A really good comment about selling art.

In my Frank Zappa entry there have been a number of thoughtful comments and this one is so good, I wanted to share it with everyone. This is from Sharon Cummings who sells well with us and has been a thoughtful contributor via email on the way BoundlessGallery.com works -

I have been selling my art for 3 years now. All online. I went to art school. I could not get a job making peanuts at that time. So I stuck my art and the idea of making money at on a shelf for 10 years. Then I found an online venue one day and my very first listing (painting) sold. My first year I grossed 75,000 in sales, the next year I did around 100,000 and this past year 150,000. How in the world did I sell that much art? My 10 Commandments of Selling Art Online

1. Self-promotion anywhere you can get it and I mean ANYWHERE (free websites, email newsletters, local papers, Craigslist, My Space, etc, buy some business cards for goodness sakes (spend money)......

2. You bust your butt to create quality work that people will come back for time and time again. You dont skimp and use crappy materials. Buyers are not fools. You spend the money it takes to do a top notch job.

3. You spend some serious money to market yourself. If you are afraid to spend money, you will NEVER make it with a career in art.

4. You cannot expect to slap a 10,000 price tag on your art and think someone will buy it for that amount online. If you are not famous, it will never happen. You start low, establish yourself and then raise your prices gradually to a level that is reflective of the competition. If your work is of a higher quality and it is obvious, you can price above your competitors.

5. Drop the attitude and just be nice to your collectors. Humility goes a long way. If something goes wrong, they dont want to hear excuses, they want you to fix it. Fix it....PERIOD Rarely does anything ever go wrong, but those customers that I make happy in the face of a problem keep coming back and tell their friends etc.

6. Buy the best camera you can afford (spend some money) for online selling. This cannot be stressed enough. A photo of your work is all you have to offer...make it stand out. Make a professional display. Buy Adobe Photoshop (spend money..are you sensing a theme here?)

7. Pay a professional if you need to for HTML, photography or anything else you dont understand (money well spent). I had a pro photographer come out and spend 2 hours with me and help me set everything up at my home studio.

8. Have a good picture of yourself to show everyone. People want to know what you look like, but they dont want to see a sweaty picture of you like you just got back from the gym.

9. Learn to produce a steady stream of work so there is always something new for your collectors and the public to look at. Dont let yourself get stale. Even if you just start offering prints or refrigerator magnets...keep it going.....

10. And last but not least, forget about being "good enough". Just do it and let them decide. Most artists spend way too much time brooding over their work and not enough time promoting it to the right people.


***This is what has worked for me. And it continues to work for me. You either want to sell your art or you do not. S.I.M.P.L.E.

Latest trip to Memphis, TN

I went down to Memphis, TN to visit the fine doctors at the Shea Clinic. I had some time to kill, so I went on the Gibson Guitar Factory Tour. This is likely a sign that I'm a woodworker, but also that the National Ornamental Metal Museum was closed on Monday.

The tour was somewhat of a joke. The first tour of the day was at 11:00 am and I had a doctor's appointment to keep and lunch to eat, so that was the one I needed to go on. After taking our money, the tour guide tells us that we need to wait a little while because everyone on the floor has gone to lunch. So, we ended up doing a tour of an empty factory, which is a lot less interesting. Looking back there are a number of questions I wish I had thought to ask, for example -
When was the factory built?
Why are some lines (Les Paul and BB King/Archtop lines) made there and not in the corporate head quarters in Nashville? I wonder if they bought out a different company that had a factory or what? I'm pretty sure that the Les Paul was always a Gibson though.
I really wonder why they would schedule a tour when the factory was at lunch.

The good news is I had the half off coupon from the internet, so it only cost me $5. Somehow an average tour feels better at half price.

The first picture is clearly the outside of their building. The second is a bench with a bunch of guitar bodies being clued up. I thought their jig was interesting.

I did play almost every guitar in the adjoining gift shop, maybe 100 guitars. Just picked them up, did a little riff and put them down. My favorite for sound was "The Elvis King of Rock" model, though I thought all the inlay was over the top. They had a nice Sheryl Crow model that was a really sweet guitar, only $2500 or so. I've decided I would rather make a new guitar then buy another one, but it was run to mess around with the complete lineup of Gibson guitars in one place. Took a pass on the $20 tee-shirt too.

Anyone been to the Nashville tour of the Gibson factory? Is it better or worse?

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." - Frank Zappa

I always enjoy the column in the Saint Louis Post on Sunday's by Dale Daltun and found the quote in the title in his piece today.

I think our place here at BoundlessGallery.com it to talk about selling art and using the internet to sell art. I'm not sure I have anything to add on art creation for most of you. I do like the idea of applying that old silly saying you used to hear in movies, "it is just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man," but changing it over to "it is just as easy to make art that sells as art that will never sell." Sometimes I wonder if art schools aren't training artists to make work that no one will buy and coaching against promoting and selling the work you do make. Of course, this is why I like the Zappa quote in the title, he suggests there is no purity in just making art, if you can't sell it.

Your comments are welcome.

Fix of online video post with better link.

In my last entry here, I wrote about doing a little movie to help promote your work. The bad thing I did was the link didn't go where I hoped it did... Oops, sorry. Let's try this one -

Click To Play

Now if you aren't a woodworker I can't suggest you get beyond the first couple of minutes of his other videos. But I think he is showing some real personality in his videos, it is a little silly, but you get to see who might be making that $5000 custom piece of furniture.

My 14 year old has edited up a couple of movies, added credits and music, and gets a pretty great result from our hand held digital video recorder. It looks dead easy, just take lots of video and edit in the good stuff. You might have to outsource editing to your local teenager, but there are worse problems. :)

As always, your comments are welcome.

A nice woodworker shop tour

I have been looking for examples of studio tours and we have been working on how to allow artists to post tours and movies. Here is a nice example from a woodworker about how to do it. I think you would sell more art if you had one of these. Check it out - The Wood Whisperer's shop tour.

What do you think?

Sometimes I hate Blogger's software! Please tell us what is wrong with our's.

I posted my last post and it went up twice. I know I didn't hit the post button twice, what gives? The problem I have now is that there are comments in both places and so I can't delete either one. I guess this is payback when the software guy has trouble with someone else's software?

Our goal at BoundlessGallery.com is that when we hear about a problem in out software, we go fix it. Sometimes we change the code, sometimes we change the documentation and other times we change the rules if the other two ways don't work.

Anyone have anything about our site that needs to be fixed?

Our new "look" is up.

We think it is much better then the old one. What do you think? Should we be doing something better?

Your comments are always welcome.

Our new "look" is up.

We think it is much better then the old one. What do you think? Should we be doing something better?

Your comments are always welcome.

1000 page views? Some truths about how search engines work.

We recently heard from an artist that they signed up on a different (pay to list) website and received a report that they have 1100 views of their work in 10 days. I was trying to figure out how this was possible, the art wasn't that good. It was way over priced against other pieces you could get for the same price range on our site. So, how did they get 1100 views?

One of the reasons we don't tell you page views is because we can't do it honestly. If you are on BoundlessGallery.com, each day the entire site is viewed by "search engine spiders" from over 10 search sites (you know Google, Yahoo, etc.).

Follow my logic, this is going to get a little tricky. Go look at this page, once you click on that link everyone who has a piece on that page just got a page view. Then go into each piece and return to that page, everyone just got 12 more page views. If you have 12 pieces on the site, then you get 12 time 13 page views per search engine ( or 156) per search engine.

We know that a machine brings up your pieces and generates a page view, between 100 and 1000 times a day on BoundlessGallery.com. But is that a page view that you care about? We don't think the Google Spider should count.

What do you think? When you get an email telling you how many times your art has been viewed, should it include spiders and robots?

Your comments are welcome.

Non-profit art - Art in a Box - Sounds like a marketing angle.

Interesting article from Art Business News. After reading the article a couple of times I still couldn't understand how this works. He has a non-profit or is selling his art for no profit? The box "allows people to receive the intangibles via mail", don't quite know what that means either.

I do love the idea of taking your art and putting it out there for the world to see. I'm not sure this is the way I would do it, but it is an interesting way to get your art seen and isn't that what it is all about?

Design change coming on Monday.

We have completely worked over the look of the site and we hope to have it up on Monday (or maybe Tuesday or Wednesday). We think that it not only looks great, but solves some usability issues too. Stay tuned.

John Medwedeff - new artist on BoundlessGallery.com

John has only have one piece listed today, but he is a prominent, nationally known metal artist. He has been winning competitions for large public statues for the last several years. Hopefully, he will list some of his small pieces that are closer to plate sized and quite wonderful as well.

When you start companies like BoundlessGallery.com you always hope to add nationally known artists who make beautiful art. Every time a really fine artist appears in our lives there is a buzz in the hallways here at BG headquarters.

Enjoy.