2014 Print Sale Plans Update

I'm late getting to work this morning (up all night with a fractious doggie), so just a short update post first.

2013 was a banner year for our print sales; among other high points we were honored by the presence of the distinguished Caponigro père et fils. However as you might remember I made a bit of a SNAFU of the mechanics of the last sale. (Origin of that term: WWII, for "situation normal: all fouled up." The f-word in that phrase can be subject to modification.)

I've been working diligently in the interim to correct the situation. We're working toward letting a fulfillment firm handle both the e-commerce and the packing and delivery of prints.

Having learned my lesson (I'm slow, but not stupid), we will be doing a small "test sale" next. This will consist of a signed print of mine, of a picture I've already shown here that people seemed to like. Because it's only "a test of the system," the price will be very low. However, there will also be a limited number of prints on offer—it won't be an open edition. I've informally dubbed it the "80x80" sale: eighty prints for eighty dollars each. We're hoping it will sell out, so we can get timing metrics on shipment and delivery. The print Ctein made (we've gone back and forth with proofs and minute variations) is really beautiful, and I'm enormously pleased with it—it's the best B&W print ever made from a file of mine since the dawn of digital.

I'm not going to be making a very big deal of it, so you'll have to keep an eye out. When it will come along depends on when all the systems are ready to go.

If everything doesn't go right, then it's back to the drawing board—we'll keep trying until we do get it right. That would mean more tinkering, a second test sale, and a delay on our other plans.

If everything does go right, next up would be a larger "group sale": 100 prints of one photograph each by six different photographers. The details aren't ironed out yet, but this will hopefully include some gems that I've been eyeing for a long time, including a gorgeous Leica S example print (the sale will include a very limited number of extremely large prints); a black-and-white "social documentary" picture by a regular TOP reader and commenter that I've loved since I first published it; one of my favorite pictures by old friend Kim Kirkpatrick who taught at the Smithsonian for many years (and whose work is not normally for sale); and Ctein's extraordinary bird impression picture, which is a great example of a print that has to be seen to be believed—it looks exponentially better in print form than as a JPEG.

Also coming up—remember when Ctein was musing about what to do with the matrix sets from all his dye transfer pictures? He's going to be offering all those, for a nominal price, to anyone who wants a set. Largely historical artifacts at this point, each set will consist of the dye matrices, a notated test print, and a printed explanation of what it all means. I'm planning to contact my local art museum to see if their photography department wants a set or two, and if so I'll donate them. Among other things, this will be a great way to see a dye transfer for yourself, if you haven't yet, for almost no money. Watch his column in February for this.

Another post later today, after I've recombobulated myself.

Mike

ADDENDUM: If our fulfillment plans work, it will make it much easier for us to have smaller but more frequent print sales—and by a wider range of photographers.

I've been accused in the past of only having sales of prints by my friends. That charge is of cronyism, which is a bad thing. But if you'll think about it, there's a very good reason for it indeed: with a large, unlimited sale, where the prints are made to fulfill the orders after the sale, I have to be very, very sure that the photographers will come through for me—that is, I have to know they're capable of doing all the work (and it's really hard work, make no mistake about that), and professional enough to be diligent. This does indeed tend to limit the sales to people who are well known to me—the better I know them, the more assured I am that we're safe, that our customers will be served in a timely fashion and aren't going to be left in the lurch. I've lived in fear of the day when we have a print sale by a photographer who just can't get all the work done for one reason or another. That would make a real mess, one I know I'd be working for months to put right.

With smaller, more limited, more frequent sales, we could potentially get all or some of the prints to the shipper before the sale. This would greatly limit the fulfillment work required of the photographers: they'd have fewer (or no) prints to make under pressure, no sales or money to monitor, no customer service to do, and no packing and shipping to do. And this would make it not only very feasible but easy to have single-print sales by photographers I don't even know personally: I'd just ask them to make some prints and send 'em to the shipper (well, it's a little more involved than that, but you know what I mean), and then we'd announce that we have that many prints to sell: easy as pie.

So what I foresee is more freedom in the print sales: we'll be able to open them to more photographers, have sales more frequently, and be more adventuresome in offering things that are more offbeat. For instance, whenever I include a picture in a post that lots of people really like, inevitably, in the comments, a few people will say that we should have a print offer of that picture. Well, in the future, maybe we'll actually be able to be just that responsive. I'm really looking forward to that future.

Original contents copyright 2014 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.

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Comments

[Ben Rosengart]

I took a picture recently which made me think of your "Hands":

[Aaron]

I loved those matrices of Ctein's when he first showed them - hopefully I can mop up the puddle of drool in time to order one.

[GRJ]

Unless the situation has changed since last December, Kim still teaches at the Smithsonian. We've got a good group every Thursday night in the darkroom and outings for landscape classes on the weekends. I hope to have a chance at one of his prints.

[Vinck]

Hi! Anybody cares to explain this non-native english speaker the joke behind recombobulation? Oh, and good luck with the new printing scheme.

[Hi Vinck, Just that "discombobulate" is an actual English word (it means to abash, disconcert, take aback, throw into disarray) but "recombobulate" is not. --Mike]

[Marek Fogiel]

Mike,
Whatever it is, just go ahead with it, and above all, let's see the photographs.
I have another suggestion to make. Take someone like me. I don't really have the time to fiddle with printing and posting to a hundred buyers, and currently, I don't really care to make any sensible profit from selling my photographs, assuming anybody would want to buy any.
However, let's assume I have my day in the sun, and a photo of mine strikes your fancy. I would be glad to send a full scan together with a proof A4 print to you or Ctein, and you would take care of the printing and posting, as I imagine, most buyers would be from the US anyway. I would be happy to get paid in the form of credit for buying from you prints by other photographers.
Think this scheme over.
Marek

[Markus]

So that means a golden future for prints - both for sellers as buyers. This looks like a good plan, and it seems that T.O.P. stays clear of the mainstream and sharpens its profile. I for myself am looking forward to these offers.

[George Barr]

Mike:

I wonder if music is similar to photography - here you are offering fine prints to photographers - people through interest have the skills to appreciate what they are seeing. Are the majority of those who really appreciate music also amateur musicians?
Are photographers really who buys most prints and most books of photographs and if not, is there a way other than galleries to avail ourselves of that market? For that matter, do non photographers interested in photography visit TOP?

George

[Adam Lanigan]

All the best with the tests and onward, Mike. You know we're all pulling for you.

This quote from the recombobulation article struck me as pretty funny:

(in reference to passing through airport security)

"It's a stressful time," she noted. "You've got to throw out your soda."

[Jamin]

I donno, I'm not too excited about this one. It may be the fact that I've downsized my lifestyle due to downsized income the last couple years but I really don't want to spend $80 on a print (even tho' it's a pretty good pic by a pretty good writist and printed by a pre^H^H^H damn good printer).

I snapped up the first set of dye prints (how long ago was that?) and the Ken Tanaka skyline but knew I couldn't get close to the Peter Turnley prints or the Caponigro. It just felt too pricy.

I've been musing all day on this (in fact the comment box has been open since this morning with a half-typed response) and I finally think I've got my thoughts nailed down.

You keep saying 'small print sale' and I keep hoping, even tho' you've spelled it out clearly, that there might be a small print.

You know how you mentioned... um, who was it? that sent the small print and said MCHNY?

_That's_ what I personally would like to see in the near future, something small but good, something from your whole plate camera or another unique photo size, perhaps a mini portfolio of five 2x3s of your driveway through the year. Maybe just give LuLu some fingerpaint and a pad of construction paper. I'd buy that :]

I ran out of wall space years ago and tho' I don't rotate as much as I should the fact stays in mind as I look at new work, not too big, I've got nowhere to put it! (I'm probably the first person you've heard complain about this)

We all know I am not your sole demographic but I do know you'd like to hear me say that I don't have the resources to spend several hundred dollars or more on _anything_, even if you don't change anything, you'd know a bit more about how a small percentage of your readership feels.

I also understand that offering much lower prices greatly increases the headache for all the elve(s) at TOP world headquarters.

I would, however, like to spend a scant few tens of dollars on a spur of the moment purchase on a small print sale (or two, or three) sometime.

Thank you for your time, your effort, your diligence, your humour, your curmudgeonry, and your writing (Look! An Oxford comma!)

This was not meant to be a scathing diatribe (I have no intent to scathe... much) just a note from a reader.

Yours (parenthetically),

Jamin

[John Meredith]

I love that Ctein photograph, it is moving and unsettling. I think you should title it 'Pale Fire' after the Nabokov book which begins with the line: 'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain', the waxwing in question having died in collision with a window.

[Dony]

IMHO, the way I see it, I think Ctein's extraordinary bird impression picture must be printed larger than 16 x 20 inches. ...beauty.

[He will be doing that I'm sure, just not for our sale for <$200. --Mike]

[adamct]

The problem, of course, is that this gets you back to the age-old problem you were originally trying to solve for, namely how to keep the cost-per-print low, and give the artist certainty that every print produced will be sold.

With the structure you are proposing, the artist has to front the cost of producing the prints, and it puts a premium on properly estimating how many prints will be sold. Guess too high, and the artist will have wasted a fair amount of time and money on prints that go nowhere. And they will have to worry about getting the unsold prints back in good condition from your fulfillment partner. Guess too low, and you and the artist miss out on potential sales. Sure, there is no real reason why the artist can't continue to sell the same picture (unless you position it as a limited edition), and there is no reason why you couldn't offer a 2nd round, but in practice, I tend to doubt that you will offer the same print twice. It seems more likely that you will move on to the next artist and picture.

I tend to like the idea of the artist knowing exactly how many prints to produce ahead of time. Otherwise pricing needs to be adjusted to account for unsold inventory and everything becomes complex and confusing and based on guesses.

Best regards,
Adam

[Mike Tchaplin]

I wonder how the dye transfer picture matrix placed in a shadow box and back-lit looks. Could make an interesting work of art all on it's own. I will gladly grab a set and give that a try.

[adamct]

My siblings and parents came to stay with us for a few days around Christmas. They called us when they were about 15 minutes away. The weather was bad and they had been stuck in traffic for hours, so I knew they would want to get out of the car and into the house ASAP.

Our back door (the door used by friends and neighbors) has an inner door that is heavy and solid, and an outer door that is similar to a screen door, except there is no screen...it's just glass from top to bottom. Anyway, our doorbell can often be hard to hear and the inner door has a tendency to lock, so I figured I would leave the inner door open and rely on the unlocked outer door to keep out the cold until my family arrived. That way, even if I didn't hear the bell, they could walk right in.

A little while later, as I was busy decorating the tree with my daughters, my parents and siblings arrived. My dad charged out of the car, headed toward the house, saw the inviting entry hallway where I had left the light on...and walked smack into the outer glass door. He didn't realize it was there and thought he was strolling into an open doorway. He hit the glass hard and his face left an imprint that isn't unlike Ctein's bird impression.

Thankfully, with a lot of ice, he was fine and his small cut healed quickly. Even better, it gave us endless fodder for jokes over the next few days...

[ctein]

Dear Jamin,

If I may be permitted to butt in here, as the fellow who ran the cheapest-ever print sale on TOP:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/04/print-offer-small-sensor.html

It's really, really hard to make money selling very low-priced prints. The order fulfillment time, alone, makes it hard to make a living wage. It's pretty much impossible if you allow international orders; the additional time is prohibitive.

I should probably mention that despite the large size of the prints, that sale was optimized for low cost and efficiency. Had I been selling 8 x 10 fiber-base prints instead, my total cost and time to prepare and ship prints would not have been much less.

Now, I understand that you were talking about the print price, before shipping and handling. But there's the buyer's perception. If I sell a print for, say, $25, and I tell them it's going to cost them another $20 for shipping and handling, ummm… Let's just say that that does not go over well. Understatement.

Under $100 print sales are fine. But prices in the low tens? Very difficult.

Not so by the way, I do entirely sympathize with your pain. Most of the art I buy does not end up on my walls; I don't rotate anywhere as often as I ought to (oh, let me be honest–– hardly ever). In fact, I have been very vaguely discussing with Mike the idea that my next print sale (definitely not scheduled-- at some point in the indeterminate future) might maybe be of what he calls collector-size prints–– 11 x 14 to 13 x 17" size range. With a sub-$100 price. Because, yeah, buying big prints gets expensive for me, too, and I rarely take them out to look at them because they're harder to handle, and so on. There is the pride of possession thing, but less pleasure from the art.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[ctein]

Dear John,

I am afraid I fall very much into the extremely prosaic school of photograph titling (largely from lack of imagination), but I do have to say yours is brilliant! Oh, bravo.

~~~~

Dear Dony,

It still looks pretty extraordinary in a 17 x 22" print, trust me. It's large enough to carry the full emotional weight.

I have had one buyer who wanted it larger––effectively life-size. We guesstimated that would be the next print size up, 24 x 32" (it's not like I had the measurements of the pigeon). Yes, it looks even more impressive, but it's not so much more so than the 17 x 22" print that I feel that that is in any way under-sized.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[Paul Richardson]

Just an FYI ( I thought you might want to alert readers). The price on the Ricoh GR seems to be plummeting - it can be had for 619.00 on Amazon - tough to pass up, and another blow to the Coolpix A.

I didn't know how else to let you know, except via comment.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Does this mean that you are giving up on the "open edition, but never offered again" model used mostly so far? That had advantages to both the artist, and perhaps to you if you take responsibility, for the inventory that was not required.

scott

[Patrick Dodds]

What Marek said +1