Where to Sell Your Giclee Prints
There are many opportunities available to sell your giclee prints directly in person, through a third party, or online. The best sales strategies for your digital fine art prints may include a combination of these methods. Each method requires different amounts of effort on your part and earns different percentages of profit. We encourage you to try them all and see what combination of the three methods will work best for you.
If you are new to selling prints, a great place to begin is in your local community. Let the people who collect or admire your work know that giclee prints are available. You would be surprised how many of your friends, coworkers, acquaintances and congregation members are interested in your art. Have an open studio or arrange a showing at your home, business, or local community/religious center. Reach out to your online social network. We have had quite a few artists generate sales just by posting regular updates about their paintings online. These face to face sales allow you to take home 100% of your asking price with little to no overhead cost.
Weekend art fairs and holiday markets are often very successful for giclee print sales. This option requires more effort and investment on the artist’s part, but it can also bring in the greatest reward.
These fairs and markets draw large crowds of art enthusiasts who are ready to buy. After you cover your booth fee and travel expenses, all of the profit is yours. A great place to find out about these fairs is Art Fair Calendar.
There are several options when it comes to involving a third party to sell your prints. Galleries, frame shops, retail stores, and print publishers are a few worth mentioning.
There are more and more galleries that are displaying giclee prints or have bins set up for selling them. This is especially true for co-op, art league and frame shop galleries. Art and frame shops love selling giclee prints because it helps them sell their framing services. Selling at a frame shop has the added benefit of saving you the cost of having to frame it yourself. Most traditional galleries will take 40-50% of the sale price of your prints. Frame shop galleries may want to spread out their exposure by selling the prints on consignment.
Photo Credit: The Art League of Alexandria, VA
Other more non-traditional venues are retail shops and specialty home furnishing stores. You can expect retail stores to buy your art at wholesale prices or sell it on consignment. Usually your work needs to be framed and professionally presentable, which requires you to put forth a little more investment before selling.
Print publishers are great options for getting the most sales and exposure for your prints. Because the publishing company is taking care of all the marketing and sales, this method has the lowest percentage of profit per sale. Usually print publishers will pay the artist 10-15% of the profits.
Of course, we don’t want to forget the importance of the internet when it comes to sales. As we mentioned above, social networking sites are a great place to promote your giclee prints. Set up accounts on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram, and post as often as you can. A personal website is a great tool for people to view your work, but it is not going to help you generate many sales by itself. It is best to sell on an established art marketplace site such as Etsy. Like ebay, Etsy has a $0.20 listing fee and takes a small fee of 3.5% on any sales.
Further reading selection: How to Price Your Giclees.