The TOP Model for Print Sales

"Summer Storm, Chicago" by Ken Tanaka. A print offer from 2010.

I'm very happy about our occasional print sales. We don't do very many of them—only two all of last year—but the sales and marketing model we've developed is very pleasing to me. Here's the difference:

Traditional gallery show: The artist/photographer/creator (whatever word you want to use) is responsible for making fine prints of all the work to be shown, plus paying for matting and framing. The out-of-pocket costs of all that can be hundreds to thousands of dollars. The costs of promotion, hanging the show, printing invitations, etc., as well as the costs of the opening, are tradtionally borne by the gallery, although in some cases the photographer has to pitch in for that as well—I've known of cases where the photographer has to help hang the show and pay for the wine and cheese for the opening!

In any event, the show is essentially done "on spec" (speculation). No one knows in advance how many prints will sell.

Then, because the sales will be few, the prices for each print have to be high. When I got into photography in the 1980s, anything up to $350 was considered a "student price." Established adult photographers would charge $500 up to as much as the market would bear; for smaller galleries, average sale prices might be anywhere from $650 to $1,800 depending on the size and rarity of the art, the popularity and fame of the photographer, the inherent desirability of the work, and all the other intangibles. Naturally, more famous photographers at the best galleries can charge much more; I've seen prices of up to $120,000 on gallery artwork. The reductio ad absurdum in my own experience was a New York City show of vacation snapshots by a famous painter. The pictures were utter junk, just random snapshots, but the prints were 16x20 dye transfers and the price for each was $25,000. The gallerist gushed to me that the artist had only shot two rolls of film on his vacation but that "every shot was a masterpiece" because he was a visual genius and his genius transferred readily between mediums, and also that the pictures were an "unprecedented opportunity to own a signed [famous name] for such an incredibly low price."

If she says so. I hope they did well with that.

But back to our typical gallery show—the show might be up for a month, maybe two. The gallery will sell a handful of prints; I've known photographers who sold no prints at a gallery show, one who sold two, many who sold four or six or eight, and several whose shows were "huge successes" who sold as many as twenty or thirty prints in a single show. A gallerist in the Eastern city where I went to art school told me that her best show ever sold 60 prints.

A beautiful platinum/palladium print by Carl Weese offered in 2010.

I should mention that sometimes, because the photographer wants to impress the gallery, the photographer will do a lot of marketing themselves, and arrange for buyers and collectors they've developed through other channels to go to the gallery and buy prints from the show. They want the gallery to think they're a good draw. Makes some sense.

So let's say it's a decent photographer with a track record and a fair amount of name recognition, and the prints are priced at $1,200, and the show does well and sells ten prints over the course of the month. That's $12,000 gross. The photographer then has to produce and deliver any duplicates of prints that have sold, again on their own dime. And the gallery will take 50%, 60%, or even 70% in gallery commission from the proceeds...leaving the photographer with $6,000 to $3,600 in profits. Subtract the $500 to $2,000 it cost the photographer to print and frame the show, and...well, you'd better not start to think too hard about the dozens to hundreds of hours of work the photographer put in to just to prepare for the show...never mind the work, effort, time, and care it took to actually do the photography and produce the body of work in the first place!

I'm not saying traditional galleries are bad. They're not; they're great—they do a huge service to photography as art, by promoting photography to the public, and helping keep working photographers alive. In fact, as "friends of photography," gallery owners are often just as passionate and dedicated to the medium as photographers themselves.

It's just a hard way for photographers to make a living, is all. Many's the time I've heard of photographers having a "big show" at a name gallery, working like dogs for several months of their lives to prepare for it and help promote it—and coming out the other end having lost money.

Another little problem I won't discuss at length here is that galleries usually only handle a few living photographers—ten, twenty, or thirty, maybe. Have you ever tried taking your portfolio around to galleries to see if they're interested in representing you? Let's just put it this way: if you're not already doing well on your own, you're not going to stand much of a chance.

And don't forget that the ten people who each bought a fine print of a picture they loved had to pay $1,200 for the privilege, in our example. That's pocket change to some people, but it leaves a significant part of the population out of the game.

Gordon Lewis's "Precipitation," offered in 2009.

TOP print sales: We do it differently. Our sales last for five days only, and the largest number of prints we've ever offered is six. The photographers don't have to print a whole show; they don't have to pay for matting or framing or invitations, or help with promotion, much less spring for wine and cheese. We price the prints much lower than gallery prices: so far our print prices have ranged from $19.95 to $395. We take orders in advance, over the five-day sale period. After the sale is over, the photographer has a set number of paid orders in hand. He or she can then begin to produce the prints "en masse" knowing in advance that each one is already sold.

The average profit per print might be much less, but the profit for each one is assured because each print has already been sold, and by production-lining the prints the photographer can make the prints very efficiently.

And, TOP's "gallery commission" is 20% vs. a gallery's 50–70%, leaving the photographer with 80% of the sale price. I can reasonably guarantee that there isn't a full-time professional gallery in the world that takes a sales commission as low as 20%.

A few weeks to a couple of months of hard work later, and the photographer is left with a nice big chunk of money (in one case, the amount was equal to four times the 2006 average annual household income in the United States).

All this means that we can make the sale prices much lower than galleries ever could.  TOP readers—you—get a chance to buy original artwork for a fraction of what it might normally cost—in several cases, less than it would cost to have a lab print one of your own pictures by the same method. We've sold platinum/palladium prints for $180 and dye transfer prints for $100—far less than any gallery could offer. (Granted, both those prices turned out to be too low. But we're learning.)

This is why I call our sales "win-win-win"—I win, you win, the photographer wins. Nobody loses.

Well, at least I think nobody loses. Some people say we're doing photography a "disservice" by undervaluing it—the traditional argument against discounters. But I would counter than in many cases, buyers from our sales are purchasing original artwork for the first time in their lives. Is it a bad thing to create new customers for  photography who weren't customers before? Is it bad for the medium to encourage people to buy original art from living artists as opposed to buying a printed poster of a picture by a dead artist from a museum shop? With each of our sales, dozens of people start thinking of themselves, for the very first time, as buyers of original art, and patrons of practicing artists. Even traditional galleries will admit that it's not a bad thing to attract new blood into the customer base.

And of course, people who have little money can be just as appreciative of fine prints as people who have a lot. There's no correspondence there whatsoever.

Of course, there are drawbacks to our model. First and foremost, it's surprisingly hard to find the right kind of artist—someone who's iconoclastic enough to embrace our sales model but professional enough to be able to fulfill the sales...not to mention good enough that our audience will appreciate their work. That sort of person isn't common. In the past two years I've probably approached a dozen photographers only to be turned down outright or have a sale idea fizzle and die for any one of a number of reasons.

And, of course, buyers' choices are limited. And you have to grab the opportunity while you can—our order-in-advance scheme means you have to order during the limited window that ordering is open. Once it's over, it's over. Still a few flaws in the ointment, as my brother used to say.

Our first sale of 2013 starts tomorrow at noon Eastern time. If I get my act together, it won't be the year's last.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Tim Bradshaw (partial comment—to read Tim's entire comment, please see the Comments section): "...Although I think the TOP print sales are admirable, I also think that they do not do the same job as a gallery, where you get to see either the print you will buy or something that should be visually very similar (and I think you'd have reason to complain if it was not).

"Related to this comment is something I've said before: the increasing uniformity of the way people look at photography (via a computer screen and usually a poorly-calibrated screen at that) is damaging. I am fairly sure I have argued with people who thought that daguerreotypes were well-represented on screen, for instance: I can only assume they had never seen one. They are obviously an extreme case, but the same is true for almost any traditional printing technique (or in fact for projected transparencies): there is no substitute for seeing the thing itself, and as fewer and fewer people do that we will forget what the things were like at all."

Mike replies: Ironically, that was originally the very justification for these sales: to put examples of various techniques in peoples' own hands and homes so they could see and experience them, study and live with them for themselves.

My opinion is that it helps greatly to "calibrate your eye" when looking at onscreen JPEGs of artwork if you have some idea of what originals look like. For instance, I've seen thousands of original albumen prints over the years. When viewing a JPEG representation of an albumen print online, I'm convinced this lets me "see" something very different than someone who has never seen an original—I'm calibrating the approximate and inferior onscreen input with my knowledge and experience of what it "probably" really looks like...which I'm able to do to some extent even if I've never seen the original of that particular picture.

Flagstaff Tower, Delhi, 1858-9. A small JPEG of an albumen print by Felice Beato. I've never seen the original picture, but I think I see something very different in this JPEG than would a person who has never seen an original albumen print and doesn't know what they look like.

Gordon Lewis: "As someone who has had the honor of being asked to offer a print—'Precipitation'—through TOP's print sale, I can also understand why many photographers would decline to participate. Just as there is a lot of time and expense involved in selling through galleries, it's more than a notion to fulfill a TOP print sale. Assuming the sale is a success, fulfillment can involve making hundreds of prints, each of which needs to be as close to perfect as you can manage. You then have to package each one such that it reliably protects the print from shipping damage yet without incurring excess charges. International shipments are complicated by the need to fill out customs forms and pay different shipping fees for different countries. This takes time, attention to detail, and organization—a combination which not everyone has in abundance. Suffice it to say that even Mike himself has been reluctant to offer his prints for sale, even though in his case he gets to keep all the profits."

Mike replies: In many cases the amount of work, care, craftsmanship, and organization that has gone into fulfilling these sales has been almost heroic in scale and intensity. It takes a huge amount of experience, ability, skill and expertise to make hundreds of platinum/palladium prints, to name just one example—in that case Carl and I underestimated just how much work it would prove to be for him, and we really should have priced the prints much higher to reduce the number sold.

The #1 thing I look for in a print sale photographer is reliability—I have to believe they'll be able to reliably fulfill the sale. It takes a high level of professionalism to be able to do so, regardless of whether the photographer is an amateur or pro.

An interesting thing to note is that sometimes printmaking is so painstaking that very successful photographers often in effect "sell too many" prints—they don't have the time or energy to even fulfill all their paid orders...or it just takes too much time away from making new work. I seem to recall that at one time John Sexton had a several year backlog for delivery of sold prints, and Sally Mann made several attempts to hire a darkroom assistant who could make her prints to her satisfaction—and she wasn't able to find anyone (at least as of the time I heard the story). She had to continue making her prints herself. Recently I heard that Paul Caponigro is so tired of printing his most popular picture ("Running White Deer") that he's declared a moratorium on orders—even though they sell for $6,000 to $8,000 each. (I don't have firsthand knowledge of all of these cases, so please don't quote me.) Obviously, Paul would not be even remotely interested in doing a TOP sale of "Running White Deer"!

Comments

[Ed Grossman]

Count me amongst the winners. As I write this, there's a Peter Turnley behind me and a Ctein to my left. As a new art buyer, I'm tickled to have these pieces and proud to support these two artists.

Ignore the dissenters. If it started snowing $ 100 bills, they'd be the ones complaining about paper cuts. If an artist decides to market prints via TOP, that's their choice and nobody else's.

[Mel]

It's a free market and your business. Any photographers who disagree shouldn't participate. You are operating on the "long tail" of business and customers are benefiting as well as learning about photographic art. Keep it up!

[RNewman]

I'm curious, what is the largest number of prints of an image you have sold? What is the average? Without naming names, of course.
Keep up the good work.

[Ctein sold 700+ prints in his first sale. I think one early sale sold three prints. I don't know the average, because there have been so many different types of sales and I haven't kept all the figures. --Mike]

[John Krumm]

I really appreciate that you do this, and I know I'll buy one sooner or later.

My local photography club is using a space to display photos for our town's First Friday gallery walk coming up. I might hang three photos. My primary consideration for framing and photo choice will be how they will look on my walls after the show, since I know traffic and sales are low for these things.

[Jack]

I love your print offers, and I love your business model. Thank you for explaining it so well.

It certainly works for the collector, as they get what they want for an efficient price.

It certainly works for the photographer, as there is no waste. In the old days, a photographer would create a portfolio of work, and if they didn't gauge demand correctly, the prints had to be stored away as costly inventory that may never sell. In your model, the number of prints will perfectly match demand.

There is an analogy in the fine dining restaurant business. The most efficient business is the banquet business with a pre selected menu. The owner knows ahead of time how many people will come, and exactly what and how many items they will eat. With no waste, the prices can be attractive, and a fair profit is possible. A normal fine dining restaurant has much waste as they try and guess what people might order. I know one restaurant owner who only makes a profit on his banquet business.

I look forward to seeing your Photographic Banquet.

[Stan B.]

You had a conversation with a NYC gallerist? The most I could aspire to was exchanging sneering glances.

[Andrea B.]

You would think that photographers would be lining up to sell prints through TOP given that they are going to get 80% of the sales price without so much of the usual overhead.

I only wish I had had the money to participate in every TOP offering. I am so pleased with the small collection I have acquired thus far.

This very well could be a viable new model for art photography sales. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.

[Steven House]

I think it's a great model and one TOP should continue. I also think the number of sales per year is about right. After all I don't visit the site to buy photographs I come to learn about photography. One day a sale will match and I may want to buy but I'm not in a hurry.

[Wil Macaulay]

Every time I see 'precipitation' I wish I'd bought a print when I had the chance!

[Tim Bradshaw]

Note this is not a criticism: I think the TOP print sales are a very good thing indeed, and I have bought a print from them and certainly would buy more.

However one important difference is that with a TOP sale you are buying something which you have not really seen. You have seen a reproduction of it (a picture of a picture, if you will) on screen, but you have not seen the real thing. For the sake of anyone who sells prints it had better be the case that the reproduction of the print on screen is not as good (or is, in any case, different) than the print, as if it is as good there is no real purpose to owning the print any more. For me this is certainly true, if only because I'm writing this on a 5-6 year-old laptop whose screen is now a dim yellowish-green only visible at all in a darkened room, but I think it remains true in general.

So, although I think the TOP print sales are admirable, I also think that they do not do the same job as a gallery, where you get to see either the print you will buy or something that should be visually very similar (and I think you'd have reason to complain if it was not).

Related to this comment is something I've said before: the increasing uniformity of the way people look at photography (via a computer screen and usually a poorly-calibrated screen at that) is damaging. I am fairly sure I have argued with people who thought that daguerreotypes were well-represented on screen, for instance: I can only assume they had never seen one. They are obviously an extreme case, but the same is true for almost any traditional printing technique (or in fact for projected transparencies): there is no substitute for seeing the thing itself, and as fewer and fewer people do that we will forget what the things were like at all.

[David Paterson]

Though I haven't as yet bought from any of your offers, I thoroughly approve of your methods and pricing (and the featured artists, thus far!). To me, one of the great things about photography is, or should be, its accessibility. Though I sell a few prints myself, I absolutely hate to see work priced at many thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (or more). This for something which is very easily reproducible, especially in these digital days (Ctein's dye-transfers notwithstanding).

You have brought a great measure of democracy to these print sales by your sensible pricing, and I applaud that. It is in direct opposition to the methods and pricing of the gallery and museum world where sales are predicated on a kind of inflated elitism and a few wealthy buyers.

[Mark Kinsman]

I think the gallery model is impractical for most photographers. In today's market, print sales are unfortunately declining, replaced by online or screen viewing. We need more ways to encourage and support print purchases. TOPs print offer provides one solution, Brooks Jensen's offers are another. I recall Brooks stating in one of his podcasts that he has sold several thousands of prints at $20.00 each. That puts the prints in front of a lot more eyeballs. Seems better than just selling a few prints at the hundreds or thousands of dollars pricetag usually seen in galleries. Affordable art work can encourage more people to own real art, never a bad thing from my perspective.

[ctein]

Dear rnewman,

My first dye transfer sale sold about 750 prints, but "only" 450 of them were of one photograph (we offered two).

The "$19.95 Print Sale" sold over 800 prints of a single photograph, but that was kind of a special case.

pax / Ctein

[QT Luong]

The sales model is indeed working very well, but to be able to pull it off, you have first to establish a huge readership, basically equivalent to starting a successful magazine.

For many photographers, gallery shows are as much about resume-building than sales. There are a number of photographers that do not need to make a living from print sales, for instance because commercial or academic jobs pay the bills. Although a TOP sales actually places their artwork in a larger number of hands, I doubt that it provides the same level of recognition.

[B.J. Segel]

It is true that the flaw in the model is that we don't get to see the actual prints before we buy. I think this is largely mitigated by the fact that Mike selects the prints, and we trust that he has a discerning eye. We may not always agree with his taste, but if it looks good on the screen and Mike says it is good, then it probably is good.

[Joe]

The TOP print sales are a wonderful thing, and I'm kicking myself for not buying one of those earlier prints. And in my experience, your description of gallery representation is pretty accurate...

...except that at any decent gallery, an artist's sales aren't limited to a gallery show. The gallery should also have a stock of your prints in the flat file in the back room, and should be showing them all the time. My gallery has sold my prints to real estate people, hotels and restaurants and upscale stores, decorators for wealthy home buyers, even film and TV scene decorators.

Those are the sales that help carry you between shows.

[David Bennett]

Where do TOP photographers rank in this spectrum from the "established adult photographers' through to the "popular and the famous... and the more famous"?

Good luck to you all. I would think that some of the photographers selling through PhotoShelter and sites of that kind would be queueing up at the door to join in.

[Tom]

Goddamn it. So much for the Dyson I was going to buy tomorrow.

[Wesley Walker]

I think it is a wonderful system - not only for buyers, but also for aspiring photographers. It feels quite daunting thinking about how to get your work out in front of an audience that is not composed of your close friends and family (and we all know that they will almost always say how awesome your images are :P). I have set myself the mission of making an image - even just one - that TOP would want in a print sale.

[Hugh Smith]

My grandfather, who was a very well known artist in Connecticutt once said to me that he would rather sell 100 pieces at $50 than one piece at $5,000. He explained that the people who could affors to spend $5,000 were usually not the people he wanted to have his art.
I have tried to maintain my grandfather's strategy and, given today's photographic market, it isn't that difficult! (A bit of a joke). But, I would rather my work hang in 50 homes rather than one.
My two cents for what it's worth.

[RNewman]

Mike and Ctein,
Your answers to my questions confirm what I suspected. You have met a need for a relatively sophisitcated (re photography anyway) audience who don't have the discretionary resources of the 1%. Definitely a win-win-win situation, as Mike said. A third offering per year wouldn't over saturate the market either.

[Dave Karp]

Thank you Mike. I have participated twice, and I enjoy looking at those prints every day. Without TOP, I doubt I would have added to our photo collection. With TOP, I am sure that over time I will add some very nice pieces to my collection. Looking forward to seeing the photos you selected for the sale starting tomorrow.

[Peter Popp]

Mike,

One of the reasons that your model works is that your readers trust your judgment, and if you say we'll be getting a beautiful print, even though we can only view a jpeg on your site, we believe it.

[Gary Nylander]

Good luck with your newest TOP sale Mike! I admire the work of Paula and Michael.

[Ben Wilkes]

I feel the same way as Will Macaulay about "Precipitation." Alas, a new baby means I may have more regrets with future sales.

[Richard Tugwell]

I agree with what Time Bradshaw wrote, and likewise this is not a criticism of the TOP model. I think the sight-unseen aspect is mitigated by the fact that regular readers will have trust in your judgement. Another aspect to the model of course is that it allows access to very few photographers, if a large number of collectors.

However, for me, the decision to buy a print is almost always spurred by coming into contact with the actual object - prints are very much a physical / visual combination for me. (I have purchased from TOP though - C Cramer).

By coincidence yesterday, I visited a Pentti Sammallahti show in Paris, recently featured here. I'm afraid in this case the prints didn't make me want to acquire one - although the images themselves are very compelling.

[Richard Man]

I am a big fan of the TOP pricing model which is similar to the Brooks Jensen's model as well. Not that I have make much money at all, but I also run special print sales from time to time - $18 for a 8.5x11" type of deal. I guess I can name drop and say Ctein has seen some of my work in person and has said kind things about them. I think more photographers, especially us "emerging" ones (one of these days I will figure out what I am emerging from) should use this model.

[Tom Kwas]

BTW, that Ken Tanaka print of a Chicago Summer Storm always hits me as perfect. Having grown up in Chicago, you'd be surprised how that print even brings back the smells of a summer storm in the city.

[Crabby Umbo]

What's interesting about this blog entry is how it's another example of how "Expense Creep" has changed the business model to something untenable for most artists and photographers.

I remember back in the 70's when you could make a pretty decent print on an enlarger you owned for years, for about 25-35 bucks, mount it for a few more dollars, over-mat it for a few more, and offer it in a local gallery for 250-350 dollars. Back then, the gallery hung it, had the opening, and did some advertising for it, for their 25%. You might make between a hundred and two-hundred per print sold. BUT, your apartment rent was 195 bucks, and your new Toyota Corolla was 3,000 dollars!

Now your rent is a grand, your car is 14,000, and the equipment to do your printing is minimum of 3,000 to 4,000 dollars, and needs to be changed out every four years, maybe your digital camera is on that four year cycle as well. And to Mikes point, it is not unheard of for galleries to take 75%.

What's always been of interest to me, is how the galleries, and the camera companies, and maybe the digital print labs, all understand what they need to survive and what they need to take out of the process, but the photographers are just toughing it out and taking their pittance, even in commercial and advertising work; especially in small and medium markets.

What's amazing to me is not how Mikes shifted paradigm of print sales meets the need for the modern photography market perfectly, but why more photographic sales haven't migrated to this model. Galleries that offer those type of standardized, and "vintage" services, seem to be an old process that won't, and can't survive if a photographer expects to live on the income...

[Bahi]

You're all doing fantastic work at TOP with this idea. Haven't bought yet from one of your official print sales but am slowly getting to the point where I think I'll be able to. Long may this model continue to work — it's wonderful.

[Markus]

Hello Mike,

Caponigro now sells a digitally printed version of the white deer image produced in collaboration with his son.

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/store/RunningWhiteDeerPaulCaponigro.php

[Keith I.]

I still really regret not buying that Chicago print. I have bought 4 since but that one still haunts me, especially since I am from that area.

[Derek L]

I'd love to see more $two digit sales... I don't think in the year or two I've been perusing TOP that I've seen any that weren't three digits. (Could be wrong, probably am...)

[Well, this onewas less than a year ago. --Mike]

[Craig]

Hi Mike

As to your comment, you can see why photographers hire people like Ctein to print there images its often a more valuable to have time not the extra money. I love the top print sales i missed the one i really wanted which was Gordon lewis. Is there a chance you could link to the websites of the sales people?

Thanks

Craig

[Ken Jarecke]

I think The Online Photographer print sales are brilliant.