Friday, January 21, 2011

Fine Art Prints

Today, I got an e-mail from the Female Photographers of Etsy Team (of which I am a member). They're trying to get us more active and involved, which I think is awesome (my Etsy teams are one of my social media sources that has fallen through the cracks of late) and to communicate some news. One of the pieces of news was a change to the team policy: they want us to include Fine Art Prints of our photography in our shops as part of membership, as they say that this is the "bread and butter" of the sale of photography.

Oof. I don't sell prints at all. The entire time I've been selling photography (a year, now) I've only sold 3 8 x 10s. However, it IS something that has really been on my mind. So since I like the team and would like to stay, and have been thinking about fine art prints, I thought I'd go ahead and get moving on this. And for this, I need your help!

First, I know some of you are artists. If you do prints, where do you get them done? I mean, I could get photography prints at Snapfish, but I can't escape the feeling that I might be able to get much nicer looking ones. I thought at least I'd see if anyone can tip me off to a good source - fast, reasonably priced, offer a variety of sizes - or at least warn me against any bad sources.

Second, if you have, oh, 10 minutes, I've put together a survey. See, the big question for me, looking at the Prints part of this, is which photographs should I offer as prints. When I first opened the photography part of the shop, my thought was to sell cards, and then if someone requested a print, I would get it custom printed for them (this has happened all of once, by the way). However, I know that the extra step surely drives people off. On the other hand, I have NO idea if prints will sell, and I don't want to keep a lot of prints (and therefore have a high initial outlaying of money) and then have none of them sell. So I was thinking - maybe I should do a pilot program. Get some input from ya'll, with your awesome artistic sensibility, and select, say, 10 images that people like best. In order to pick these 10 images, I've put up a survey on Surveymonkey.

Click here to take the survey!

For example, here's one my favorites that I sold the card long ago so most of you have probably not seen:

(so that I don't have a post without a single image)

Thanks in advance for your help, everyone.

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