As work becomes harder and harder to get, I have to try different ways to pay the bills. Over the years I have sold a 1 or 2 prints a year of some of my drawings. It doesn't add up to much but it makes me feel good and i think shows there is potential to sell more if I can figure out how to go about it. With that in mind I made plan to produce and sell a book of illustrations on Amazon and tie it in with selling prints. I plan to sell with an online service that will handle the printing, shipping and taxes. I have several places in mind but any advice is more than welcome.
The book will feature illustrations of acrobats, athletes and dancers - my most popular subjects. This won't be a retrospective or "best of" collection but include only images I will be selling as prints and ones I think will sell the best. I think having a book out there will help sell the prints and vice versa. I won't include any explicit nudes because I think that might be forbidden on Amazon even for art books and will limit who can see the work. I have a large catalogue to choose from and the idea is to not try and put it all out there at once but see what happens and add maybe an image a month to the print site so there is always something new and if things go really well, produce a second book in future.
This is plausible but is it possible considering I have zero social media presence and I am not exactly a household name in the art world? I might have to break down and open "Behemoth media" accounts in Instagram, Facebook and whatever else and hopefully convince some of my friends who already have accounts to like and help promote my work to get it out to more people.
Here is the design layout, the inner title page looks good to me and I decided the full images on the right and a close up of that image on the left would be visually interesting and give the potential buyer more information on how detailed the pieces are.
So the plan is to finish some new drawings... I have about 15 lined up and most are hopefully for this project if they work out. Picking the right ones is no easy task. This will take months to finish so I am hoping to get it going for real after the new year. The text will be both English and French.
3 comments:
What a great idea! And if you have printing companies ready to do an on-demand book or prints, all the better so there's little outlay from you. The presentation so far looks really slick; here's where your figures against simple or empty backgrounds work really well. I have an account on Instagram. Twitter seems to be "a thing," but I can't stand it so I don't have an account there. Let me know what I can do. Wishing you the best!
Amazon ringing is free and I did a version of my photo book about Copps Hill Burial Ground on it and was surprised at how good it looked... and how cheap it was a copy, Less than 5$ for me to buy for myself! Instagram is a possibility... no twitter for me either if I can possibly help it. A place for prints is up into air, I have several sites to check out. Some take a HUGE percentage others are more reasonable. I was thinking even silly things like t-shorts and mugs might sell. Trying to go into this as a commercial venture using my art and not feel bad about that!
I just use my giclee printing place for prints. I do have an etsy store; might be a good idea to have that as well. When someone ordered a print, I had them pay for it then just ordered it myself from the printer and had them send it out. I knew what they charged and just uncharged by about 100% including postage. They do a great job and I don't pay ahead of time or sit on a bunch of prints. gicleetoday.com is the place I've used and I really like their stuff.
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