A Beginners Guide to Pricing Your Prints

Photo by Vincentas Liskauskas on Unsplash

How Much Should You Charge?

In my last post I talked about the lessons I learned when printing my work for the first time, which can be checked out here. 

Now that we have our work printed it now comes down the question of how much should you charge for your work. This is a tough question, especially when you’re starting out and one that I’m currently struggling with quite a bit and still working on. I’d like to use this post to talk about pricing and what I’ve learned so far. I can then update this post as I dive deeper into featuring and selling my own work.

The Base Cost:

When figuring out pricing we should always start with what does it cost to create a print of your work. This can vary widely based on the medium, framing, shipping costs, etc. I would also not only factor in the actual printing costs but if you had to setup test prints or purchase special equipment to print as these costs should be factored in as well. All these expenses add up and even thou it’s extremely exciting to have someone buy your work you should be valued and make some money so you can cover the costs and provide some income for all the effort you put in. 

For example let’s look at the costs first and let's say it broke down as follows:

• Test Prints: $20 

• Print: $150

• Shipping Label: $20

• Shipping Materials: $5

• Total: $190

Adding up our costs they come out to around $200, this is your base cost. You’ll want to charge over this base amount as we have not even factored in the time and effort you put in to create the work. You can obviously lower these costs if you did not have to factor in shipping, creating test prints, but a good exercise is to break down all the effort you put in to just create the print.

A Starting Point:

Once you have your costs down a good starting point I’ve been told is to charge 1.5 - 2.5x your costs. This way you’ve covering your costs and then some for the effort and time you put in to create your work. So if I my cost was $200 then I may apply a 2x ask for $400 for my piece of work. I’ll be really honest it’s very hard for me to figure out my costs so I applied a similar rule for my work at the start. 

However, another tip that can help you price your work is to visit local galleries and see what other artists have charged for similar styles of work.  You will then have an idea if your pricing fits within a range of what the local market is used to. Although now that I have started to learn more of what it costs to put work up in a gallery you will generally find higher prices than this 1.5 - 2.5x multiplier.  This is because of the additional gallery costs and also that artist may have sought after work and can charge a higher amount. I will be touching on these additional costs in the next section. 

Gallery Costs:

Once you look at gallery costs they likely have been adjusted to include the expenses of featuring work in a gallery. Some galleries charge a membership fee, a wall fee, and/or they get a portion of your sales. These all add to additional costs that should be factored into the price of your work. So for example, if I had my original price of $400 but the gallery took a 30% cut then I would only make a profit $80 ($400 - $200 print cost - $120 gallery take). A portion of that profit would also be taken away from those other expenses so you may walk away with little or no profit. As a results you have to price your work higher. 

I think this is really important for new artists and for new buyers to understand as after all the costs the artist may not walk away with much unless they ask for a higher price. 

Final Thoughts:

Pricing work is not exactly straight forward but hopefully these tips can help you figure out a starting point. I think what’s important is realizing you may need to ask for more than you originally thought after you consider all the different expenses and calculate what you need in terms of profit for each piece sold.  

Another way you may want to increased costs of your work is to limit the number of editions you sell for example, this allows you to ask for a higher price but also makes your work more of a collectors item. I’m in the process of trying to learn more of how to do this and authenticate my work for collectors and I can share these details once I learn more. 

If you have some suggestions on how to price work when starting off for newer artists like myself please do share in the comments.