The Learning Curve - Hard Lessons
I have learned quite a few lessons along the way with my photography business however the toughest is pricing my work. I know I wrote a blog post a month or so ago about pricing but this animal has reared its ugly head to me yet again
I have had some work on display for an extended period of time. I put my framed images on display at this location, set my pricing for each piece and walked away. I even have two different sized images on display. Someone that works at said place let me know that there was a lot of positive feedback about the pieces but one constant was about how high the pricing was. I took this into consideration and decided after much agonizing and self debate, I should drop the prices. I was told by a very wise person, it is better to sell some work at a lower price than to sell NO work at high prices.
A month or so had passed and I received more feedback about how much people loved my photography but again this pricing conundrum has popped up. This time I was told that my work was neither original nor was I a “known” artist therefore nobody in their right mind was going to pay the kind of money I was asking people to pay for my artwork. I will agree withthe latter, I am not a known artist “YET”. As far as not producing original artwork, I can only assume the person meant my artwork wasn’t signed or numbered
Lesson learned this time... ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS sign and number your artwork if you plan on selling your artwork to the general public. This has been a very hard and somewhat expensive lesson for me to learn. I now realize that I probably can’t ask the prices I was originally asking due to the fact the works aren’t signed and numbered. All has not been lost here, I can walk away from
this experience saying I will definitely remember to sign and number any pieces going forward.
Image courtesy of thelearningcurve.com