What types of Fine Art Photography actually sell?

Artwork is a very personal thing and the reasons that people buy art for their walls are numerous. Paintings appeal to a certain audience and I have little experience on trying to explain what sort of paintings sell, but photography is probably of interest to many of my readers. So what sort of photographs sell as wall art, and what can we do to improve our success? That is the $64,000 question! I started thinking about this because a follower of this blog recently asked the question on the Fine Art America forum. He has been uploading there for some time, paying for their professional package that includes the personal website, and has sold absolutely nothing. He is based in Indonesia and so much of this work is of places and subjects in Indonesia and the culture there is not to have photographs on the wall. Plus, there is probably a massive cost to have something printed by FAA and delivered to Indonesia. He is trying to decide if FAA is not a good investment in terms of money and the large amount of time he has spent on Twitter and elsewhere pushing his work. Tens of hours a week, I understand.

So, I started thinking about my own work and what sort of photographs sell and what doesn’t and can I draw any conclusions from that? I looked back over 2019 to 2023. I have sales earlier than that (back to 2012), but I wanted the analysis to match the period where I did a lot more promotional work. I really focused on some social media activities to try to boost my sales in February 2021 and published my first article about selling fine art prints then. So the first two years of my analysis were prior to this point and the final 2 (and a bit) years were during my marketing activities.

I’ve published this chart before and it shows that my social media efforts didn’t achieve much in 2021, but most likely had a lot to do with sales in 2022 as I more than doubled my income. But it still comes back to the question – what worked and how did it impact what people actually bought?

Update – December 2023: Incidentally, since writing this, I’ve gathered all my thoughts about selling photos online into a book. You can find more details here.

Analyzing Fine Art America Sales

There is a spreadsheet on the FAA site (in settings under the sales area) that lists all the financial transactions on your account. Very difficult to analyze as it contains information all jumbled together in one field and so a year of so back I wrote a complex Access database to try to parse out some results. I’ve just looked at my most recent spreadsheet and added the sales from Pictorem so that I can work out what is happening. I have 3020 images on Fine Art America and almost 1600 on the newer Pictorem gallery. I chose to add the latter because they offer free shipping in the USA and Canada. I’ve written my review of Pictorem in an earlier post if you are interested. During the past year, I have marketed almost exclusively this newer Pictorem site and have moved my short URL, steveheap.com to it (which I put as a watermark on all the images I post), but almost all my sales have been on Fine Art America! Strange but true! I have written about why I think that is in this blog post, but in a nutshell, I think that people see an image somewhere, don’t do anything at the time of seeing it, but later think it might make a nice gift, or would look good on their wall and then they search for that image. Fine Art America often comes up in searches before Pictorem in my tests.

But back to the results. First, here is a snapshot of the sales of my prints ranked by total profit I received.

You may recognize some of the names and their locations, but the first thing to note is that although I do have more generic photos in my portfolio, such as flowers, still life, general landscapes, seascapes, sunsets and so on, almost all the sales above are of specific places. I have some interesting photos of seed pods in macro or the inner workings of an old clock which I have on my wall at home and have attracted interest when I have displayed prints where people can look through them, but none of those sell on these online stores.

Even this sunset (which I think is pretty good) has zero interest!

So why is this? I think the key answer is that there are millions of images on Fine Art America. No-one (in their right mind) goes to the site and starts browsing through the thumbnails. Very few people go there and start searching in the database there unless they already have some history with the site. Most people (in my view) start with a Google search and searching for a generic landscape, sunset or, even worse, a flower image would bring up millions of images again, with little chance that yours might be up there in the early results. What I think we might capture is a search for a very specific location, especially if someone had seen our image at some point in the past and knew that it featured, for example, Woodburn Hall at WVU in Morgantown. Now we have a chance of appearing!

In fact, I recently asked a buyer of my print of the New River Gorge bridge how she found it. She simply said that she loved that place and the bridge, and searched on Google and found my image and then went to Fine Art America to buy it.

My results above suggest that what I am successful with are well executed and hopefully attractive photos of places that mean something to the buyer. Perhaps they went to West Virginia University, or they want a gift for someone that graduated there or perhaps teaches there? They may have grown up in Morgantown and now want something to remind them of their earlier years? But they already have something in their minds and my images come up in searches to match that inner vision.

What sort of places sell for me?

I then did a bit of Excel work on the spreadsheet to identify the state or location of the images that sold and this resulted in the following:

Not the smartest table I have produced, but hopefully you can recognize states in the USA and then other locations. One of them was a train image, which I think is more important than where that train is. But as you can immediately see, West Virginia leads the table by a large margin and then Hawaii (mainly Kauai) is second. Pennsylvania and Washington DC come next. The Pennsylvania ones include the university there as well as the sports field – both subjects that fit with my “lifestyle” assumptions.

What doesn’t make much headway is Alaska, where I know many people go on a vacation or a cruise, but perhaps not for a reason that makes them want to celebrate the occasion with a piece of wall art? Someone contacted me before buying a big metal print of a beach on Kauai to tell me that it was his wife’s favorite beach in the world and he wanted to celebrate that and remind themselves of the times they had spent together in Kauai.

All this analysis reinforces, in my mind, that the photo needs to really resonate with someone and while a beautiful flower image could certainly do that, there is next to no chance that they would see one of mine.

How does Social Media fit into this?

In 2021 and 2022 in particular, I spent a long time on Twitter, placing 2 tweets a day on most days and religiously retweeting the work of other FAA artists using the #BuyIntoArt hashtag. I got many views, but very few clicks through to the artwork at Pictorem. I also sent them to LinkedIn as well and I do get occasional comments there so that may all be good for visibility in general. I did spend time in the groups and contests on FAA, but I think that does nothing. So no involvement at all in the FAA social scene apart from some common commenting on the blogs of a small group of artists to try to improve the ranking of our sites. That group is Bloggers Supporting Bloggers if you are interested.

What I did do, and I think this is the core to my recent success, was become active on a Facebook group called Growing Up in Morgantown, which seems to really enjoy seeing my photos of Morgantown and the surrounding area, and I have also posted photos and short pieces about Kauai to a couple of Facebook groups focused on that island. I haven’t tried any of the other Hawaiian island groups yet. I am starting now with groups focused on cruises that I have been on to try to capture some interest (or make my name a little more known) in those groups.

Going forward, I think that is going to be my focus. Still post things on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, which I do using a free Buffer account, but not spend much time boosting or retweeting things. But spend more time in the specific Facebook groups that might be interested in my work and have a personal connection to places there that I have photographed. You need to be careful not to be too aggressive and it isn’t critical to post links outside of Facebook (which is often frowned upon or blocked). You are trying to become a known contributor with good images. People can find you via your profile on Facebook if they are interested in your work.

I hope this analysis helps your thinking – as always, please comment and add more to this discussion! I did add more to this analysis with an investigation into how someone had found two of my photos of some local waterfalls. You can find that article here.