Reproducing Your Artwork PART 5 — How to Market Your Work

Myron Arndt

This is part five of a six part series on publishing and marketing your artwork.

MARKETING

At this point in our series you have undoubtedly considered several factors which now need to be combined to help choose a marketing strategy.

What are your goals? What type of reproduction do you feel you should do? How will your work be reproduced? Although these are important questions in the process, one thing you must keep in mind is that you will achieve very little unless your reproductions can be sold. Although a few fine artists do commission work or work for a commercial company where the buyer is known in advance, most artists will not have that to rely on. That usually leaves one of the following methods of marketing:

• Sell the work directly yourself, either to galleries or the public via the Internet, shows and exhibitions.
• Employ your spouse or close friend to sell the work for you.
• Employ an independent agent to sell the work for you on commission.
• Contract with a distributor to market your reproductions.
• License your work to a publisher who will do the reproduction and manage the sales and distribution for you in exchange for receiving royalties on the work when it sells. (Note: In this case the publisher must select your work among other artists they would also consider for publication.)

In the case of you or your spouse selling the work, you must carefully evaluate several things. For example, given the type and style of your work, will you have time to travel the country selling and promoting your work and still have time to produce it? Will your spouse be prepared to dedicate their time and energy to selling and promoting your work and do they have the necessary skills? What about the nuts and bolts of distributing the reproductions, such as storage, shipping, billing customers, collecting the accounts and maintaining business records?

Hiring and agent or friend to do the marketing for you entails many of the same questions as well as the question of how to compensate them and train them to understand and relate your work to the customers they contact.

Many artists have chosen to work in one of the ways we have touched on thus far. The majority, however, find it to be a difficult and demanding task and have turned to publishers or distributors for assistance in this area. It is helpful at this point to define the terms “publisher” and “distributor”. If you elect to reproduce your own work you will become a “publisher”. If you also elect to sell it yourself, you also become a “distributor”.

A publisher is an individual or company who contracts with an artist to reproduce their work in forms acceptable to the artist. The publisher ensures that the artist is compensated, usually by a royalty on each reproduction sold. The publisher finances and arranges for the printing of reproductions, promotional literature and advertising to announce the release of the work. The publisher will then arrange to have the work distributed in one of the methods we have discussed above.

A distributor is usually a company engaged in the business of marketing reproductions and will have an established clientèle. The distributor will hire and train sales representatives to call on galleries or other outlets to solicit sales for your reproductions. The distributor will look after shipping, invoicing, collection of payments, storage of some or all of the work, and will compensate the sales force out of its share of the returns. Many distributors represent the work in their catalogues, on-line services, trade fairs and private exhibitions. Quite often the publisher and distributor will be the same company, however many distributors deal directly with an artist who has produced their own work just as they would any other publisher. This is the marketing route that makes the most sense for many self-published artists.