Some goods news—
I've been working hard on some "back-end" stuff, filing forms with the county and so forth, and I thought I'd bring you up to speed on a few details pertaining to TOP Print Offers for 2019.
First, We're partnering with an e-commerce firm and a local bank to take credit cards directly. We'll be able to take all major credit cards, including international orders from anywhere in the world with instant automatic currency conversion. For all future sales that TOP runs (this doesn't pertain to sales run by the featured photographers themselves), we'll accept only credit cards, which hopefully will mean minimal hassle for you as well as for me—no more old-timey snail-mailed checks which take so long to process*, and no more need for PayPal.
Second, We'll have a professional bookkeeper handling everything from the orders to the mailing labels, including all the accounting**.
Third, I've narrowed the field down to several options of printmaking service bureaus to partner with. We might use more than one, but I'd like to work with one consistently because my experience has been that practice makes perfect when creative people work together repeatedly. The leading contender is a small atelier in Philadelphia that can do the printing and shipping for photographers who don't do it themselves. They are excellent, highly experienced printmakers with very fine equipment, yet they're still a small shop with individualized, hands-on service and personalized attention. Artists themselves, they will work with our photographers to get the 'master prints' just right before committing to a run.
Reader print offers
The real hidden benefit here? It means we'll have the potential to work with a greatly enlarged pool of photographers...including TOP readers.
It's always been a balancing act to find just the right photographers to partner with. For years, I've lived in fear that we might one day venture a sale with an unreliable partner who might fail to follow through. That could damage or even ruin the reputation we've worked hard to build. It's always been a very high priority for me for that to never happen.
My son Xander holding the Lincoln Memorial print
by TOP reader David Dyer-Bennet. It now hangs
in my living room here in the Finger Lakes.
If, on the other hand, TOP oversees all the printing, bookkeeping, and fulfillment work, and takes those aspects of sales out of the artists' hands, then we'll be free to work with nearly any good photographer. Even if a photographer doesn't normally do his or her own printing, even if they're unwilling or unable to accept payments or manage shipping and handling, we'll still be able to potentially choose a photograph or photographs of theirs to offer. We did that several times in the past with Ctein handling all the printing and fulfillment, and it worked very well (for example, the highly successful Kate Kirkwood sale).
Because the cost of some of these services is monthly, it would make sense to have small sales more often. We could even get the point of having a "reader picture of the month." I don't know about you, but I think that would be satisfying—bringing physical prints into the world in multiple copies that wouldn't otherwise exist as such.
Just the discussions of which images deserve to be chosen could be interesting for everyone, even for those who aren't selling or buying.
The system remains to be tested, of course, and I assume things will run more smoothly as we get some practice under our belts. But I'm excited by the possibilities. Could open the door to some good fun, going forward.
Mike
* The bookkeeper said, rather darkly, "not waiting for personal checks to clear is not good bookkeeping."
** Given my aptitudes for that kind of work, this is a very good thing, my brothers and sisters, believe you me. :-)
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
John Krumm: "I have the Lincoln photo hanging in my living room too. This all sounds great, but you just over promised. Since you are from the Midwest, you should know that one secret to happiness is under promising and then over delivering."
Mike replies: You could be right, but I don't think I'm promising...no specifics, and no timetable mentioned. Just a report of the work I've done so far and why.
David Dyer-Bennet: "More frequent, smaller, sales might be very interesting.
"Very pleased to hear that print found a place in your living room! And yeah, before the details were fully worked out (Ctein ended up handling print-making and fulfillment) I was a little scared of that part, never having handled anything like it myself before. So I was entirely pleased with how that was done.
"One minor thing—will the new system accept PayPal? You're emphasizing not requiring it, which is good, but I tend to keep my playing-around money in PayPal, and having to shift it somewhere to use it would be a disadvantage."
Mike replies: If enough people feel that way, I'll keep it in mind. We tend to get lots of complaints about PayPal; many people refuse to use it. And the fees at this end are high.
MikeR: "I like the sound of this. You don't want to be making it up as you go along. The more you can establish a process and routine, the smoother that things will flow. That should help with keeping administrative costs low as well. (Make it up with volume!!) Kate Kirkwood's print 'Sunrise Cow' hangs in my living room. The DD-B Lincoln one is by my printer, and your print of fishing at a lake is by my monitor (an NEC PA272W, like yours. I love it!)."
Rodolfo Canet: "Sorry if I'm missing something but if the printing is done by an external service, will the copies be signed by the author?
Mike replies: Generally not. Everyone's experience is that shipping prints to be signed results in a lot of handling loss. Plus, the benefit of signed prints is almost always for one of two reasons: because the artist is an accomplished fine printmaker and has crafted the print personally and is attesting to that fact, or because the artist is famous and the signature is a token that they touched the print themselves and approved the way the print looks. (Andy Warhol once signed blank sheets of printmaking paper and sold each for $5,000.)
In the art photography world these days, buyers generally do want signed prints, but they like them signed on the back, not on the front. The use is for provenance and to attest to the vintage (date) of the printing, rather than for display.
If the photographer is a.) unknown and b.) didn't craft the print him- or herself, I'm not sure how a signature provides added value.
But you tell me—how do you feel about it?
Of course Peter's prints will be signed—he believes in it strongly and doesn't sell unsigned prints. But he's a name photographer with literally thousands of publishing credits who has published many books and has been honored with a retrospective exhibition at a major national museum. That's a far cry from many readers who are dedicated enthusiasts but have either modest art-world resumés to no such credentials at all.
For Chester's sale in December, we might try a "virtual signature" outside the image area. He's sent me an image of his signature and we're thinking of printing it on the lower right, in the white border outside the image, in an unobtrusive light gray color. Whether we do it or not depends on how he and I and the printer feel about it once we see it. I'm hoping this will serve the purpose of attesting to his authorship of the picture without at the same time fooling anybody into thinking it's an original signature, which is not the intent. And its position on the page gives the purchaser the option of allowing it to show or not show when the picture is matted. Chester lives in a remote location, so shipping prints to him to sign doesn't seem practical. Given the inevitable losses, the time it would take, and the extra shipping costs and so forth, it would add significantly to the cost of each print.
None of this means we would stop selling signed prints, in cases where it's appropriate or desirable, or in cases where the photographer simply prefers it that way.
Rodolfo replies to Mike: " I understand, and even agree to all reasons stated in your kind reply. I'm nonetheless, quite a fetishistic guy about objects and I've gone to some lengths to get even modest prints from my friends signed. So, yes, an unsigned print will be of less interest to me, even if I'm the first one to see that it really makes little sense."
