Price Your Prints

Work backwards from the gallery wall, not forwards from your costs

The single most expensive pricing mistake is setting a price for your own website first, then discovering it does not survive a commission.

Say a print costs you $120 all-in and you decide $250 is a fair asking price. Sold direct, that is $130 to you. The same print in a gallery taking 40% returns $150, which leaves $30 - before you have counted the hours. So you either raise the gallery price, and now the same print has two prices in the same city, or you absorb the difference and effectively pay the gallery for the privilege.

The fix is to decide the retail price once, with the largest commission you expect to pay already inside it, and then hold that price everywhere. Selling direct becomes your better margin rather than your cheaper price. Collectors notice inconsistent pricing, and galleries notice it faster - being undercut on the artist's own website is one of the quicker ways to end a relationship.

The worksheet above does this division for you: enter the commission rate and it solves for the retail price that leaves your intended margin intact.

The costs artists routinely forget

Print cost is the easy number, and it is usually the smallest one. The costs that quietly erode a margin are the ones that never arrive as an invoice for that particular print.

• Your time. File preparation, colour approval, signing and numbering, packing, correspondence with the buyer. An hour per sale is not unusual for editioned work, and an hour of your time is not free just because nobody billed you for it.
• Packaging and freight. Tubes, flat packs, corner protectors, tape, and the postage itself. If you offer free shipping, that is not free - it is a discount you have chosen not to name.
• The prints that do not sell. An edition of 25 that sells 15 still has to carry the cost of 25. Pricing as though every print sells is how a sold-out edition fails to pay for itself.
• Rejects and proofs. Test prints, the sheet with the mark on it, the one where you changed your mind about the crop. Build in a small allowance rather than assuming a perfect yield.
• Payment and platform fees. Card processing, marketplace listing fees, currency conversion on overseas sales.
• Framing, if you supply it. Including the risk that a framed piece is damaged in transit, which is materially higher than for a rolled print.

None of these individually looks like much. Together they routinely account for more than the printing.

Edition size is a pricing decision, not an afterthought

An edition is a promise: this image will exist in this size, on this paper, exactly this many times, and then never again. The premium collectors pay is for that promise being kept.

Smaller editions carry higher prices, and they have to, because the fixed work of preparing and launching an edition is spread across fewer sales. A large edition is not a worse decision - it is a different business, priced for volume and aimed at a different buyer. What does not work is a large edition priced as though it were scarce.

A few conventions are worth knowing before you commit, since they are difficult to walk back:

• State the size, paper and edition number together. The same image at a different size is conventionally a separate edition - but only if you say so up front.
• Artist's proofs sit outside the numbered run and are conventionally around 10% of it. Releasing a large tranche of APs after an edition sells out is, correctly, read as breaking the promise.
• Price up as the edition sells through. Raising the price at 50% and again at 80% rewards the early buyers who took a risk on you, and it is far healthier than discounting the tail.
• Keep the records. Which number went to whom, and when. For a collector reselling later, provenance is part of the value.

Open editions are a perfectly respectable choice - just price them as a product rather than as an artwork, and do not imply a scarcity you are not providing.

What justifies the price on the certificate

If you are asking collector prices, the print has to hold up as an object. That is largely a materials question, and materials are checkable - which is the point.

Archival pigment printing on cotton rag or an acid-free alpha-cellulose stock is the baseline expectation for editioned work. Pigment inks are what give the print its lightfastness; dye-based inks on consumer paper are not in the same conversation, whatever the print looks like on day one. We are certified by both Canson and Hahnemühle, which means our colour management is audited against their reference rather than simply asserted - see the paper range.

The practical consequence for pricing is that consistency becomes possible. An edition sold over three years has to look the same in year three as it did in year one, which means the same paper, the same profile, and a studio that still holds both on file. Reprinting the back half of an edition at a different lab, with a different colour rendering, is exactly the sort of thing a collector notices when two prints finally hang together.

It is also worth being straightforward with buyers about what they are getting: the paper, the ink, the edition size, the year. A short certificate of authenticity carrying those facts costs nothing and does more for an eventual resale than any amount of marketing copy.