It used to be that you’d paint something, put a frame around it and sell it either at a street fair or — if you were lucky and had a following — in a gallery.
The thing is, unless it was a co-op gallery, where the artists take turns running the store and each artist has a small area for display, you only got one show about every three years, so the gallery didn’t burn up its territory, meaning that the sales got fewer and fewer over the months, and then finally dried up altogether.
You have to move to a different town until you wear out your welcome there, too, and that’s why artists don’t stay in one place forever unless they do local landscapes.
With some luck, your market might expand to regional and even national sales, but seldom will an artist get into the international art scene without a great deal of work and, as I mentioned, luck.
In the old days, you were limited to painting, drawing, charcoals, graphite, various forms of sculpture, and handmade craft items and jewelry.
Today, you can generate an image and plaster it all over a wide variety of gift items and personal treasures, and what’s more, you don’t even have to invoice it, pack it and ship it.
That’s why I’m recommending zazzle.com for most of your after-market needs. Imagine having a show in a gallery where not only are your wall art pieces selling, but also your tee-shirts, mugs, keychains, pillows, scarves, greeting cards and postcards, candles, flip-flops and hundreds more items, all working to promote your name and your art.
It’s incredibly easy. Want to find out more? Okay, stay tuned to this channel, ’cause here goes:
- PAINT OR DRAW SOMETHING — on paper, canvas or in photoshop. Save it as a JPG unless it needs to be transparent in places, in which case, flatten it and save it as a PNG, as in the case of the photo cutouts.
- PHOTOGRAPH or SCAN the artwork, and massage the image to around 5,000 pixels wide.
- UPLOAD the image into your zazzle image bin.
- CHOOSE an item to receive the image and adjust accordingly.
- SELL the item, deciding what to call it, how to describe it, etc.
- PROMOTE the item, leading viewers to your selling page.
That last point is my main point — you can’t sell the most wonderful thing in the world, if nobody knows about it.
Your sales will depend entirely upon your Circle of Friends. The cleverest advertisement won’t help you if you don’t get “word of mouth” promotion among your social media friends and followers.
Now, if you don’t have a lot of friends and followers and subscribers, guess what? You’re not alone. Is there a remedy?
Yes, there is, but you’re not going to like it.
The remedy is to get an “Influencer” with millions of fans to promote your product, or if you can’t afford to bribe someone, you yourself will have to become an Influencer.
In the case of fashion or cosmetics, that’s a fairly easy task, but it does take buttering up thousands of admirers, and that means ALL the social media exposure you can possibly dream up.
Most people would never become an Influencer, for several reasons — firstly, because it’s a LOT of work, and secondly, because there is no bottom to it, you just keep going down and down and down, while your sales go up, and up, and up.
It’s a devil’s bargain, and if you realize that fully, you’ll want to avoid becoming a product, particularly on the internet and social media circles.
The fastest way that I know to get there is through DISCORD. What an ironic name for folks who want to be in communication with each other, but that is the name.
Actually, you’ll need to join about half a dozen live chatrooms, and you’ll want to place some facebook ads to build your daily audience and your friends list, because people want to go where other people go, and they want what other people have or want.
Now the fact is, you can either BE an influencer or HIRE an influencer to promote your stuff, but without that, you’re stuck in limbo, out of which there is only one way — advertise.
Write a simple letter explaining what you’re doing and what you want the casual passer-by to do about it, like actually purchase the product, or join the workshop, or send for the special booklet — whatever you have in mind for your customer.
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling — if you get it in front of enough faces, you’ll sell plenty enough to make it worth the effort. If you keep your merch in a box in a storage unit, it’s much less likely to sell than if you get your customer to try it on.
You have at your disposal, several factories willing to make your product for you and bill and ship it to your customers, so that’s one big factor out of your calculation. You’ll pay zazzle or redbubble or paom for the finished product, which you or they can ship out.
If you plan to sign things or label them, you’ll want to add the extra shipping to your house and then to your customer.
You can have zazzle ship direct, but then your customer knows where to get the thing at wholesale, because you have your items up there at wholesale prices, of course.
Retail is Strictly for the Gallery.
What gallery? You haven’t been paying attention recently. Read my twenty or so latest blogs to save me having to repost all that information again.
So if you’re a modern artist of the 21st century, KunstMatrix.com will be the home of your personal gallery or galleries, the number of which will depend on your creativity, your total artistic output, and your ability to stay with a thing all the way through.
After you’ve made an item on zazzle, go to the item sales page.
Take a screenshot of an item by right-clicking and selecting “screenshot”, then save the shot on an outboard drive.
Upload the image, make the item, and put leading graphics and hot links to your media outlets all over the place, with that hot link leading directly back to your sales page, which can be on your own website, or on zazzle or redbubble or paom, or other. It’s totally your own choice where you decide to send them, based on whatever considerations you have.
If I were going to set myself up as a fashion designer — at the age of 81, that’s hardly likely, but you may be a bit younger and more able to hop around as needed — I’d actually buy one of my dresses in whatever size my photo model wears best, then I’d do a professional modeling session with just the one dress, called a “number”, in the business.
I’d hire my model and photographer and I want the best I can get. I might have to ship my garment to the photographer, who would then hire a model for me, or I’d find a model on fiverr who lived in the same area as the photographer.
With the right brick-and-mortar gallery setting, this could sell for $225.00 retail with no problem. There isn’t anything like this WEARABLE Fine Art fashion.
If you did a runway show, you’d want a dozen different designs, all related to one another in some way, to tie them in to a show concept.
You could conceivably make an entire show with just this one design, or make it the feature design, the “drop of the day”.
If you want to set up something even more fashionable and Fifth Avenue, you might consider limiting the dress edition to 10, or 22 or 35 total, each hand-signed, with your own personalized label, along with a COA that includes the photo of the model with the item on.
So here’s a case where I don’t have the thing itself, just a screenshot from the PAOM site, and a rather small one, at that — around 500 pixels at best, but that’s what they’ve got, so if you don’t have a model and can’t afford to send for the thing, just sell it from the screenshot.
When I say “afford” I mean that you have to have one in every size, if you don’t know where your sales are coming from, but if you have a model, you order only his or her size for the photo shoot.
Models aren’t always the best solution, but they are among the top ten. I’m lucky to have models as friends and close neighbors, so we were able to do four great sessions in a few weeks’ time.
No two necklaces alike — that’s easy to accomplish. The metal never bends the way you expect it to when you’re doing one of these Modernist jewelry pieces.
The thing is, once again, if nobody sees it, you might as well have blown it out your ass, as they say in polite society.
So once again, no matter how hard we struggle against the web of organic deceit, we’re left with the question, “How do you get your stuff in front of people’s faces???”, and the answer is still the same — it’s going to cost you.
If you know in advance that ANYTHING you do is going to cost you, it’s easier to take the curves — the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so to speak, and you can quote me on that.
So let’s start simple and cheap. Get one thing in front of one person’s face one time. That’s just for starters, but it IS a beginning, and it will work to get you started.
You say you’re not an artist? Not creative? Okay, I’ll buy that for the moment, and disprove it later, but let’s say that you can’t or won’t or don’t produce art. Okay.
So you grab as many screenshots of my stuff that’s for sale and put them up for sale on your own venue or platform, and price them double what you’ll pay to get them, plus shipping, of course, unless you’re intensely well-connected with amazon.
You can sell any of my online items at double the price — I list all my art items at wholesale, allowing resellers to take advantage of a multi-million dollar inventory of things that don’t exist until they’re ordered and shipped.
I have dozens of different online shops, and you’re welcome to visit all of them. I didn’t put them up to make money from them — think of publication in the scientific release sense, not in the literary or marketing sense.
In short, use whatever you find in my efforts — they’re meant to give you the fuel for the journey, and journey it is.
I don’t casually recommend selling as a work-tool. It’s very intentional and intense. I insist on it, because only then can you get the actual experience of working in the work, thus gaining momentum — for the trip up, which is exactly one step.
You don’t have to be creative at all. Keep your precious low self-esteem, if you want to — you can function with or without it, so get on board and start finding ways to get your stuff in front of people’s faces.
A blog, by the way, is one way to do this, provided that each and every person reading this blog passes it on through social media channels to others who also might benefit, thus benefiting you, naturally.
I’m going to tell you how to get started even though it’s an impossible Catch-22 to even try. Here’s a starter:
I have a number of famous jazz artist and jazz venue backdrops for sale, and you could take part in it, get a commission for your sales and help the community at the same time.
We support the California Jazz Association and other jazz artist support groups around the world. If you can get this in front of someone who wants to donate a jazz item to a museum or jazz venue, get in touch and we’ll discuss it, or you can attend our marketing group meetings and learn how from others who’ve done it.
It’s all about getting exposure, and that doesn’t happen from just sitting around bitching about how you’re not getting any breaks. Of course you’re not. You have to DO something to get the breaks.
Maybe you can’t afford the $450,000.00 or more that we’re asking for our major performance backdrops, but perhaps you’d be happy with a 24″ x 36″ metal print of the same piece, for less than $500??? The original painting comes with a full-color “JazzArt” Storybook.
You can hand-sign metal prints if you make them on zazzle or redbubble, but there’s double the shipping — to you and then to your customer — so consider it carefully. I’d tend to plate-sign them and let that be enough, but it’s your choice.
So bottom line, the way to go is to buy some facebook ads, just a few, a little at a time, with lots of patience in-between, and see what happens.
It’s going to cost you around $12 for 1,000 views, and about a dollar for every click-through to your website, but that might not result in sales, so be careful, and don’t be a wiseguy, go a little at a time, and compare your result with the cost. There are ways to get bargain prices, but you’ll have plenty of time to discover those ways.
click here to see a lot of A-Line Dresses all at once
See You At The Top!!!
gorby