How Prints Sales Work (And: Mike Prints Have Shipped)

Ctein reports that all prints from my sale have shipped as of this morning. Everyone should have received an e-mail with a tracking number from the post office. Sometimes cyberspace is slow; if you haven't received notice by Monday, please e-mail Ctein ([email protected]). You can track the progress of your order on the post office website using the tracking number.

And thanks very much!

The June Print Offer, a Leica S Series "example print" by Jack MacDonough, will start on Monday morning at 7 a.m.

How TOP print offers work
Jack went back and looked, and discovered it's actually been quite a long time since I've explained how our print offers work. This might be a good time to revisit.

Our TOP print offers grew out of a program I initiated at Photo Techniques magazine called the "Collector Print Program." That, in turn, was inspired by Fred Picker's "Example Prints" that he offered through his business Zone VI Studios in the 1980s.

The fundamental principle is that it's good to see things for yourself, with your own eyes.

Picker produced 8x10" contact prints in bulk and sold them for very low prices through his equipment catalogs. He simply reasoned that most people had never seen an 8x10" contact print and didn't know how good they looked. Although the prints typically cost only $25, he claimed at one point that he was one of the very few photographers in the U.S. who was selling more than $100,000 worth of prints annually.

Usually, the prints we've offered have been nice pictures in and of themselves, but they also do double-duty as examples of various techniques or equipment types. Carl Weese offered platinum/palladium B&W prints; Ctein offered color dye transfer prints several times, as well as an "ideal" large prints from a Micro 4/3 file; and I offered the best digital B&W print that's ever been made from my work. Monday's print "needs no explanation," but we also chose it as an excellent example of what an S-series Leica is capable of, for the many people who've never been able to see for themselves and might be curious.

The standard "gallery model" of print sales c. 1980 (the year I got into photography seriously) was as follows. At the culmination of a period of working, the photographer spent lots of time, money and effort printing, framing, and (usually) helping to hang, and (usually) helping to market, a show. A gallery would display the work for a month or (infrequently) two, during which time a small number of people—dozens or hundreds, and not more than a few thousand at the very most—would see it.

However, they were the right kind of people—the kind of people who went to galleries, meaning people who really liked photographs...

...And sometimes actually bought them. A gallerist in Washington D.C. told me that the largest number of prints she had ever sold from a single show was 60. But that was a bleeding-edge outlier—sales of a dozen prints or even fewer was much more the norm for a month-long gallery show.

The burden of a lot of operating expenses had to fall on the back of these few sales: the gallery's overhead, the gallery director's income, and the photographer's immediate expenses (printing and framing the prints for the show). Naturally the print prices had to be high. I was told in art school in 1982–5 that an acceptable price for a "student print" was $350, and that any mature, working art photographer worth his or her salt should start their pricing at no less than $500, with $750 being a more comfortable base price*. More successful working local art photographers charged anywhere from $800 to $2,000 for a print, with $950 and $1,200, as I recall, being popular price-points.

The photographer's "deep" expenses—what it cost to become a photographer in the first place, as well as ongoing survival—were seldom addressed. Usually, the photographer's cut of the print sale price was 50%. Later, this changed to 40% as a standard, and 30% in a number of instances. (I don't know what's common now, for living, working contemporary photographers represented by galleries.)

The photographer's right to sell her own prints was limited. Those were called "studio sales" and galleries didn't like them, because they undercut the gallery's sales efforts and their ability to profit. (Note however that the galleries weren't getting rich either. Running a gallery was in some ways just as much a labor of love as being a photographer, and many galleries came and went—only the good, savvy, and dedicated ones could survive for more than a few years.)

However, the gallery often didn't do a lot to promote its photographers during the times they weren't having a show. Let's just say prints didn't fly off the shelves. The model was simple: if a print sold, the photographer usually had to go into the darkroom and make a new print for the buyer.

So gallery sales went as follows: buyers could buy a print at any time, but galleries sold very few, the price was relatively very high, the gallery made the majority of the profit, and the photographer had to produce the prints one at a time, intermittently, to order.

(A side effect of this last factor was that many times, buyers had to wait a long time for their prints. When I interviewed Sally Mann in the '80s she had a huge backlog of print orders—which moved me to compare her to King Midas, since she could turn silver into gold at will—and when the publisher of Photo Techniques bought a John Sexton print, he had to wait for it for at least two years that I know of. I think the last I heard he had been waiting for five years and counting, but my memory might be wrong.)

The TOP model
Our model is basically the opposite of the gallery model. We open our sales for a short "window" (currently five days, but soon to change to three). During that time, people who want one place their order and pay for it. When the sale closes, the photographer knows how many prints he or she has to make, and can make them all at once.

In our sales, most of the profit goes to the photographers. I'm the "gallery" (really a promoter or salesman, I suppose). My portion is 20% of the gross. From his 80%, the photographer must bear the expense of producing the print, but the lion's share of the profit is his.

While it's true that the photographer earns less per print from our sales, the big advantage is that every print the photographer makes is already sold. This allows us to offer the prints for much less than equivalent traditional gallery prices.

So, in a generalized way, the "models" look like this, with typical number values inserted:

Typically gallery sale: Prints continuously available; prints sold one at a time, every now and then, for $1,000. The gallery keeps $700 and the photographer gets $300. The photographer must produce and deliver the print to individual order. The buyer might have to wait for it indefinitely.

Typical TOP sale: Availability very limited, during the brief sale "window" only; 100 prints sold, all at once, for $100 each. The site keeps $2,000 (20%) and the photographer gets $8,000. The photographer can make all the prints at once and the buyer receives it within eight weeks.

The disadvantage of our model is that the photographer pays more to produce the prints, since he has to make 100 of them instead of one. (It is indeed a lot of work in a hurry, not for the constitutionally fainthearted.) But he can make them all at once, and his cut is larger to begin with.

The advantage for the buyer is that she's spent 1/10th as much for the print and will receive it within a matter of weeks. The disadvantage is that she can't order it any time, but has to hit the window when the sale is happening.

I like to call this a "win-win-win": I win, because I get 20% of the proceeds; the photographer wins, because he sells more prints and gets to keep a greater percentage of the profits than any gallery would allow; and the buyer wins, because you get a fine print for a very advantageous price, and it arrives with reasonable promptness.

Final note
Our print sales have really amounted to one long experiment, as we try different things and see what works and what doesn't (and what people like and what they don't). Our latest experiment is to try to downplay the sales and integrate them a little better into the quotidian flow of the site. (My conceit is that it should be a feature of the site, entertaining to check out even for those who aren't buying. We'll see if that pans out.)

One thing we've learned is never to show what we're offering until the sale starts. So please stop back on Monday morning after 7 a.m. and check out Jack's Leica S2 print! I'll be interested to hear whether you like it.

Mike

*I had a delightful little thing happen to me before our first Peter Turnley sale. I was out to dinner in the company of, among others, an old friend who teaches photography, Kate, and a local gallery owner, Deb. I was talking about our pricing for Peter's sale, which was the highest amount we had ever asked for prints on TOP at the time. They asked me what the price was, and I said, "$395," at which point—simultaneously—Kate, on my left, said "that is a lot," and Deb, on my right, said "that's nothing."

It's always relative.

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

[xtian]

Absolutely brilliant and thanks for posting it again. It again is very inspiring, and I hope you won't mind if I copy some of it sometime!

[Brandon Scott]

I have received my print Evening Winter and it is absolutely luminous. There is a depth to the print that is unimaginable when only seen on a screen. Another proof that printing is the ultimate form of the photograph. Thanks to Mike and Ctein. Now I want to take a course from Ctein on printing. Really. Where do I sign up? I have tried Mike's print a day program and made real progress. But when I see this print, I realize how much more there is to learn. Brandon Scott

[Michael Wayne Plant]

While I have not astrally brought a print form one of TOP's offers I would suggest that you leave the sale time at 5 days or even extend it to 7 days

[Godfrey]

My print arrived today, just in time for your redux on the print sale concept. Excellent print, lovely work, kudos to you and Ctein both. Keep it going!

[Scott]

Let me start by saying that I really like this model as a way of getting great art sold to a large number of people. However, as with any model it is imperfect and I have a suggestion. The main thing that has held me back from buying one of these prints, at any price, is they just haven't resonated enough with my personal taste. I'm sure others agree too. What I think would be great is to have a mini online gallery with 20-30 candidates for future sales. Once enough interest is generated to make it worth it, an open sale occurs on that image. Eg 10 people pre-order, sale commences. This would also give you a real window into what kind of images the TOP readership really wants to buy.

[Speed]

Ain't the internet great?

[Andrew]

I received my print of your "hands" image in the mail yesterday. It really is marvelous (and useful, and inspiring, and a little depressing) to see just how an expertly printed image looks.

Thanks for the print sales; I really enjoy them.

[Mike Ting]

As an artist and constant "lurker" to this site who's becoming interested in photography, my suggestion is that you have a permanent gallery that every 2,3,4 months or whatever, orders for prints are tallied up and then printed, or a premium amount charged for on demand orders.

Great site by the way.

[Euan Forrester]

I'm sure you've seen that both Magnum and VII are trying similar things: http://pdnpulse.pdnonline.com/2014/06/photo-agencies-test-consumer-market-prints-t-shirts.html

It's nice to see this catching on!

Are TOP T-shirts coming next?

[Sarge]

Our latest experiment is to try to downplay the sales and integrate them a little better into the quotidian flow of the site. . . [I]t should be a feature of the site, entertaining to check out even for those who aren't buying...

How about introducing a TOP print sale by a podcast embedded in the announcement post. The video would introduce the artist and a print of the photograph being sold (or samples of his work if the former is not yet available).

The podcast will be a mini "biovid" of both the artist and his work with you doing the interviewing and the narration. A follow-up podcast featuring the photographer (or Ctein) printing the picture and the print itself mounted in its frame, may also be embedded in the post print sale report.

A print sale podcast would be entertaining to TOP's readership, in and of itself. Taken together these podcasts would form the beginnings of a TOP video "channel" on current photographers and contemporary (21st century) photography.

[Neil Partridge]

Would it be possible for each print sale to have a unique reference, which is then referred to in blog posts and emails? E.g. the first of this year could be TOPPS14-1 (Space), the second could be TOPPS14-2 (Jones), with the words in brackets perhaps being an informal name of the subject or photographer. Just an idea as every time I see the words "print sale" I get my hopes up that it relates to the one relating to me. Thanks.

[Michael Bearman]

I have purchased from TOP print sales - all lovely, thank you. But 3 days will not be enough time for my - um - purchasing department to process a decision to buy (OK, OK, I am an indecisive shopper). Five days is barely enough. And when you throw in that I cannot access TOP every day - and time zone changes to Australia when I am able to read TOP - at 3 days, every sale will be finished before I have time to consider whether I should participate.

[Rob]

Please don't reduce the window of opportunity to 3 days. Otherwise, carry on.