Selling Fine Art Prints

After a focus this year on stock photos (with some great results), I decided to try to boost the sales of prints of what I call my Fine Art Collection! I mentioned that I was going to try an experiment of lowering my prices to see if that would juice the sales. Well, I gave it two months and nothing much happened, and so I reverted to a new pricing plan that was closer to the ones I have used in the past. I’m pleased to say that I have now seen some sales and that re-invigorated me to put more effort into trying to boost my sales. But first, what has sold recently?

The first sale came in on December 7th and was for a small 10 x 7 inch metal print of San Diego, enhanced by one of my artificial seas!

Nice to see this being recognized and this one earned me $34.

Then on December 8th, I sold a face mask with an image that I only uploaded a day or two before:

Today, I went to my account at Society 6 and noticed three nice sales there in the past couple of days. First, I sold this image of the Harbor of Avalon on the island of Catalina in California:

Then the next day I sold this image of the skyline of Chicago (again with artificial water reflections) as a framed art print and then again as a canvas print:

Although the prints on Society 6 don’t produce the higher margins of Fine Art America, at around $35 for each sale, it all adds up.

I’ve also started playing a much bigger role in the community at Fine Art America. I joined three groups that are dedicated to promoting each others artwork – usually you get to submit one image and then in return, you like the images of the artists above you in the discussion posted in the past 24 hours. Then, the artists following you do the same for your image. Other groups have commenting agreements – I comment an image on five different artist portfolios and the next members do the same to my image. It is not guaranteed to help your position in the search results, but all interactions with your images are recorded and fed, in some way, into their algorithms. It appears that sales are the biggest factor (and so I created a buyers account and bought one of my own face masks) but comments and likes certainly look good to a buyer when they come across one of my images. I recently added a new composite to my portfolio and put that into one of these groups earlier today. It already has 26 likes and 9 comments (and the comments were not part of the “deal” – these were people who simply had to like the image but they chose to also add a comment.

I usually visit these Groups once a day and see if there is anything I wish to promote. It doesn’t take very long and hopefully it has some impact. Time will tell!

Finally, as you know, I use Jixipix digital painting packages to create images like the one above in an interesting style. This one used the Hand Tint Pro package. For the next 10 days, they are offering either a discounted application, or a free application on their website. They post the new offer at 9am PST each day. So far, I have downloaded a “photo edge” package, which I may not use, but as it was free, I thought I might as well!