Before you can begin to seriously market your art, you need to develop a plan (hey! a plan again???). Look for the niche market where your work will be accepted and sought for.
One artist, who is June artist of the month for my newsletter, Annie Hermanson , has found a niche market and uses blogs, co-op sites and on-line stores and auctions to market her work.
If you plan to sell your work at outdoor shows, attend the shows first. See how others set up their booths. Talk to the vendors. Stand back and see which booth attracts your attention. Analyze it. What is it that works? See who has attracted the most customers. What brings people into that artist’s booth? In the high end shows, the cost of booth space is quite high. You want to be sure you can attract the customer flow into your space.
If you want to sell your work in galleries, you must visit galleries. Do not assume that just because you love your art work, every one will. Do not put your art out there before you are ready. Galleries are very choosy and want to show work they think will sell. Some galleries ask for exclusivity. That might prevent you from selling your work yourself.
Galleries are retail businesses. If they take your work on commission they will ask for 50%. If you just double your price for the gallery sale, you are undercutting the gallery representing you and you will soon lose any gallery position you have. As a retail business a gallery has to charge that commission in order to meet the costs of doing business. If you are selling to the general public at half of what the gallery asks then you are cheating the gallery. Therefore, understand that the money you will receive when you sell through a gallery is half of what you would make if you sell it on your own.
There are many on-line galleries and storefronts. Some people find sucess but most artists I have talked to say that they have not sold anything through them. But they are a good way to showcase your work if you do not have a web site. However, you must have good quality images wherever you chose to show your work on the Internet. A poorly photographed work of art is not going to get much attention.
A website of your own is great, but can be expensive. A good alternative to that would be a blog like this one. Blogs are easy to learn and are open source. That means they are free. Blog sites like Word Press have many themes to choose from and you can keep them up to date.
Another alternative to an expensive website would be a photosharing site like Zenfolio, Flickr, Smugmug or any number of other photo hosting sites. Some of these sites have a cost, some are free. If you want a professional looking site you may have to spend something but is not expensive. Zenfolio starts at $25 a year. Smugmug starts at $39. Before you decide, check out reviews. Most have a trial period as well.
