Selling your work

[Joe Pelonio]

I've noticed that there are many people that have just started with laser work, who hope to be able to make some money selling their art. While I'm no expert and not that experienced myself, I did learn a lot form a class I took at a local community college "continuing learning" program. The class I took was
"Selling Your Artwork" and was $75 for 3 Saturdays, and well worth it. The teacher owns a large gallery in Seattle. The class was fun and provided the opportunity to meet other local artists/crafters, and many of them ended up going together for show/fair booths. This class covered mostly selling at craft
and art fairs, including getting into juried shows, but also discussed things like copyright law, effective pricing, consignment, selling wholesale, and marketing.
If you are new to selling your crafts, especially if you don't have a "retail" shop with traffic, you might look for such a class in your area. Here are some of the other related classes offered at times in our area:

Business for Artists - Developing your portfolio

Effective Selling

The Basics of E-Bay Selling

Basics of Copyright Law for Artists

[Ed Lang]

Would you post some of the highlights you learned in the class?


I am sure others here would like to hear what you learned as well as me.

[Joe Pelonio]

No problem. I dug out my notes, the actual class title is "Marketing Skills for the Artist & Craftperson." The first topic covered was Self Assessment, which covered time-management, developing people skills, scheduling, setting goals, and self-discipline. One of the most interesting to me was discussion on identifying your
audience, including sex/age/income etc., to see who are the people that will buy your work and to whom you target. Then there was identifying your market, from retail shows/fairs, wholesale, galleries, commissions, advertising, and the internet.

Quite a bit of time was spent on marketing tools, from business cards to press releases and everything in-between. We prioritized those tools for our own work, as to which would be the most affordable and productive to sales. On the subject of advertising there was in-depth discussion on photographing your work to clearly show the quality, preparation of the protfolio for applying to juried shows, and developing a marketing plan.

At the time I took the class I did not have the laser but was working on selling my stained glass art. The class covered something that is more helpful to me now, production items. With the laser you can make a lot of the same item, and she covered pricing, materials costs and overhead, and having a plan to be able to handle that big order on time when it does come in.

There were samples of various forms that a business might use such as consignment agreements and inventory lists, gallery contracts, sales representation contracts, and worksheets for doing much of the above.

There were also a lot of resources given, art organizations, lists of wholesale and retail trade shows in this area (Seattle), insurance, legal, accounting and consulting resources, and recommended reading lists. Just one example of a book to try is "The Basic Guide to Selling Arts & Crafts" by James Dillehay. I have not read it but trust the instructor's judgement in recommending it.