a FAA seller too, I am contemplating raising prices in early 2019. I appreciate your analysis and posting of it.
Thanks George!
Haha, thanks a lot for this Steve! Following some advice from Alex, I wanted to take some time over the holidays and put my work on FAA for sale but wasn’t totally sure about the pricing. But I remembered that you wrote something on that a long time ago, opened your website to find the old post, and – voilà – you just posted this! How is that for good timing?
Perfect timing. I have adopted this pricing now although I entered each margin with $1 less for each one so that the final price would end in 9, like $69 instead of $70.
I was going to start off the new year not only rethinking my pricing, but finally getting around to populating my FAA site more. I’ve been holding off any of this while I think it all through. Then I remembered I had bookmarked your site months ago. My surprise when I found this article. Perfect timing.
I had done a similar thing months ago and tended toward the low end. Based on your calculations, I headed more towards the middle as the sizes increased. I think it’s fair in the long run.
Thanks for the timely info.
Hi Ken
Glad the article was useful! I haven’t sold any prints in December, although my sales were so variable that I’m not sure that it tells me anything!
Steve
Hi Steve,
I read your initial post back when I decided to try FAA back in 2015. Your post was a very good starting point for me. I really didn’t get rolling until I took on the Premium account late 2016 and put some effort into it. I was recently thinking about looking at my pricing to make adjustments and ran across this latest post. Terrific timing. Once again your post is a huge help and very insightful. I did make some slight adjustments. Did you ever pull the trigger on your new pricing?
Question, have you ever thought of looking deeper into Licensing Pixels and specifically Rights Managed Images. I thought that it couldn’t hurt to get in the ring so I did. I really have no desire to do royalty free but rights managed I’m curious about. There is of course the Shutterstock and Getty competitive price examples as a guide but I’ve seen artist with pricing across the board.
Hi Scott – glad I could be of help! I did put the new pricing into effect when I wrote that blog post and have sold 3 prints since. Now is that a coincidence – possibly, but it is good to see some traction again! I do fill in the pixels licensing section of the default pricing schedule that is applied when I upload images, so I think I am already there. No sales yet though. I don’t think I can paste my prices into a comment though. I can’t recall if I used their defaults, but my extended licenses are between $40 and $100.
Steve
Hi! You know, I’m an artist and while I do understand it’s a whole different medium, I absolutely recognize how brilliant this chart is.
Thank you for taking the time to do this and showing the work it took. I can use your example and apply it to my business and that really helps me out.
I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you and your work.
Thanks again, it’s a really great system, nice work!
Thanks Morgan – this sat around in my Spam folder for a while. Sorry!
Is the size (in inches) the long or the short edge of the photo? Do you think these numbers hold up for 2022? Thank you!
The size is the long edge of the photo. I did modify my prices earlier this year when I opened my Pictorem account. I set the prices there at $20 per square foot which is less expensive than FAA and so I brought down the FAA ones to make it somewhat similar. I’ve added this in this image:
. I will see how it goes. Not sure that people are very price conscious, although it has been a poor August!