How Long Take Before I Sale My Art on Artofwhere

Selling prints can feel like a daunting job. Just the human action of only trying to figure out how to get your pieces printed tin can seem insurmountable.

You may not want to print them yourself. In that case y'all may desire to consider a Impress on Demand (POD) service. There is a LOT of misinformation most POD. Over the last two months, I take interviewed the CEOs and founders of several POD companies. In our conversations, some of them chose to sling mud at their competitors and shared information with me that was directly contradictory to what I could find in other sources. Some of the companies refused to respond at all.

I as well took the time to interview a handful of artists who accept had significant success with POD. A small number of them were incredibly generous with their time and I'll be quoting them extensively throughout this post and future posts on POD services. All of the information in this mail is true to best of my knowledge, and I volition be updating to reflect any changes or inaccuracies.

The Rising in Print on Demand Services

There are a surprisingly large number of companies in the POD game. From tiny startups with simply a few squad members to huge companies with thousands of employees, POD is officially big business organization. For the purpose of this blog post, I'll only include POD companies that make art prints. Some of them too offer t-shirts, mugs, posters, and other formats, but they all offering giclee or high quality fine art prints.

Hither's a list of POD companies that I institute (so far):

AbsoluteArts.com
Art.com
Artflakes.com
ArtistBe.com
ArtPal.com
ArtSpan.com
ArtStar.com
ArtStoreFronts.com
Crated.com
DeviantART
FineArtAmerica.com
Fotomoto.com
Gallerydirect.com
Imagekind.com
JuicyCanvas.com
Redbubble.com
SaatchiArt.com
SmugMug.com
Society6.com
Spoonflower.com
Zazzle.com
Zenfolio.com

In that location are a few reasons that then many companies are getting into POD.

It's relatively easy. Some of these companies brand a claim to having higher quality prints. The reality is that Fine Fine art America, Society6, Shutterfly, and other companies use the same printing and fulfillment centers. These POD companys' simply startup costs are getting a website built and finding plenty artists to attract buyers.

The profit margins are high. Prints tin can be a very profitable business. For some of the more successful artists I spoke to, prints were more than lxxx% of their income. Artists can mark up prints quite high from the cost of product, and so having lots of popular artists on the site means more profitability for the POD company.

How to Choice a Impress on Demand Service

There's a LOT of things to consider when information technology comes to picking the right POD company. After talking to dozens of artists, hither are the criteria that we came up with, in general society of importance.

What does the artist get paid? I was amazed at how much this varied from site to site. On some sites, the artist gets merely 5% of the sale amount. On other sites, it's as high equally seventy%. Be sure to read the fine impress. The manner that artists become paid varies considerably also. Consider that on some sites, all prices are pre-set and the artist gets a tiny percentage of the sale. On other sites, the artist sets the toll and the POD company adds their margin to arrive at the final retail cost.

Quality of the printed production As mentioned above, many of the POD companies apply the same fulfillment houses, and so quality varies fiddling. If yous sell something on FAA, it's printed by the same company that prints for Society6, Shutterfly, and others. Mark Tisdale is fan of Imagekind for quality, but most artists recommend ordering 1 of your own products to encounter how the quality comes out. Each artist cares well-nigh slightly different details and it's incommunicable to say which service is definitively meliorate.

Promotion and sales. It's relatively easy to get thousands of artists to sign up for a website that promises to sell their fine art. It's another thing entirely to attract qualified buyers regularly over fourth dimension. Most of the fourth dimension sales depend on the following:

• the number of collectors visiting the site, which is heavily afflicted by the site's search engine rankings and how much marketing they practise for their ain site;
• artists sending their own buyers to the site to brand a buy;
• the biggest place for sales is art featured on the habitation page of the POD site.

Unlike sites accept dissimilar methods of highlighting their artists and it's usually i of the following factors

• curation of content – some sites have employees who rummage through their artists to find fine art that they recall is likely  to sell. Some sites have instituted algorithms that automatically promote artists who are selling regularly to the front page, the logic beingness that if an creative person sells well on their own, they'll sell really well if they're highlighted on the front folio.
• internal search – the importance of the quality of a site's search function really can't exist understated. If your piece of work tin can't be found, then you won't make any sales. Search functionality should give you the ability to filter by manner of fine art, color, artist names, location, and other factors.
• paid promotion – this normally takes the form of paying to be on the dwelling house page of the site or to exist in a newsletter. Not all POD sites practise this.

Design. It's more than just looking pretty. Good blueprint includes ease of setup, mobile responsiveness, ease of purchase, discoverability of work, functioning of the site, and other elements. A well designed site matters a lot.

Control. How much can you customize the look of your store? Does information technology expect skilful with your art? Most of the companies don't offer much in this area, but a couple of them do interesting things with allowing you to embed your products on your own site, which nosotros will address in a hereafter mail service.

The ability to interact directly with the end customer. Many POD sites don't tell y'all who your buyers are, and this is a huge problem for an artist trying to build a business organization.

Stats & analytics. Sadly, this is an area where almost all of the POD companies need to make major steps forward. In addition to seeing how many sales you've fabricated, information technology would exist really helpful to see how many views each piece has had, where those viewers came from, and a little info about those viewers. Even better would be seeing how much fourth dimension they spent on each slice of art, and if they looked at any particular formatting options.

Civilization & community on the site. Pay attention to the target audition of the site. DeviantArt.com has a very different audience from FineArtAmerica.com. Go where your art makes sense. Also, getting deeply involved in the social aspects of some of the POD sites can exist hugely helpful to your sales. When you have a solid customs, yous are more likely to have your art shared and suggested by other members of the community.

Juried/Curated? Some artists appreciate being part of an sectional grouping, and some collectors want to know that the artists they're considering buying from have been vetted in some way. That said, the artists I spoke to who take been function of these curated sites have not seen higher revenues than sites that permit everyone to join.

One additional note on curation: many of the more than pop sites have rules about image quality. The photography or scanning has to be at a certain level before they'll take the image. This is different than having a console of judges who pick artists who match a theme or style that the site wants to highlight.

Image protection & Attribution. Quite often POD sites feature an artist's piece of work in their marketing without crediting the artist by name. This may not matter to you, but some artists find it concerning. Some sites foreclose people from correct-clicking on images to save them to desktop. While many artists find this to exist a plus, it besides makes sharing your art more difficult.

Experiences from Other Artists

In our next post, The Ultimate Guide to POD Services, we share some stories and case studies from other artists. We've interviewed artists who are pulling in v-figure incomes each month from prints. We'll include the adept, the bad, and the ugly.

In the hateful while, if you are an artist who has benefitted from POD, we'd love to hear from you in the comments, or via email. What works for you? Do you have whatsoever great stories to share?

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Source: https://theabundantartist.com/print-demand/

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